“The last time we saw Charlie, he was riding high above his home town in the Great Glass Lift…”
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is a silly, chaotic, hilarious sequel to the classic original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Released a year after the iconic 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in anticipation of a cinematic sequel, this ridiculous book picks up right where we left Charlie and the Bucket family –inside the glass elevator floating above the city with Willy Wonka. It is no longer called a lift, but a “glass elevator” which is kept up by “skyhooks.” Willy Wonka somewhat maniacally sends the elevator speeding like a rocket further upward into orbit where there is zero gravity. Despite floating around in space inside the elevator, Charlie’s grandparents still refuse to get out of bed. At the same time, two days earlier, the United States launched its first Space Hotel, “a gigantic sausage-shaped capsule no less than one thousand feet long” into orbit and a Transport Capsule is en route carrying passengers up to the Space Hotel, led by Shuckworth, Shanks, and Showler,.
However, the glass elevator arrives at the Space Hotel first. Willy Wonka, Charlie, and his family all decide to dock and explore. Almost immediately, the Americans are confused as to who might have boarded the Space Hotel. American President Lancelot R. Gilligrass contacts the hotel but Willy Wonka makes all manner of silly noises which the president fears are the sounds of creatures from Mars and Venus. Notably, throughout the novel, the United States is satirized as a trigger-happy, childish, seemingly incompetent country. The president is flanked by his vice president, Miss Tibbs, a huge lady of 89-years-old with a whiskery chin (she was the president’s nurse when he was a child), and on the other side of the president is the Chief of the Army, an absurd cowboy-esque caricature of an American military man (think Dr. Strangelove) who wants to bomb the space station to smithereens. “’Hooray!’ Said the Chief of the Amy. ‘Let’s blow everything up! Bang-bang! Bang-bang!’” (34).
Shortly thereafter, Wonka, Charlie, and his family encounter a fearsome group of shape-shifting green-brown aliens with red eyes and bodies like eggs inside the Space Hotel. Suddenly, they move their bodies to spell out the letters “SCRAM.” Terrified, they rush back to the glass elevator where Wonka informs them that these aliens are called “vermicious knids” (pronounced with a hard “k”) from the planet Vermes, located 18,427 million miles away. This leads to a grand battle between the vermicious knids and the glass elevator, and as the Transport Capsule approaches the Space Hotel, Wonka decides they must rescue the Capsule from the knids as they tow it all the way back to earth (along the way, the vermicious knids burn up in the atmosphere, which Wonka describes as “shooting knids”). Back on earth, the elevator come crashing back into the chocolate factory:
“The Elevator stopped. The doors opened and Charlie found himself looking out once again at the great Chocolate Room with the chocolate river and the chocolate waterfall, where everything was eatable – the trees, the leaves, the grass, the pebbles, and even the rocks. And there to meet them were hundreds and hundreds of tiny Oompa-Loompas, all waving and cheering. It was a sight that took one’s breath away” (99).
From here, the story takes another comical twist. In an effort to finally get Charlie’s grandparents out of bed, Willy Wonka introduces the group to the “Wonka-Vite” a “great rejuvenator” pill that reverses aging by exactly 20 years. Grandma Georgina asks why Wonka didn’t take any himself since he said he was getting too old to run his factory, but per usual Wonka merely coyly replies “Anyone can ask questions… It’s the answers that count.” At any rate, the grandparents predictably take too many pills –two are transformed into infants and Grandma Georgina disappears entirely which leads Charlie and Wonka back into the glass elevator where they head deep underground into the bowels of the earth, to a land known as “Minusland” populated by “Gnoolies” where Grandma Georgina has become a “Minus.” Minusland is somewhat reminiscent of the Homeric underworld. After rescuing her, all the grandparents are given “Vita-Wonk” to bring the back to their relative age.
The novel ends with the whole group invited to the White House to be honored by the President of the United States for rescuing all 136 people who were aboard the Transport Capsule. At long last, the grandparents are finally eager to get out of bed. Thus, ends this rather ridiculous children’s novel. In my view, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is decidedly a step down from the classic original. Very little of the novel actually concerns the chocolate factory, and instead of exposing the vices of spoiled children, it shows us the moral failings of adults who have lost the will to live, who remain in bed all day, and who obsess over a desire to become young again. Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde, and Mike Teavee are replaced by Charlie’s grandparents in this novel. A third book in the series was planned by Roald Dahl after Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. It was to be called either “Charlie in the White House” or “Charlie Meets the President” in which Charlie’s family and Willy Wonka are invited by President Gilligrass to have dinner at the White House. However, Dahl only ever completed the first chapter. Apparently, it sits on display at the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden (in Buckinghamshire, England).
Dahl, Roald. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. Puffin Books, a division of RandomHouse (first published in the US in 1972 by Alfred A. Knopf).
With wonderful illustrations by Quentin Blake. Roald Dahl dedicated the book to his daughters Tessa, Ophelia, and Lucy, as well as his godson Edmund Pollinger.