The short story collection by Roald Dahl titled Over to You is one of the most iconoclastic and idiosyncratic works of this very iconoclastic and idiosyncratic author. Ironically, what makes the collection so idiosyncratic is it relationship to the author’s usual mode of work. As far as short fiction is concerned Dahl is known mostly either for his stories about kids trying to navigate their way through a creepy world filled with creepy adults or for his more adult-oriented stories that relentlessly work their way through a macabre plot twist. Almost none of that is featured in the stories here. These stories are connected by theme of character: they are all about the experiences of RAF pilots in the war. Some of the stories are linked by the presence of recurring characters.
One could appropriately enough characterize the collection as “war fiction” but the stories are not thrilling exploits of battle nor are they distinctly intended as anti-war propaganda. Even Dahl’s most ferocious critics are willing to admit that his most finely tuned literary talent is as a storyteller. The overwhelming bulk of his short stories are not that type which win prestigious awards where nothing happens and the enjoyment of reading is almost entirely buried in the subtext. For Dahl, plot is almost always the driving force behind short fiction. That is most certainly not the case with the stories in Over to You.
Most of the stories feature no real plot in the typical sense of a Dahl story. One can argue that “Beware of the Dog” is the only story in the collection that really feels like a regular Dahl tale. Not coincidentally, it is the one story that moves toward its twist ending with relentless intensity of a tale of the unexpected. RAF pilot Peter Williamson is shot down in battle somewhere over France but appears to wake up back in England. When it is revealed that everything around him upon waking back to consciousness after his crash is carefully executed façade designed to pump him for information by German spies it becomes apparent that this is truly a Dahl story where plot outweighs character. And in that way, the story sticks out from the rest.
Most of the stories in the collection penetrate into the psychological state of mind—and this also certainly applies to Peter Williamson in his frustrated disconnection between reality and illusion—to deliver a different species of war fiction from the conventional standard. What Dahl succeeds in doing in these stories is something that for the most part he really does not even try to do in the bulk of his short stories. Since Dahl was himself a pilot who suffered a horrible crash during the war—“A Piece of Cake” is a sem-autobiographical recounting of that experience—he is intimately familiar with the psychology of the men who fly planes into the air to conduct battles with other men flying battleships in the sky. Although the dogfights of World War I introduced aviation in into the battlefield, it was not really until after World War II that the average writer could construct a story about this new form of warfare. As a result, those reading stories like these and by other writers who had served in various air forces were being introduced to a brand new type of war story that even the greatest writers who ever lived had never written about.
It is this psyche of the type of man willing to sit in a cockpit fully exposed to the enemy with very little in the way of defensive protection and with their only last-ditch escape route being a trip straight down to earth hoping that if the parachute does open the slowing of the descent doesn’t make you an even more tempting target.
The stories are thus about the mindset of the type of men willing to volunteer for such insanity. And so we get comic relief from the ravages of war when two pilots who have arranged to rendezvous with a prostitute instead conspired to free the girls from the malevolent clutches of “Madame Rosette.” At the other end of the spectrum is “Katina” which almost qualifies as a horror story in the tale of a title character, a little girl orphaned after a German bombing of her village who is adopted by the squadron and spends time shaking her fists and screaming at enemy planes when they fly overhead. It is a ghastly tale that leads to heartbreaking tragedy and makes one wonder if this is what Dahl found suitable to publish what kinds of horror did he witness that weren’t suitable for publication. The pilot who grows closest to Katina becomes the central figure in “They Shall Not Grow Old” which almost completely abandons the realm of realism to present the perspective of a pilot daily facing a shrinking odds of surviving the war as an existential dreamscape in which the pressure of survival is itself only enough to move a pilot to welcoming death as the only escape.
Over to You is not the most enjoy collection of short stories by Roald Dahl. The ration of laughter to horror is much lower than in typical tales of irony. The absence of children removes the dimension of innocence which even the presence of Katina cannot alleviate since her circumstances present her as anything but an innocent awaiting corruption by experience. While not providing the same type of reading experience as other collections by Dahl, however, Over to You is most definitely worthy of inclusion for the committed Dahl fan who wants to miss out on nothing. Its pleasures and wayward distractions can afford the read a sometimes much-needed off-road vacation from the standard Dahl fare of creepy adults and unexpected twists.
