Who doesn’t love a good villain? And Mr and Mrs Twit are a delightfully nasty pair! When they’re not having a go at one another - she mixing in live worms into his spaghetti, he trying to send her off into space with balloons - they’re trying to eat children, actually eating the local bird populace and torturing a family of monkeys. Then one day the monkeys decide to push back…
The Twits still holds up as one of my favourite Roald Dahl books. Dahl’s speciality is over-the-top baddies and he delivers with Mr and Mrs Twit who’re as grotesque as can be. Quentin Blake’s illustrations are perfect as always - his art is as inseparable from Dahl’s prose as John Tenniel’s is from Lewis Carroll’s.
A few key plot points are perhaps a bit too easily glossed over, perhaps because Dahl is writing for a younger audience than his longer books like Matilda and The Witches - it is a much shorter book than either and feels a bit rushed towards the end.
And the monkeys are a bit underwritten compared to the title characters. It’s a similar setup to Fantastic Mr Fox except, whereas Boggis, Bunce and Bean are as wonderfully vicious as Mr and Mrs Twit, the monkeys and the Roly-Poly Bird are nowhere near as fully realised as Mr Fox, his family and friends.
Still, the story remains ingenious fun even some 25+ years since I last read this as a kid. And I also think there’s some truth in thinking cruel and wicked thoughts warping your outward appearance over time. Be good, everyone, inside and out! The Twits: a brilliant book about a couple of eminently hateable scumbags!
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