Kate Emery: Roald Dahl rewrite is a nip and tuck too far as publisher Puffin Books updates language in books

Cosmetic surgery is tricky.

Done right it is all-but-invisible: a nip and a tuck but you’re still looking at the same person.

Done badly it erases not time but character, resulting in a face that may have fewer wrinkles but no longer resembles its owner.

The plastic surgery conducted on Roald Dahl’s back catalogue in the name of modernisation reads like the work of a one-armed, short-sighted surgeon who either has a bad case of the DTs or a wicked sense of humour.

Instead of the books emerging as the best possible version of themselves — an errant sunspot excised here, a triangle of sadness smoothed there — they have entered the so-called “uncanny valley” of a cosmetic surgery victim who has had so much work done they now resemble a creepy CGI version of themselves.

If you missed it, Puffin Books, which publishes the late Dahl’s stories, used “sensitivity readers” to update them.

This happens, to varying degrees. Agatha Christie’s excellent novel, And Then There Was None, originally had the less-than-excellent title of Ten Little N-Words. Clearly such a title was offensive, so minor surgery was performed, removing the racial slur with no impact on plot or style.

Dahl has felt the brush of a scalpel before now, himself rewriting parts of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that depicted the Oompa Loompas as African pygmy slaves “paid” in cacao beans. I don’t think it’s political correctness gone mad to suggest children’s books aren’t the right forum to imply that slaves probably had a great old time toiling for their masters, actually.

But the extent of the recent Dahl changes have left me — and I’m hardly the only one — deeply uneasy.

First there is the widespread removal of the word “fat”, which is an interesting move given that plenty of modern books — the Harry Potter books are bad offenders — are chock full of characters whose size is used as shorthand for gluttony and laziness.

Still, I’ll admit to regularly excising the f-word when reading to my daughters.

But things get really bad when whole new sentences and sentiments are added.

Take The Witches, where Dahl wrote about the perils of trying to recognise the wig-wearing, glove-sporting witches: “You can’t go round pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens.”

This is a funny line.

The new, defiantly unfunny, version reads like an after-school special designed to teach a Very Important Lesson about tolerance: “Besides, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”

OK, mate, thanks for the alopecia PSA but we’re really more concerned about the secret plot to kill the world’s children right now.

In Matilda, Dahl had his precocious bookworm transported via literature to “olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. . . to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling.”

In 2023 Conrad and Kipling, both accused of racism, are replaced by Jane Austen and John Steinbeck.

There are more examples — women cashiers become “top scientists” and characters no longer play with toy guns — but you get the idea.

Everyone has denied the changes are related to Netflix’s acquisition of Dahl’s books and its desire to avoid controversy amid plans for a series of adaptations. Still, the fact that Matilda the Musical, the charming adaptation now screening on Netflix, has made about $50 million is a reminder that some have vested interests in keeping Dahl popular.

Whatever you think of the (well-founded) accusations of anti-Semitism against Dahl, this isn’t a case of trying to separate art from the artist, this is a ham-fisted attempt to sanitise a writer whose enduring appeal is because — not in spite of — his grotesque characters, naughty kids and often shocking acts of violence.

Smooth down those rough edges too far and you wind up with something that might superficially resemble a Dahl book, but one that’s had its all its laugh lines removed, hyaluronic acid injected in its cheeks and a healthy squirt of botulism plugged into its forehead. Which is not actually a Dahl book at all

In attempting to make Dahl “uncancellable” the changes have rendered him closer to unreadable.