The library bits are nonsense

Nobody who has actually run a library believes the Mrs Phelps chapters for a second, and I've yet to meet a librarian who minded.

A four-year-old walks in alone, is left wholly unsupervised, works through the entire adult fiction sequence in a few months, and is handed Dickens and Hemingway by a woman who says next to nothing and never rings her parents. It is nonsense. Safeguarding alone, can you imagine? And yet it remains the only depiction of my job in popular fiction that gets the important part right, which is that the right thing to do about a child reading above their level is to stand back, keep quiet, and go on putting things where they will be found.

Dahl is cruel and I've never had a difficulty with the cruelty. Children are not sentimental about adults; they know perfectly well that some grown-ups are stupid and some are malicious and that nothing whatever is done about it. The Wormwoods are drawn with genuine dislike, the hair oil and the telly and the sneering, and the Trunchbull is pure invention. The hammer throw. The chokey. Bruce Bogtrotter and the cake, which I've read out to more rooms than any other chapter of anything, and which children still hear in total silence right up to the moment the plate goes over Bogtrotter's head, and then it's bedlam!

Where I part company with it is Miss Honey. She's a device. Sweet, wronged, penniless, waiting to be rescued by a child, and the ending hands her a house and the girl and a job and ties it off with a bow that Dahl would have sneered at in anybody else's book. Compare what he does at the close of Danny the Champion of the World, which is much harder and much better.

The telekinesis I could take or leave, honestly. It arrives two thirds through as though a different book had been posted through the letterbox. The finest parts of Matilda have nothing supernatural about them at all: a small girl with no allies working out that she can put superglue in her father's hat.

The Blake drawings matter more than people admit. I once had a paperback with different illustrations, a cheap job lot in 1996, and the children rejected it outright. Not "I prefer the other one". Rejected. Three came to the desk to complain, one a Kelleher twin, who complained about nothing else in five years.

Nine. The mark comes off for Miss Honey and for the newt, the one gag that has never worked in a read-aloud in my hands, and I've tried it in three decades' worth of rooms.

Practical note, since somebody always asks: it suits a confident seven-year-old better than a struggling ten-year-old, whatever the reading-age chart says. The chart is measuring sentence length. It is not measuring whether a child wants to be Matilda, and they all want to be Matilda.