Some books are simply sui generis, surprising and entertaining, emerging from nowhere. Or, at least, that’s what this book feels like, although once you delve into Dahl’s career, you can see that this had its beginnings in the shift from writing short adult fiction to short children’s novels with the same kind of absurd and grotesqueness (e.g., James and the Giant Peach had been published three years earlier, and it has some of the same exaggerations that typify the characters in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).

But what Dahl accomplished here was a send-up of all the bad children in the world: the gluttonous, the greedy, the self-centered, the annoying. And he did it all without making his children readers hate him for it. This is a book with a moral center, where Charlie is the ultimate good child, but it doesn’t read moralistic or patronising. Charlie and his grandfather get a glimpse of the outside world, one that Willy Wonka is very aware of, and they succeed because they still have the sense of wonder that Wonka was looking for.

But what you remember about this book isn’t that so much as the Oompa Loompas, the imagery of this amazing candy factory and the squirrels looking for bad nuts, the gum that can taste like a whole meal, and all that. It’s a fun book, and one that you can revisit. Highly recommended (and avoid the movies, even the one with Gene Wilder).