The Twits

Roald Dahl's The Twits is a gleefully disgusting comedy for 8 year olds about two horrible people who spend all day trying to out-nasty each other.

What happens

Mr Twit has not washed his face for YEARS. Food gets caught in the bristles and stays there, so if he's peckish he sticks out his tongue and has a rummage. A bit of old cornflake. A slimy sardine tail. Dahl makes you look closely, then tells you to hold your nose while you do it.

Mrs Twit is no better. She has a glass eye that she can pop out whenever she likes, and a walking stick she claims she needs for the warts on her foot. She doesn't. She carries it so she can hit things with it. Dogs, cats and small children, mostly.

They love each other in their way. Their way is a trick war.

She drops her glass eye into his beer so it's staring up at him from the bottom of the mug. He puts a frog in her bed and tells her it's a Giant Skillywiggler that'll bite off her toes. She digs up worms and cooks them into his spaghetti, then waits until he's cleared the plate before telling him.

Then he starts gluing a tiny disc of wood to the bottom of her walking stick every night, so it grows a fraction longer while she sleeps, and announces that she has caught the dreaded shrinks.

Dahl slips in one serious paragraph about how ugly thoughts show up on a face, and how good ones shine out of it. It lands, mostly because nothing else in the book pauses for breath.

Here's the thing to weigh up. The nastiness isn't a flavour, it's the plot. The Twits keep four monkeys in a cage and make them spend the whole day upside down on their hands. Mr Twit paints glue on a dead tree every Tuesday so that birds land, stick fast and go into a pie on Wednesday. Later on, both Twits go into town to buy shotguns to use on the birds.

It's cartoonish and it's completely clear whose side you're on. Plenty of eight year olds find the whole thing hilarious, and the monkeys have plans of their own. But if you've got a child who feels things keenly about animals, the bird pie chapters are a lot, and the shotgun chapter is more.

What to read next

Horrible grown-ups outwitted by animals is the whole business of Fantastic Mr Fox as well. Boggis, Bunce and Bean are one fat, one short and one lean, and all three of them are waiting outside a fox's hole with their guns.