I Should Have Read It First, Roald Dahl’s Henry Sugar

I watched The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar on Netflix mainly because Wes Anderson made it. It was 39 minutes long, which felt about right. The sets looked like dioramas, the narration moved fast, and Benedict Cumberbatch played Henry like someone who was used to getting what he wanted. I liked it a lot.

But when it was over, I kept thinking: I should have read the story first.

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Going back to Roald Dahl’s original, I was struck by how good the writing was. Simple, direct, no extra weight. He did not waste words but he also did not rush. The story went in layers, a report inside a story inside a life, and on screen that felt clever, but on the page I sat with it longer. The whole thing had more room to settle.

What I did not expect was that the story was really about two people, not one. Henry got the title, but the man who trained for years until he could see without his eyes was the one I kept thinking about. In Dahl original, he was called Imhrat Khan, played in the film by Ben Kingsley under the name Imdad Khan. Nobody seemed to know why Anderson changed it. His part of the story felt quieter and stranger than the rest, and it made Henry change feel earned.

The Imhrat Khan section was almost entirely dialogue. A doctor asking questions, a man answering them, back and forth, page after page. On paper that sounds like it should drag. It did not. Dahl wrote it in a way that kept pulling forward, each answer leading to a stranger question, each explanation opening up something that did not quite make sense until suddenly it did. I read that section twice. The second time I noticed I was hearing Ben Kingsley voice the whole way through, very calm, very deliberate, with that slight pause before each sentence. I could not unhear it. And then somewhere in the middle I started seeing Richard Ayoade sitting cross legged on the floor as the yogi, which made the whole thing funnier than it was probably meant to be. Dahl wrote the yogi as this ancient, deeply serious figure. Ayoade is a deeply funny person just by existing. Those two things do not fully go together and now I cannot separate them.

Going between the book and the film, small differences started adding up. In Dahl original, the doctor who recorded the whole thing was a British surgeon named John Cartwright. Anderson replaced him with Dr. Chatterjee, played by Dev Patel, a South Asian doctor. It was not a dramatic change but it was a deliberate one. Dahl original text had a colonial feel to it and Anderson quietly removed that. The yogi in the book had a name too, Banerjee. In the film, Richard Ayoade played him but the name was gone. And then there was Ralph Fiennes as Dahl himself, appearing as a narrator from the very beginning. In the original, Dahl only showed up at the very end. Anderson moved him to the front and built the whole frame around him.

The book also spent more time showing just how self-absorbed Henry was before his change. Dahl wrote about his capped yellow teeth, a mole he had removed by a plastic surgeon, a hand cream he used made from turtle oil. Small details, but they added up to a portrait of a man who was completely consumed by himself. The film skipped most of that. It moved too fast to linger.

I also went in expecting a twist. Dahl was known for those. It never came. Instead the story did something harder: it took a greedy, bored man, put him through years of real work, and let him become someone different. No big moment, no speech. It just happened. That was hard to write, and Dahl made it look easy.

The film stayed close to the text, almost word for word in places. Some critics called it a glorified audiobook and I understood that. It moved fast and kept its distance. Reading the story after watching filled in what the film left just out of reach.

If I did it again, I would read first, then watch. The film was good, good enough to win an Oscar. But the writing, the sentences, the pace, the way Dahl made something strange feel normal, that was the better part.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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