Like many, I suppose, I read 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' when I was very young, but I know its story more from the movies, so I was keen to revisit the book and the films to see how they all compare to each other. I quickly learned a few things that I wasn't quite expecting.

My first lesson was that my Puffin paperback is falling apart, half the book literally detached from the spine. I must have read this a heck of a lot when I was a kid. Tellingly, the equivalent editions of other Roald Dahl novels have held up a lot better, not just the sequel, 'Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator', but also 'James and the Giant Peach', 'Danny, the Champion of the World' and 'Fantastic Mr. Fox'.

My second lesson was that the text is closely integrated with its illustrations. While I remembered what happened, I'd completely forgotten that there were drawings, by Faith Jaques, or just how important they are, especially early on. Chapter one is practically a duet between the two as Dahl and Jacques introduce the characters together.

My third lesson was that Charlie's family isn't merely poor, they're practically destitute. Chapter ten is titled "The Family Begins to Starve" and that's not hyperbole. It's fair to say that had he not found a fifty-pence piece in the street and used it to buy chocolate, they may not have lived until the end of the book. In fact, I acutely worried for them while Charlie and Grandpa Joe were on the factory tour. All four of his grandparents are in their nineties, Joe being ninety-six and a half. It's a miracle that they lasted the day, but as dark as this book is, it would have been notably darker had Willy Wonka got Charlie back home to find his family dead.

My fourth lesson was that, as wonderful as Gene Wilder was as the title character in 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory', that film departs from the source material far more deliberately than the later Tim Burton version, which is shockingly close for much of its running time. Sure, he took a different tack with the ending, adding a whole subplot for Christopher Lee, but the dialogue and a lot of the music is verbatim and he put back a bunch of stuff that Mel Stuart had ditched in 1971. It plays much better to me than the Wilder version and, heretical as it might seem, I'd call it a better film as well as a truer adaptation. Then again, Dahl disowned the 1971 version entirely.

Pretty much everyone knows the story, but I'll run through it just in case. Charlie Bucket is a young boy growing up in poverty with his parents and four grandparents, the latter of whom never leave the only bed in the house. Hope has almost vanished from their lives, but it's revived by a strange announcement in the newspaper. Willy Wonka owns a chocolate factory in the same town, and the chocolate that emerges is the best and most magical in the world. However, as a response to spies from rival chocolatiers infiltrating it, Wonka closed the gates long ago and nobody has gone in or come out ever since. Until now, because he's hidden five golden tickets in five Wonka Bars and the finders of those tickets will be treated to a tour of the factory, as well as a lifetime supply.

The first four tickets are soon found by or for clearly unworthy children, though their locations are never mentioned. There's Augustus Gloop, an obese glutton; Veruca Salt, who's always given what she wants; Violet Beauregarde, who's a compulsive gum chewer; and Mike Teavee, who's addicted to television. After finding a coin in the street, Charlie becomes the fifth ticket owner and Grandpa Joe finally gets out of bed to accompany him on the tour, which turns into a surreal nightmare for four of the kids and a blessing for the fifth. I'm sure you can't remotely guess who that would be!

On its most basic level, this is a morality tale for children. Of the five kids, Charlie is easily the one most overlooked. He's painfully thin, because his family are outrageously poor. He's done nothing and achieved nothing. Dahl even intended for him to be black, though his agent talked him out of that. However, he's a good kid, the only thoroughly decent human being in the bunch, and it’s that goodness that's eventually rewarded. Of course, that's just the most basic level. There are a host of other levels that aren't remotely as straightforward.

This is a dark book, a really dark book, often reminding of the fiction that Dahl wrote for adults as much as his more famous work for children. Around the same time that I first read 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory', as the seventies became the eighties, Dahl was presenting a TV series called 'Tales of the Unexpected', a sort of British take on 'The Twilight Zone' anthology model but with a more grounded setting free of supernatural elements. Its episodes, initially based on stories Dahl had written himself, had dark twists and black humour. You know, kind of like this book.

For a story that's rooted in tolerance, it's surprisingly intolerant. When we meet the first finder of a golden ticket, Augustus Gloop, nothing in his description is remotely politically correct. He's fat, "so enormously fat he looked as though he had been blown up with a powerful pump. Great flabby folds of fat bulged out from every part of his body, and his face was like a monstrous ball of dough with two small greedy curranty eyes peering out upon the world." The Oompa-Loompas judge him even more harshly in the song they sing after his inevitable comeuppance in the factory.

Wonka himself is outrageously rude, without any of the childlike Michael Jackson-esque innocence that Johnny Depp brought to his portrayal. Oddly, he's memorable because he appears to have no restraint, whereas the four other kids are insufferable for precisely the same reason. Of course, it becomes clear that he has restraint but chooses not to use it because he's a manipulator. I haven't searched, but I'm sure there are entire theses out there about Willy Wonka, whether they look at his errant psychology, his errant business practices or a whole string of other facets to his life and work that are all just as errant.

Even when he does something that seems to be not remotely errant, like how much of the factory utilises nature to achieve its ends—whisking chocolate by waterfall, getting chocolate milk from cows, employing squirrels to shell nuts—but none of those things are remotely natural. If we look back at the beginnings of science fiction, the worst transgression any scientist could make was to mimic God. Leaping forward to modern concerns, that's dabbling with the environment, genetic modification and enslavement of animals. Then again, he transplanted an entire race of people to work his factory and pays them in cacao beans.

And at the end of the day, it's this mixture of childlike wonder and dark social commentary that is 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's legacy. It's easy to get caught up in the ride that is the Wonka factory tour and lust after his magical creations—I could do with some cavity-filling caramel right now—but the older we get and the more we learn about the world, the darker this gets. In a neat Goodreads review of the book, author Patrick Rothfuss suggests that Wonka closing his factory is the most likely cause of Charlie's family's poverty, due to how that act broke the local economy. It isn't hard to conjure up a dozen convention panels on different ways to read aspects of this book. Whether we love it or hate it, it really is a gift that keeps on giving. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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