_____________________________ WHEN CINDERELLA STRIKES OUT Dylan Holmes _____________________________ Jan 2020 I have just noticed what Dahl was up to when writing /James and the Giant Peach/. He has reworked an old story to talk about hope in the face of catastrophe and our own shortcomings. As in the standard rags-to-riches fairy tale (see: Cinderella), James is orphaned and living with his cruel aunts when a mysterious benefactor shows up offering a magic solution to all his problems in a paper bag. But here's the thing: in this story, he ruins it. Immediately, he trips and spills the whole bag, and every last one of the little green things inside crawls into the dirt and disappears. So much for destiny. For the rest of the story, you follow along through the aftermath, seeing the laws of magic play out logically (question: "what would happen if you dropped a bag full of wish fulfillment near an old garden?" answer: "an adventure involving giant bugs and a giant peach"). You see clearly the machinery of how this huge wasted opportunity works itself around into an escape and an adventure and eventually into happiness after all. What a beautiful message! What an important twist on a familiar story. Like in Cinderella, the first lesson is that when you are miserable, life will offer you a way out. But Dahl adds another lesson beyond this, namely that you will sometimes ruin that way out. Even if you're trying your hardest; even if you're ready and deserving. You will ruin it and you will feel like you've missed your one big opportunity and you will be right. And yet here the little green things are, crawling unseen through the soil, enchanting everything. To be clear, it's not a trite message that "sometimes bad things happen for a reason and you can grow from it" or even "another chance will come along someday". It's a carefully worked out example of how when we are powerless and clumsy and our lives are ruined because of cruel fate and our own shortcomings, the world has its own strange unseen machinery. It tells you that, sometimes, you'll blow your one chance, and that machinery will keep on working its logical consequences, and it will work the fallout of that mistake around into a weird wonderful happy ending after all.