James and the Giant Peach Summary: Roald Dahl's Flight Across the Atlantic
What it is about
James and the Giant Peach is a children's novel by Roald Dahl, published in 1961 by Alfred Knopf with illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. It is the story of an orphaned boy who climbs inside an enormous magical peach and crosses the Atlantic Ocean with seven talking garden insects.
James Henry Trotter begins the book happy. He lives with his parents in a house by the sea in the south of England. When he is four, a rhinoceros escapes from London Zoo and eats both of them during a shopping trip. James is sent to live with his two aunts, Spiker and Sponge, in a queer ramshackle house on top of a high hill. They are cruel in a thorough, grinding way. They hit him and insult him, they isolate him, they invent punishments for tiny offences, they make him sleep on bare floorboards in a room like a prison cell, and they hand him the heavy chores they will not do themselves. They never use his name. He is "you disgusting little beast" or "you miserable creature".
Three years in, James is sent behind a clump of laurel bushes simply for asking to go to the seaside. There he meets a mysterious man who gives him a bag of magical crystals and tells him to make a potion that will change his life. James trips on the way back and spills them. The crystals burrow into the ground beside a barren peach tree, and the tree immediately produces one peach, which swells to the size of a house.
The aunts fence it in and sell viewing tickets. James is locked indoors, watching the crowds through the bars of his window. When the tourists leave, he is sent out to clear up the rubbish, and he finds a hole in the side of the peach. He crawls through a tunnel into the hollowed-out stone, and that is where the real story starts.
The main characters
James is small, quiet and resourceful. The book gives him almost nothing and then lets him work out everything, which is the engine of the plot. Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge are two of Dahl's purest grotesques, greedy and vain and entirely without softness.
Inside the peach stone James finds Centipede, Miss Spider, Old Green Grasshopper, Earthworm, Ladybug, Glowworm and Silkworm. All of them have been made miserable by the aunts too, and all of them want off the hill. Centipede is the loudmouth, boastful and reckless, and most of the trouble on the voyage traces back to him. Earthworm is a pessimist. Old Green Grasshopper has the manners of a retired gentleman. They are a crew rather than a chorus, and part of the journey is James learning about each of their lives before they met.
How the journey unfolds (mild spoilers)
Centipede cuts the stem. The peach rolls down the hill, flattening the aunts on its way, smashes through a chocolate factory, and reaches the sea, where sharks surround it. James works out that Miss Spider and Silkworm can spin thread, that Earthworm makes excellent bait, and that 501 seagulls can be harnessed to lift the whole peach into the sky.
Above the clouds they meet the Cloud-Men, who manufacture hailstorms and rainbows. Centipede insults them, the Cloud-Men retaliate, and there is a running battle involving a rainbow, cans of fast-drying paint and the enormous taps that make the rain. A giant bat passes in the dark. By dawn the peach is over New York City.
The ending
A passing aeroplane severs the remaining seagull strings and the peach drops onto the spire of the Empire State Building. The city assumes it is a bomb, then a spaceship. Police and firemen arrive. James calms the crowd by telling his story, the children of New York eat the peach, and James and his friends settle in Central Park inside the hollow stone, each with a job of their own. So many people ask James about the voyage that he writes a book about it, which is the book the reader has just finished.
The themes
Survival comes first. James is kept hungry, cold and friendless, and the peach is an escape hatch rather than a treat. Friendship is the second thread. The insects are frightening in theory and loyal in practice, and the book quietly argues that family is what you build when the one you were given has failed you.
There is also a coming-of-age shape. James arrives in the peach as a passenger and leaves it as the person everyone else depends on. The sharks, the Cloud-Men and the landing are all solved by him thinking clearly while the adults around him panic.
Why it still matters
Dahl originally planned a giant cherry and switched to a peach because it was "prettier, bigger and squishier". That instinct for the bigger, odder choice runs through the whole book. Its macabre streak has made it a regular target of censors, and the same streak is why it lands. Bret Easton Ellis has called it his favourite children's book, saying it showed him that the world was meaner, crueller, more absurd and more fantastical than picture books had let on, and that he could not read the same way afterwards.
The book has been re-illustrated many times, by Michael Simeon for the first British edition and later by Emma Chichester Clark, Lane Smith and Quentin Blake. Henry Selick directed a film version in 1996, with Smith as a conceptual designer, and a musical followed in 2010. Dahl dedicated the book to his daughters Olivia, then six, and Tessa, then four. Olivia died of measles a year after publication.
