We went to see Matilda the musical in London and it was an unexpectedly overwhelming experience. There's something about a musical, with all the group choruses and explicit emotion, that can be very moving, and for me the story of Matilda is especially powerful. Roald Dahl's characters are so polarised: either nasty, terrible people or magical, intelligent and generous. When the good people win, it's so universal, so resoundingly comforting.
Matilda is about books. She reads and reads as her parents watch TV and lie and insult her for her pursuits. Books give her the emotional and intellectual education her parents and television have failed to give her. Books give her imagination and a thirst for knowledge, but also a strong sense of morality. She is taught right and wrong by the narrative cadences of the stories she reads. (and if take a step back, we see that Roald Dahl is also performing the same role to children everywhere in the real world by writing this very story) Irrespective of her corrupting parents, Matilda grows into a generous girl with a fierce sense of morality and justice. She helps her teacher, Miss. Honey to reclaim the house the evil Trunchball stole from her (by murdering her father) and Matilda even learns Russian so she can read Dostoyevsky in the language it was intended to be read in, which ultimately helped her to stop the Russian mafia from killing her family.
The magic of books is made literal in Matilda, when she finds she can use her mind to move objects. The implication is that books can give you magical powers, or perhaps that when extreme intellect is nurtured by books, magical powers of imagination and telekinesis are produced. These powers are also probably a result of the psychological hardships Matilda has endured throughout her young life. A latent power builds in her, an extreme bottling up of emotional energy, until it bursts out supernaturally. Roald Dahl was such a great writer. There are so many levels to Matilda, and all good art should be both profound and simple at the same time.
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Matilda the musical made me think about whether our relationship with books has changed since Roald Dahl wrote the original story, i.e. are books still such invaluable sources of knowledge and culture to those who are not granted proper upbringings? In a first world country, does the internet provide just as ably this knowledge, or is the internet becoming the equivalent of the television Matilda's parents so insistently praise in place of books? 'Why are you reading those awful books when we've got the internet?' I could easily imagine a lazy parent saying that to a child, 'I'm not buying you books, just go on the internet.' And perhaps it does become difficult to argue with that reasoning when money is tight.
The internet is a beast of varied goodness - though it holds vast information, vast educational potential, we spend most of our times idly on it. And this can of course be said for the television Matilda is so forcefully encouraged to consume: television is not all bad, it has great potential to educate. I suppose the point (one of the points) I'm making is: books are far less corrupting than other media because of the effort it takes to read them. Though they have the potential to corrupt, I think insidiousness thrives in ease of consumption. That books have great power for good is undeniable; whether or not that power is reliant on them being physical objects remains unproven.
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