Fantastic Mr Fox

Another storytime read with my son as we work through Roald Dahl's œuvre. This one is concise but manages to keep the stakes high with the usual Dahl threats: death by murder, abuse, starvation... you know, kid stuff.

There is something interesting going on with the question of Mr. Fox's Fantastic-ness and the way Dahl writes him against three antagonists who could otherwise have been written as the story's victims. The discarded players of "the capitalist arrangement" are forced, it would seem, to steal food for their livelihood from farmers who cultivate an excess of food to sell at the market. Dahl's levers of sympathy begin by portraying the farmers as crass, ugly, and murderous and end with the reader weighing the moral balance of life against profit. Dahl makes it clear which side the story he advocates.

The farmers set into an ego driven task of killing the fox as soon as he's desperate enough to do something unclever. What makes Mr. Fox fantastic is that he not only maintains his cleverness by literally undermining the farmers but he takes on a posture of generosity. He builds a system of resource sharing to encourage safety among his underground brethren. It made my Marxist tendencies all warm and fuzzy but I would love to read a book set 6 months later, when Mr. Fox's funneled control of resources become problematic. Perhaps his eldest son, the strong one, decides to dole out smoked hams in exchange for mole fealty. Perhaps he withholds chickens from the weasels bc they don't support the war on farmers anymore. Maybe the fixed resources in their economic system inspire the young fox to enforce a one child policy on the rabbits. But then, maybe this is the whole point. There is plenty of room to read this book with the utmost irony.

Interesting metaphors aside, this is still a very entertaining children's book. The sequence involving their pursuit of Mr. Fox and his family is truly harrowing. My son couldn't bear the tension and there were several nights of "just one more chapter to see what happens, pleeeeeease?"

His favorite scene was the reveal of Bunce's storehouse full of geese and smoked hams (my veganism hasn't stirred him in the slightest). Mine was the image of three farmers waiting in the rain. So ominous!