The One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956)

I love Dodie Smith's writing, and I know I read The Starlight Barking when I was younger, but I never read The Hundred and One Dalmatians, somehow. So now I have. I love the humour in the narrative voice, and the little asides, like, "Mr Dearly wasn't exactly handsome but he had the kind of face you don't get tired of." It's an energetic and entertaining read, and I was tickled pink to realise that "What's my crime?", in the Disney movie, is from the book.

It can be a bit... well, old-fashioned about gender roles. Like, in the animated film it's Pongo and Perdita. Well, Perdita is a character, but she's not Pongo's wife. Pongo's wife is just called Missus Pongo. Siiigh.

Still, it's fun -- little details really make it for me, like Cruella putting way too much pepper on all her food. ( )

This was one of the most sexist books I have ever read. Worse, I first read it when I was ten or so and didn't notice the sexism, which means that its ridiculous list of 'male' and 'female' attributes went into my psyche unchallenged.

According to Dodie Smith, men and male dogs are stronger, don't feel the cold, understand both numbers and words better, have a sense of direction, possess deductive powers, are inventive, loyal and brave.

Women and female dogs can't tell their left from their right after a page of instruction in how to do so, feel proud of not getting lost while heading in a straight line, can't count - even one's own puppies, don't understand either human or dog speech as well as a male dog, get tired about four times as fast as male puppies, are jealous, vain, proud of their clothes, are hysterical, silly, distracted, and generally ridiculous. But they are pretty.

What a steaming pile of crap.

Also, there's a scene of "thieving gypsies", and one can speak either Romany or "normal". Ugh.

I really wanted to like this. It's a charming story, in parts. But it is choc full of blatant, unchecked sexism, and I am boggled that Disney seems to have done a better job than the source. ( )

I loved this movie when I was a kid and was finally able to read the book this past week. It was amazing; so much better than the movie.

Mr. and Mrs. Dearly meet and so do their dogs, Pongo and Missis. Missis has puppies (15 to be exact) and this where the fun begins. Missis cannot feed 15 puppies by herself so Mrs. Dearly goes to find a surrogate mother- enter Perdita a liver spotted Dalmatian who lost her puppies when they were taken from her by her owner.

Things are splendid until we consider Cruella de Vil. Cruella was an old classmate of Mrs. Dearly who was kicked out of school for drinking ink. She always is wearing fur, has a striped black and white car, and like to be hot (I mean roasting). She sees the dogs (Missis and Pongo) and later the puppies and gets the idea for a Dalmatian coat. And makes the mistake of dognapping Pongo and Missis’s puppies. This leads them on an adventure to find them which involves the like of a Retriever, a Spaniel, Colonel and Lieutenant Tib (whose real name is Pussy Willow), as well as a Great Dane and a Stradfordshire Terrier. Pongo, Missis, their fifteen pups and another 82 puppies find their way back to the Dearly’s on Christmas.

But this is only 100 Dalmatians (including Perdita). Prince (Perdita’s beloved) joins the group as well. And her puppies were part of the 82. ( )

Well-loved books from my past

Title: [THE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS]

Author: [[DODIE SMITH]]

Rating: 5 stars out of five, because I still love the memory of being rescued

The Book Description: Pongo and Missis had a lovely life. With their human owners, the Dearlys, to look after them, they lived in a comfortable home in London with their 15 adorable Dalmatian puppies, loved and admired by all. Especially the Dearlys' neighbor Cruella de Vil, a fur-fancying fashion plate with designs on the Dalmatians' spotted coats! So, when the puppies are stolen from the Dearly home, and even Scotland Yard is unable to find them, Pongo and Missis know they must take matters into their own paws! The delightful children's classic adapted twice for popular Disney productions. Ages 8-11
(This is from a 1996 Barnes and Noble edition)

My Review: Mine wasn't an especially happy childhood. The particulars don't matter all that much, what does is that I was on my own in an adult emotional landscape a long time before that was a good idea. I am lucky beyond luck that I seem to have been born with a love of reading. Both my parents and both my older sisters read to me a lot when I was a kid, which doubtless had a lot to do with fanning the flames of my obsession with books; but there was never a sense in me that there was something else I'd rather be doing, even watching TV.

My mother and I, after the aforementioned sisters left us and my father was removed from our world, had all sorts of books in our house. I was the only kid I knew with a 6-foot-tall bookcase of my own books in his room when there was one digit in my age. And it saved my sanity, that stuffed story-world, so many many times.

One of the books that spoke to me on every level, which I discovered in the Allandale branch of the Austin Public Library, was this book. I was nine, I was miserably angry and unhappy, and I didn't know that anything was wrong. I found this book, this fabulous perfect rescue fantasy of authority figures who don't know their butts from their elbows but who know that they love, and want, their charges to be safe, and who go to extraordinary lengths to make it happen...well! That sounded peachy keen to my abandoned boy self. So I checked it out, and I read it. And I read it. And read it.

Easily a hundred times over the next two years.

No authority figures rescued me. I found some who loved me, but none could, or would, see the emotional hell I was in. When I was about twelve, the fantasy stopped satisfying my need and instead made its unsatisfied nature worse. So I stopped reading the book.

This christmas I decided to read the book again, just to see if there was as much here as I remembered, and to look at the pages with adult eyes.

I can't see it with adult eyes. Just as that desperate child full of reinflicted pain and rage. Oh the poor thing, I'd think, no wonder he re-read the book so often, look at this, or this...everything, really. It was a perfectly ordinary kid's book of its day, misogyny and elitism and racism permeating it with an almost industrial strength stench. But it also rang, and rings, true: Rescue me! It's a cry many kids don't vocalize but they do feel. Sometimes, for the lucky ones, they find stories to crutch them onwards towards adulthood.

For me, this was one fine, sturdy crutch. I still love it, and I still thank Dodie Smith for it, with all its time-and-place flaws. It's wonderfully parenthetical in its style and it's simply deliciously fantastically comfortable and comforting in its plotting.

A grateful salute, then, Miss Dodie Smith, from a forty-plus year distance, from a young redheaded fat kid lost in so many ways, for writing him a star to guide him. I'm here today because you did. ( )

Illustrated by Janet and Anne Grahame-Johnstone