Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying - Roald Dahl

Ten mind-tingling stories based on Roald Dahl's experiences as a wartime fighter pilot. They probe the psyches of men living nightmares behind the nervy bonhomie of Ops rooms and Mess; men sent on one mission too many into chilling countries of the mind. 

~ from back cover

 

 

 

 

During World War 2, beloved childrens' author Roald Dahl served as a fighter pilot with the Royal Air Force. Though severly injured in Libya, he went on to fly in additional missions over Greece and Syria, later transferring to a position in Intelligence. Inspired by his own true-life experiences, Dahl crafts a truly unique collection of sometimes eerie, sometimes touching short stories, each story illustrating an unusual experience of a different pilot. In his foreword, Dahl explains that none of the stories reflect anyone he knew in particular, but were inspired only by general things he witnessed during his years of service. 

 

All the stories in this collection were originally published individually in various magazine publications around the world but have since been made available as one collection in book form. Now, a quick run down of the ten stories:

 

#1 "Death of an Old, Old Man" -- tale of a seasoned pilot on his final flight -- what originally had me wanting to read this whole book was just the very first line of this first story: "Oh God, how I am frightened!" Had to know the story behind that!

 

#2 "The African Story" -- an old man has a unique method for confronting an animal abuser... okay, so actually this one doesn't have the focus on the pilot but it's still tense and good!

 

#3 "Piece of Cake" -- an overconfident pilot has his plane catch on fire, pilot falls into emotional shock, time slows way down and he finds himself struggling to be able  to move to free himself from the flames --- This one had a scene that I found a bit of dark humor in: When someone comes to the pilot's aide, the pilot feels pain in his nose and asks what's wrong with it, to which the newcomer replies, "It actually doesn't seem to be there very much." I probably shouldn't have found that bit funny but the polite tone used to notify someone that a prominent part of their face appears to have left the building just tickled me. Guess I'm just dark like that. 

 

#4 "Madame Rosette" -- two pilots on leave hit the town one night and come up with a scheme to visit a local brothel to try to free all the prostitutes. 

 

#5 "Katina" -- Greece, 1941. Two pilots patrolling a bombed area come across a girl, body and face cut and bloodied, standing on a pile of rubble. They decide to take her back to the base doctor to get checked out, end up bonding with her. -- This one I found to be one of the most poignant of the bunch. Katina's story wrenched my heart a bit! It also had one of the best (though saddest), most cinematic endings of any of the stories here, IMO.

 

#6 "Yesterday Was Beautiful" -- a pilot is simply trying to find someone who can give him a boat ride, but in the process of trying to find someone comes across a family whose matriarch is completely emotionally & spiritually broken by the war

 

#7 "They Shall Not Grow Old" -- a pilot by the name of Finn goes missing for a few days. When his plane sudden comes in for a landing days later and his fellow pilots ask what happened to him, he initially has no memory of where he's been. When the memories do come back, the story he has to tell is almost impossible for anyone to believe. 

 

#8 "Beware The Dog" -- Story opens with a pilot's plane going down. Pilot survives wreck, wakes up in a hospital. When he has some time to get his bearings about him, the pilot begins to suspect something fishy about the hospital and why he's really there. It was with this story I can say it was my first time ever reading the simile "like a dead cat on a sofa." So there's that. 

 

#9 "Only This" -- the only story in the bunch told from a female perspective -- a woman describes her nightmares she's suffering while waiting for the return of her pilot lover --- eerie ending! 

 

#10 "Someone Like You" -- this collection closes out with a story of two pilots, old acquaintances who have lost touch over the years, reconnecting & shooting the breeze in a local bar

 

 

There's just something to Dahl's writing that even if I don't entirely know what's going on all the time, I don't care, I'm compelled to keep reading,,,, if for nothing else just because his writing is so inviting, even when his story ideas get weird af! And some of these here definitely fall under that weird label. A number of them -- such as "Piece of Cake", "They Shall Not Grow Old", and "Only This" had something that was very Twilight Zone about them lol. And since we're speaking of Dahl, you know that scene in the original movie adaptation of his book Charlie & The Charlie Factory where Gene Wilder is singing that CREEEPY song in the tunnel? Well, there was something to the way that Dahl wrote "Piece of Cake" that definitely brought that scene to mind!

 

Not all the stories have that vibe though. Some really are just a blend of sometimes bittersweet, sometimes tragic reflections on people just trying to come out the other side of war okay, or as okay as one can expect. From the soldiers to the women to the war-scarred children, I could easily picture all of Dahl's creations here as real people. What brought down my rating a bit was the endings on many of the stories... many of those endings fell too flat for me, or were too abrupt, making the rest of the story feel like it fell into some abyss. Still, this being my first dip into Dahl's adult fiction, I'm very much interested to see where his other offerings take me.