How Do You Solve a Problem Like Roald Dahl?
A review of The Secret World of Roald Dahl, the podcast series that reckons with antisemitism, genius, and the stories we give our children.
If you thought you knew who the person was who dreamed up some of the most iconic children’s stories of this century (The BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda) you are unquestionably wrong. Even if you thought that you knew some of the more outlandish things about his life story (that he was 6’6”, a British Spy, that he married an Academy-Award-Winning Actress…that he was a bigot and likely also an antisemite) you would still be wrong.
The Secret World of Roald Dahl is an entire series set aside with the explicit task of discovering the story of the man. But it goes further. It then exposes the stories behind the man, and then the stories behind the man that hides behind those stories. The layers that this man — the half-Norwegian, half-Brit who married an American Hollywood actress and had five children — keep appearing. The story just gets bigger…the longer you dig, the deeper the hole.
One Man, Ten Episodes, No Easy Answers
The Secret World of Roald Dahl is a deep biographical dive into the life story and the life's work of the children's book author who needs no introduction — and yet, it turns out, no one really knows who this man is. It's written, hosted and narrated by Aaron Tracy, who is also a screenwriter, audio drama writer and producer, television writer, and teaches creative writing at Yale University where he's on faculty.
The trickiest thing about this series is also what makes it compelling: Tracy is clearly in love with his subject. Smitten, in fact. He wants to hold onto the genius behind the pen, and you feel this pull throughout.
The question by the end of this series, a full 10 episodes, is: did he go too far, or not far enough?
In no way does Tracy gloss over the unseemly details
On the contrary, he dives deep into these swampy waters. He tells the story critically and calls upon distinguished critics: Roxane Gay, and Yair Rosenberg from The Atlantic. He also speaks with bestselling author Claire Dederer, who wrote Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma — her book that followed from her viral Paris Review essay asking: Can we love the work of Hemingway, Polanski, Miles Davis, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen? Should we? Why do we love the work of monstrous men, and why can’t we let it go?
The way Tracy unfurls the story is prodigious. You’ll be on the edge of your seat as he plucks out successive Russian dolls from Dahl’s life story. Each new figure contains new details — clues, even — about who this man really was. His life was so complete, so complex, it takes the first five episodes to truly represent all the details. The sixth episode (The Pivot) is the point in Dahl’s life when he finally submits a manuscript for a children’s book. It’s also the point in the series when Tracy switches from chronicling to criticizing.
In episodes 7–10, Tracy digs into the controversy that is Dahl. He begins with an interview that Michael Coren did for the New Statesman in 1983. Coren was a young theatre critic at the time, trying to ask Dahl about a book review Dahl had recently written that centered around the difficult and hot-button topic of the day, the invasion of Lebanon by Israel. Sort of off-topic, Dahl said: “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” Coren calmly continued; his article would end up exposing the antisemitism of Dahl that would permanently change his legacy.
Unfortunately, this sort of remark was not a one-off. His biographer Jeremy Treglown recounts many of them; and his own daughter recalls Dahl getting drunk one night and complaining about the number of Jews at their social club.
What Tracy Gets Right
Before we cast final judgment on Dahl, what Tracy most wants us to understand is that his success as a children’s book author didn’t come easy to him. Tracy wants us to understand how undeterred Dahl was by failure, how well he managed failure in the process of creating something great.
This is more than just a noble artist trope. Tracy wants us to deeply see just how much, and how fabulously, Dahl failed before he succeeded.
The fact that Dahl failed as much as he succeeded makes him approachable; equally humbling and inspiring. As Tracy processes each of the losses and failures, he dives deeper to try to determine Dahl's secret sauce.
Tracy sets out to solve this sphinx riddle, and he finds an answer: it was his writing process. Dahl was rigid, dogged — almost ascetic — in his approach to daily writing. This was the key to his success, beyond anything else.
The fact that he got up every day and sat down to write, behind a closed door, in a room of his own. This is what made him great (and Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison, and Mary Shelley). This, Tracy ardently argues — totally apart from any of the stupid things Dahl said in his life — is what made him great. And this seems to be the thing that the writer Aaron Tracy loves most about this man; a clue to how to become a great writer lies in the details of how you conduct your day.
Hollywood Has Always Had Dahl's Back
Tracy writes like a playwright, carefully unravelling the very flawed character that is Dahl. The cinematic quality. The scene construction. The way it attempts to resolve an intensely flawed artist — it’s difficult not to see Hollywood written all over it, and he has the screen cred to make this happen.
This series is produced by three entities: iHeart, Parallax Media (Tracy’s production company), and Imagine Entertainment, Ron Howard’s production company. There’s an oddly placed phrase that concludes each episode: “Copyright 2026 Imagine Entertainment, iHeartMedia and Parallax.” I’ve never heard a copyright statement in the credits of a podcast series. I’d expect it in the show notes, but spoken aloud it feels jarring. A copyright statement read aloud at the end of every episode isn’t an aesthetic choice. It plants a flag in the ground in a way that’s not common practice. Should this also be a signal about who owns this story, and what they intend to do with it?
There is and has always been a steady diet of people interested in Dahl. Many Hollywood heavyweights have made Dahl adaptations: Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, Wes Anderson, Robert Zemeckis, Quentin Tarantino. Tracy speaks with longtime NPR Fresh Air film critic David Bianculli about many of these.
The breadth and depth of Dahl’s influence does raise the question: is he just too big to be ignored and written off? How should the world continue to love this man and his genius, as they have so many other notable figures whose legacies are complicated by their worst selves — Richard Wagner’s antisemitism, Picasso’s misogyny, Kanye West’s despicableness?
What complicates this entire thing is that Netflix spent $1 billion to acquire the entire Roald Dahl Story Company — that’s everything. Dahl died on November 23, 1990. Thirty years later, his family issued a posthumous apology regarding his opinions and remarks. One comfortable year after that, Netflix announced their giant rights acquisition. Was this convenient timing, or a chance at redemption? And where does Imagine Entertainment factor into all of that? Are the apology and the acquisition part of the same transaction? One cleared the moral rights; the other cleared the legal ones.
The Part That's Hardest to Forgive
It’s one thing for adults to sit with Wagner’s Ring Cycle and hold the split-screen image: musical importance on one side, antisemitism on the other. Adults can allow that. Adults can choose to ignore, or set things aside. They can continue to laugh at Trading Places, choosing to appreciate the brilliance of Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd while setting aside the racist overtones of the plot.
But we give this stuff to our children to read. Tracy returns to this again and again throughout the series, and it’s the right instinct: he would never hire a babysitter without making sure that person is one of the good ones. So why would we hand over a book to our children without fully vetting both the book and the person who wrote it?
Many academics and critics have examined Dahl’s works for hidden antisemitism — some found it, others disagree. Does his hatefulness spill onto the page without him realizing it? Adults can decide. Young formative readers are not yet equipped to make that call.
The Secret World of Roald Dahl is a serious, well-produced, thoroughly researched piece of audio that earns most of its ten hours. What it cannot quite bring itself to do is deliver a verdict on its own subject — whether the genius is worth the cost of the man. What it does do is give new relevance and seriousness to the critic’s trope of the Art vs The Artist. And good, at least, to be armed with the entire backstory to Dahl before the deluge of Dahl material forthcoming from the Netflix rights grab.
We cuddled up next to our children and helped them learn to read, through his words. This part is supposed to be the easy part.
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