Yatterings

One Hundred and One Dalmations (1956) by Dodie Smith is a curious there and back again tale (or should that be tail?) which is somewhat more saccharine than the Disney film (or at least my memories of it).

When Cruella de Vil steals 15 puppies from the Dearlys’ dogs, Pongo and Missis Pongo, and takes them to her country home, the dogs set out to find them. They use the Twilight Barking to find news of their whereabouts and manage to find them -  a secret language dog language. Finding the hall, they hatch a plan to confuse the villains and bring the dogs back to London.

Christopher Isherwood, a close friend, thought that Smith disapproved of her villain and she does come out as extremely flat. In fact all of the characters are fairly flat with interlaced advice about dogs. Smith invited him to read E. B White’s Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web - tales of anthropomorphised animals.

The book itself is out of step with the children’s fantasies of the 1950s. Norton’s Borrowers were small folk dealing with the everyday issues of rationing and Make Do and Mend (earlier post on Borrowers) in a collapsed Britain. The finale of the Dalmations shows the Dearlys’ ordering steaks from ‘rather  good hotels’ (101 Dalmations, p266) and then buying the de Vil’s country home. It stands in stark contrast to the trials and tribulations of the Pod family. Perhaps it is a more American book, taking for granted that the post-war World was now theirs instead of being fought over by the old Great Powers.

I’m not sure that it works at all really. It shows what collective action can do in terms of regaining and strengthening  community but it suffers from its distance from the real world.

One Hundred and One Dalmations, Dodie Smith (Egmont, London, 2006 reprint)

Biography
Dear Dodie: The Life of Dodie Smith, Valerie Grove (Chatto and Windus, London, 2006)

Tags: dodie_smith, 101_dalmations