Roald Dahl

My Uncle Oswald

Gavin

Comic novella about raping famous men for money. So, one of the first real person slashfics in history. Actually scandalous; one can only imagine the ruckus if it was published today.

The eponymous rogue teams up with a livestock scientist and a beautiful accomplice ("Yasmin Howcomely, a girl absolutely soaked in sex") to date-rape the great men of early C20th Europe. Then blackmail them, and steal their semen to sell off. Drugging Freud, Monet and Proust with a psychotic aphrodisiac, the three conspirators collect a Nobel sperm bank. Most of the men are disposed of in one pithy paragraph, with only comic details supplied. 

It's scandalous because of its levity. The plot has more in common with A Serbian Film than Carry On, yet it keeps up the latter's matey banter. At one point Yasmin comes across Picasso, who promptly rapes and dismisses her, without need of the "Sudanese blister beetle" drug. Needless to say, this is tremendous sport:

  "Do you know what he did afterwards?" Yasmin said. "He just buttoned up his trousers and said, ‘Thank you, mademoiselle. That was very refreshing. Now I must get back to my work.’ And he turned away, Oswald! He just turned away and started painting again!"
"He’s Spanish," I said, "like Alfonso." I stepped out of the car and cranked the starting handle and when I got back in again, Yasmin was tidying her hair in the car mirror. 
"I hate to say it,” she said, "but I rather enjoyed that one."
"Tell me," I said, "is Monsieur Picasso a genius?"
"Yes," she said, "it was very strong. He shall be wildly famous one day."



The sexual prowess of the drugged men is a means for Oswald to reflect on their overall quality. (The volume they produce is shorthand for his esteem of them, e.g.: "Fifty straws from Kipling.") It leaves Dahl room to propound a general ranking of the giant personalities of the eC20th. For instance, Einstein and Freud are able to resist their inverted rape for some minutes, earning both respect and suspicion. And of Freud:

  "You should have seen his face, Oswald. You really should have seen it. The Beetle was hitting him and the sexcrazy glint was coming into his eyes and he was beginning to flap his arms like an old crow. But I’ll say this for him. He didn’t jump me right away. He held off for at least a minute or so while he tried to analyze what the hell was happening. He looked down at his trousers. Then he looked up at me... He was really very decent about it all. As soon as he’d had his first explosion... he jumped away and ran back to his desk stark naked and began writing notes. He must be terrifically strong-minded. Great intellectual curiosity."



The low point comes in the treatment of Shaw, by this stage a celibate disabled old man. They drug him three times the dose and:

  "Who is there?" shouted a voice from behind the hut. It was a male voice, but high-pitched and almost squeaky. Oh God, I though, the man is a eunuch after all...

[after]... I heard a yell from the garden and in the half-darkness I saw this tall, ghostlike, whitebearded figure charging down upon us stark naked and yelling, "Come back, you strumpet! I haven’t finished with you yet!"

I saw Mr. Shaw capering about on the sidewalk under the gaslight, white-skinned all over save for a pair of socks on his feet, bearded above and bearded below as well, with his massive pink member protruding like a sawn-off shotgun from the lower beard. It was a sight I shall not readily forget, this mighty and supercilious playwright who had always mocked the passions of the flesh, himself impaled now upon the sword of lust..."



He is made into a real man - no more humourless vegetarian prude. Sad and standard in "one of [Dahl's] lightest comic works".

Oswald is not Dahl; some of Oswald's opinions of his victims are cartoonishly snobbish; its idiotic, Lawrentian theory of virility is only used because it is very funny; and Oswald receives a brutal comeuppance for exploiting Yasmin that it's implied he never recovers from. 

A dazzling and ridiculous book, and as far as I can tell it evaded all opprobrium because it was published in the gap between the sexual revolution and the rise of PC. From the above you already know if you should avoid it.

Meet Oswald Hendryks Cornelius, Roald Dahl's most disgraceful and extraordinary character . . . Aside from being thoroughly debauched, strikingly attractive and astonishingly wealthy, Uncle Oswald was the greatest bounder, bon vivant and fornicator of all time. In this instalment of his scorchingly frank memoirs he tells of his early career and erotic education at the hands of a number of enthusiastic teachers, of discovering the invigorating properties of the Sudanese Blister Beetle, and of the gorgeous Yasmin Howcomely, his electrifying partner in a most unusual series of thefts . . . 'One of the most widely read and influential writers of our generation' The Times 'Raunchy and cheeky entertainment' Sunday Express 'Immense fun' Daily Telegraph Discover all things Dahl at www.roalddahl.com

Christina Hufford

What started off as a fun, entertaining, well-written frolic ultimately, due to its sexism, homophobia, and glorified rape-culture left a horrendous taste in my mouth. 

(view spoiler)[My Uncle Oswald is a fake memoir of a lecherous millionaire explaining how he made his fortune -- ultimately, by using the dried powder of a kind of Sudanese beetle to make pills with powerful aphrodisiac powers. For a large chunk of the book, Oswald and his business-partner Yasmin travel around Europe tricking famous kings, painters, musicians, writers and the like into taking the aphrodisiac -- once the men are overcome with lust and simply MUST rip off Yasmin's clothes and have sex with her, she puts a "rubbery thing" on them (did they not have the word 'condom' yet??) to collect (read: steal) their sperm to eventually sell in a black market type situation. When the men come to from their fog of lust, they are easily kept quiet about the incident because they're lead to believe they've just spontaneously lost control of themselves and raped this woman. 

Just. For as well-written as the book was, I could not get past the rape-culture and obvious consent issues glorified by the storytelling. The book was overtly sexist, and in the scenes dealing with Marcel Proust, it was flat-out homophobic. (Yasmin doesn't want "that bugger" touching her when she finds out that Proust is gay, and is disgusted at the idea of his so-called perversions. I was SO uncomfortable.)

Women are treated as sport in this book, and the idea of consent before sex is laughed out of the window, as the major (repetitive) plot revolves around tricking men into having sex, exploiting them for semen, and then blackmailing them by calling what they did rape, when surely it was the other way around. I don't know, the concept of rape is used for entertainment throughout the novel, and that's just not something I'm okay with.  (hide spoiler)]

I can concede that the language in this book was well-used, it's very, very well-written and I was, for the first fifty pages or so, very excited about reading this. Dahl's writing reminded me of a Stephen Fry book. But the glorification of rape culture and the rampant sexism nailed the coffin well shut. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone.

My Uncle Oswald

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