31 pages • 1 hour read
Roald DahlEsio Trot
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPages 22-48Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 22-48 Summary
Mr. Hoppy writes something on a piece of paper and lowers it to Mrs. Silver on a string. It appears to be another language, but it’s actually just a few sentences of English written backwards. He says it is “tortoise language.” It’s a series of commands telling Alfie to get bigger and put on fat. He explains this by saying, “Tortoises are very backwards creatures. Therefore they can only understand words that are written backwards. That’s obvious isn’t it?” (24). Esio Trot, the novel’s title and a key phrase in Mr. Hoppy’s magic words, is “tortoise” spelled backwards.
Mr. Hoppy says she must whisper the chant to Alfie’s face three times a day. First, she practices it aloud for Mr. Hoppy. He says to give it a few months but promises that she’ll be satisfied.
Alone again, he keeps thinking of “your slave for life” (26): “What bliss!” Mr. Hoppy puts his furniture in his bedroom, puts canvas over his living room carpet, and writes the addresses and numbers of all 14 pet stores in the city. He then visits each one over the next two days. Eventually, he buys 140 tortoises of different sizes, but with shells the same color as Alfie’s.
After taking them home in groups, he is pleased with his plan. He thinks it will work because “[s]ize, of course, [is] everything” (28). The tortoises fill his living room. He asks an old colleague for an hour with a work bench at the garage where he was employed. He then makes a long metal claw and puts it on the end of a metal tube. When he pulls on two attached wires, the claw gently closes. His device will allow him to reach Mrs. Silver’s balcony and gently lift a tortoise to his.
Mrs. Silver works part-time at a candy and newspaper shop. Mr. Hoppy lifts Alfie to his balcony when she is gone. He weighs him and finds that Alfie is 13 ounces. Then, he finds a tortoise that weighs two ounces more. This is a small enough difference that Mrs. Silver won’t notice.
He puts this tortoise—Tortoise Number 2—on her balcony, next to a lettuce leaf, which it has never eaten. The tortoise was used to the nasty cabbage from the pet store, so this is a treat. Two hours later, he hears Mrs. Silver exclaiming to Alfie about how hungry he is. She credits the magic words, which she says to Alfie as Mr. Hoppy listens above.
A week later, he replaces Tortoise Number 2 with Tortoise Number 3, which weighs 17 ounces. Over the next eight weeks, Alfie transforms into Tortoise Number 8, which weighs 27 ounces. Mrs. Silver hasn’t noticed the trick, even though he has doubled in size. That night, Mr. Hoppy hears Mrs. Silver say that Alfie can’t get into the door of his house. She weighs him and finds that he is now 27 ounces. Mr. Hoppy asks to come down and hold him.
Pages 22-48 Analysis
The theme of Deception and Ethics takes center stage during the middle section of the book. Mr. Hoppy’s plan is an elaborate, Rube Goldberg device of inefficiency:
When he had finished, Mr. Hoppy, in his enthusiasm, had bought no less than one hundred and forty tortoises and he carried them home in baskets, ten or fifteen at a trip. He had to make quite a lot of trips and he was quite exhausted at the end of it, but it was worth it. Boy, was it worth it! (30).
That excitable “Boy, was it worth it!” would seem unrealistic in someone less shy, but Mr. Hoppy likely believes it. Ironically, though, the effort and expense required to execute his plan are significantly higher than that required to engage Mrs. Silver in more traditional forms of courtship. This highlights the extent of Mr. Hoppy’s shyness and the lengths he will go to in order to avoid discomfort.
Mr. Hoppy’s capacity for thoughtfulness and care are also evident, not only through his devotion to his flowers but also when he selects the replacement tortoises from the pet store: “[Tortoises] differ only in their size and in the colour of their shells. Alfie had a darkish shell, so Mr. Hoppy chose only the darker-shelled tortoises for his great collection” (28). While Mr. Hoppy’s lack of courage and self-confidence holds him back, the implication here is that he in fact possesses several positive traits, including thoughtfulness and attentiveness.
If Mr. Hoppy had as much courage to simply talk to Mrs. Silver as he did in inventing nonsense on the fly, he could have saved them both a great deal of time alone. Instead, he gives her the backward “magic words,” which appear below in legible English:
TORTOISE, TORTOISE,
GET BIGGER BIGGER!
COME ON TORTOISE,
GROW UP, PUFF UP,
SHOOT UP!
SPRING UP, BLOW
UP, SWELL UP!
GORGE! GUZZLE!
STUFF! GULP! (24).
While Mrs. Silver is surprised to hear that the solution is so simple, she doesn’t argue or question for long. Instead, she complies with his instructions, and the deception begins in earnest. Dahl writes as if Mr. Hoppy’s success is inevitable. There is only one small moment of hesitation for Mr. Hoppy, when he waits for her to see Tortoise Number 2 for the first time: “Would she see any difference between the new tortoise and Alfie? It was going to be a tense moment” (39). Mrs. Silver fails to notice the trick, and the tense moment—in which Mr. Hoppy might have been exposed as a manipulative liar—passes.
In this section, Dahl uses an internal monologue about slow growth to comment on the bittersweet reality of aging: “If a creature grows slowly enough—I mean very very slowly indeed—then you’ll never notice that it has grown at all, especially if you see it every day” (43). In this passage, he is referring to Alfie and Mr. Hoppy’s reasons for the success of his plan, but it serves as a commentary on the nature of human growth as well. It is possible that Mr. Hoppy is not able to see past his defining trait—his shyness—and acknowledge the ways in which he has grown through life and the positive traits he has developed.
When he refers specifically to people growing, it is a melancholy sentiment: “It’s the same with children. They are actually growing taller every week, but their mothers never notice it until they grow out of their clothes” (43). This contrasts with Mrs. Silver’s fixation on Alfie’s lack of growth, suggesting that she, too, possesses the traits of attentiveness and care.
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