This review was printed in the November 22, 1989 edition of The Times (South Australia).
Source: Trove
“Dahl looks at mysteries of rural life”
Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life. Roald Dahl. Michael Joseph. $24.99.
A highly original approach to mating cows, an even more bizarre method of poaching pheasants, and a foolproof scheme to clean up on the greyhound flapping-tracks.
The mysteries of life in rural England are ingeniously addressed in this new collection of Roald Dahl’s
country tales.
The seven stories in this volume, invitingly illustrated by John Lawrence, feature those wily characters from earlier collections – the shifty, froglike farmer Rummins; his vacuous son Bert with the boiled fish eye; Claud, greyhound fancier and poacher extraordinaire; and Gordon from the filling station.
The stories are all spiced with the incomparable Dahl twist in the tail, hilarious or macabre but always surprising… not least the conclusion reached in the title story, which has never appeared in book form before.
Roald Dahl’s preface gives the background to the characters and their misadventures.
An acknowledged master of the short story, Roald Dahl trains his sophisticated eye on the unsophisticated. The result is an exuberant collection of stories whose spirit is perfectly captured in John Lawrence’s evocative and delightfully sly drawings.