I snapped up this book firstly because of Ivan Brunetti's lovely illustrations on the book cover. But my secondhand copy of this 2011 edition is worth having just for the introduction by Lev Grossman, Time magazine book critic and author. In it, he compares Willy Wonka's chocolate factory to "Dante's Inferno, and to the Mines of Moria dug by the dwarves in The Lord of the Rings." Unlike those places,

"Wonka's underworld isn't a hellish underworld. It's an inverted paradise. The dwarves, Tolkien wrote, "dug too greedily and too deep," and they were punished for it: they disturbed the sleep of the terrible Balrog. But in Dahl's imagination the rules are reversed. He gives us the impression that Wonka can dig as greedily and deep as he likes, and things will just keep getting better."

In this world, Wonka is a god (he's created his own world) and news like WONKA FACTORY TO BE OPENED AT LAST TO LUCKY FEW make front-page headlines.

Grossman goes on to call the novel "built like that moth-eaten Victorian specter, a work of moral instruction, but it isn't one". The four children foils to Charlie are not just guilty of over-consuming and obsessing (over chocolate, gum, presents and television); they are children who "don't enjoy what they consume" and "have forgotten what it means to be a child".

And unlike other mentor figures, Willy Wonka is not wise or even reasonable, but instead rather batty. Wonka is there to "remind Charlie not to grow up too far or too fast", Grossman argues. Charlie the "moppet" and hero of the story, like the other children, also has a craving - for candy. The difference is that he is able to appreciate and savour what he consumes. Indeed,

it is only when he gives in to buying a second candy bar, with money he doesn't really have, that Dahl rewards him with the Golden Ticket.

I enjoy this story even more now with these nuances Grossman highlights.