|
|
A review by Trent Walters
Ray Bradbury, fantasist extraordinaire, needs no introduction. His novels
and short story collections count among the best remembered: Something
Wicked This Way Comes, The Martian Chronicles, The October Country,
Fahrenheit 451, and so on. From the Dust Returned, has been hailed as a
return to his former stylistic pinnacle. It spans the length of Bradbury's
illustrious career, stringing together stories about an unusual misfit
"family" of Halloween creatures -- a book that Bradbury hoped would...
"become a sort of Christmas Carol idea, Halloween after Halloween people
will buy the book, just as they buy the Carol, to read at the fireplace with
light low. Halloween is the time of year for story-telling... I believe
in this more than I have believed in anything in my writing career. I want
you [Charles Addams, the illustrator] to be in it with me."
The overarching plot is fairly simple: a "family" -- or, rather, a group
of societal misfits like loping werewolves, living gargoyles, ghosts who
starve in a world without belief, the dead who must be unburied to live life
backwards, the voice of a creepy creaky Theban door hinge, vampires and
other winged creatures of the night who can no longer fly at night but must
etch out a new meaningful existence, spirits that possess other bodies in
search of the body that would love them, and Egyptian mummies who can bestow
knowledge of the dead -- congregates every now and again at a haunted house
and decides how to define who they are and what they should do, pausing to
tell individual tales of the family members.
The strength of the narrative is the story of the rejected seeking out
people with similar problems or powers to build their own family, catalogue
and define it. Interestingly, as in real-life houses and churches and other
places of congregation, the House becomes a symbol of the family itself
that, when threatened by an outsider who wishes to expose and burn down the
house, the family itself is threatened. One might view this as the story of
the reading public in general, the genre in particular, or whatever group
that feels isolated from the mainstream of society. The individual story
sub-plots/sub-themes ask the mainstream: why not battle unbelief with the
imagination of a child -- the life elixir of the undead? Why not accept
death as another process of life?
Like a Robert Frost poem of perfect rhyme and meter, the light tone in From the Dust Returned can
hide darker dealings for a careless reader. Timothy, the young mortal and
family cataloguer who wants to join the immortal folk one day, suggests:
"we have someone who could make distribution. She can search the country
for souls, look for empty bodies and empty lives and when she finds great
canisters that are not full, and little tiny glasses that are half empty,
she can take these bodies and empty these souls and make room for those of
us who want to travel."
The implications are tremendous. Who and what are empty lives? or half-lives? Are we living a half-life
whose body might be better served for immortal souls to travel in?
Alfred Bester puts Bradbury's accomplishment best in his essay "The Perfect
Composite Science Fiction Author" from Redomolished:
"Mr. Bradbury is for the simple life... [H]e seizes upon a very small
point... and develops it with masterly style into a telling incident.
Incident, not drama, is Mr. Bradbury's forte... [A] very little goes a
long way... One becomes quickly surfeited with the subtle nuance, and
begins to require more robust fare."
This is just to say that Bradbury's cool plum of prose, while delicious,
should be savored one or two chapters per sitting.
Copyright © 2003 Trent Walters
Trent Walters' work has appeared or will appear in
The Distillery,
Fantastical Visions,
Full Unit Hookup,
Futures,
Glyph,
Harpweaver,
Nebo,
The Pittsburgh Quarterly,
Speculon,
Spires,
Vacancy,
The Zone
and blah blah blah. He has interviewed for SFsite.com, Speculon and the
Nebraska Center for Writers. More of his reviews
can be found here. When he's not studying medicine, he can be seen
coaching Notre Dame (formerly with the Minnesota Vikings as an assistant coach),
or writing masterpieces of journalistic advertising, or
making guest appearances in a novel
by E. Lynn Harris. All other rumored Web appearances are lies.
|
