The Illustrated Man – Ray Bradbury

Another short story compilation, but tweaked slightly to present a set of stories told by a drifter that all relate to his unfortunate condition. Aside from the massive Everyman’s Library omnibus of short stories, this is the third novel-length and novel-published book of Bradbury’s I have read that is actually more of a collection of short stories: The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine being the other two.

The other two are also much stronger. This one has some great stuff, I enjoyed quite a few of the stories, but for the most part the book seemed to drag on and on without actually providing much suspense or any reason to keep reading more. So it took me a long time to finish. Some of the stories had suspense – like the one about the astronauts in the explosion who are all drifting through space alone until they crash into something or are taking out by something (speaking of which, isn’t that the plot for the new George Clooney/Sandra Bullock movie?) – but they were all over so quickly.  

Nothing felt really gripping, or profound. Just a bunch of stories that all featured a rocket in some way or another. The one about the Rocketman who does not want his son to grow up to be one like him was probably the closest thing to the profound story that I have come to associate with Bradbury. Either that or the final story about the Illustrated Man himself. They were both kind of fucked up. But for the most part, everything felt kind of meh. Sort of feel indifferently about this one, but I am glad I am at least tearing through the Bradbury section of my library.

Also of note, just after I finished this book, the Simpsons released their latest Halloween special “Treehouse of Horrors” episode, which featured an opening sequence directed by legendary horror/thriller filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. Why is this of significance? See if you can spot why:

Ocean at the End of the Lane

So Neil Gaiman went and wrote another story for children! Then another one, about a child, that I sort of had the impression might be a children’s book in the same light as His Dark Materials are children’s books.

It is about a man who is attending a funeral and makes a stop at the house on the end of the lane where he grew up, remembering his friend Lettie who had an ocean in her small pond. He then flashes back, and the story takes away to the time when he was seven, remembered by referencing his seventh birthday party – a party in which nobody showed up and he took his books and his Batman figurine upstairs to his room. He then learned that he was to be moved from his room to make way for a new tenant, as money was tight, and a South African opal miner shows up, runs over his cat, gives him a stray to make up for it, then steals his father’s Mini and kills himself in it. This event brings about a creature from another dimension, and she throws money at people and tries to hurt them whilst giving them things they desire. Lettie and the young man venture into the other realm to make sure the creature no longer throws money at people, and it uses the young boy as a door to cross into our realm. The monster shows up as an attractive young nanny to take care of the boy and his older sister, very much in a creepy Merry Poppins sort of way, if Merry Poppins were a babe, and named Ursula Monkton. Ursula puts everyone else into some sort of trance, becomes vindictive and nasty towards the boy, then gets his non-violent father to try and kill him by drowning him in the tub, then has sex in the study with the boy’s father as he escapes, then gets eaten by ravenous shadow-figures that are sort of like birds.

Pretty cool children’s book, if you ask me. I would let my kids read it. But not before they finished His Dark Materials.

I liked it, not just for all the reasons I mentioned, but because the story telling was so good. Gaiman really never ceases to surprise me with his quickness in taking a story from one direction and turning it on its head. This one had a lot of elements from others, namely Neverwhere, Graveyard Book, and Stardust, for me. Neverwhere, in the sense that a person visible and knowable in our world can become a door to the other world, which is not just a cliché fantasy but some sort of fucked up imagination I probably would not voluntarily visit that exists in Gaiman’s mind. And Graveyard Book because of the way the Hemstock family are all liminal figures who understand and can determine who and what goes in and out of each realm and orchestrate maneuvers that keep everything in their proper place within the two. But, because they are liminal figures (which many of my favourite characters throughout literature often are), they share nothing about how they are able to do these things.

Also similar to Stardust is that misdirection, where Gaiman builds an air of children’s fantasy story-telling, letting you think that you may be reading a bit of a kids’ book, then presents fucking. And not “proper British sex,” either, but babes fucking dudes. It always gets me!

 Another, this time unfortunate, thing I realized when I read this book, is that Gaiman drew many of the background events to set up the plot from his own life. Which tend to be pretty fucked up. I say this is unfortunate, because the story-telling is so good that I finally came to the realization that all great authors pour into their works some elements of their own background, and the darker their past, the better the book. So events such as him climbing his drain pipe growing up, having a tenant who killed his kitten, stole his dad’s Mini and killed himself in it, being the only one present at his seventh birthday party, and still being excited to go read books and play with Batman toys, these things all make for a dark past and a great story. I was pretty regular, and pretty damned spoiled as well. I am therefore incapable of entertaining you all with something so inspiring.

Dandelion Wine – Ray Bradbury

First off, I’d just like to say that if you are reading this blog and you are not a Ray Bradbury fan, then kindly fuck right off and close this browsing window right this instant. He is one of the few authors I can apply the term “electrifying” to.  He dazzles. He makes me wonder at how great writing can be. And he makes me feel ashamed that I do not appreciate him enough. I own many books of his, several I have thoroughly enjoyed, some I am yet to read, and his short stories sit in a rather large volume on my shelf, unmolested, much to my dismay but entirely my own fault.

Many authors bring many different styles, and I have reviewed a large portion of my favourite authors on this blog: Neil Gaiman can write circles around the reader with a very “that’s exactly how I feel!” sense that comes to mind when he is read; Frank Herbert has a quality of delivering incredibly well thought out, unique plot-twisted and intense epics; Stephen King can wrap popular culture around a jagged, rusty blade of a storyline and stab it violently towards your eyes; Orson Scott Card will generally find the qualities of life you enjoy and use them as leverage to tear down a main character until he is the exact opposite of everything he is allegedly standing for; but Ray Bradbury remains un-trivialised on my blog. Let us change that, shall we?

He is, to me, what happens when incredible writing meets the everyday observation and is sprinkled in with a very modest, un-voluminous yet extremely powerful darkside. He does not dance around in his own cleverness the way Neil Gaiman does, yet they are very similar to me. He also does not bathe the heroes/heroines in despair quite the way Herbert or Orson Scott Card would, but I can see the relations and inspirations between them all.

Dandelion Wine represents to me a complete novel that fulfills all that I felt The Martian Chronicles lacked. Understand they are completely different books with nearly nothing in common. But both are novels compiled of essentially independent short stories tied to a central location/setting. I loved The Martian Chronicles, loved how it painted humans and our relationship with a new culture that is more of a state of consciousness than a simple second sentient race. But it lacked ringers. Stories that made you put the book down and take a few paces around the room, taking time out to appreciate the experience.

Dandelion Wine does not lack these moments. I do not feel I need to get specific, both for the sake of not spoiling anything for readers of the blog who have not yet read the book as well as for those of you who may have felt the way I did only with different chapters, but this book had individual stories of supreme brilliance.

Whether it was a simple description of the atmosphere one feels when in the prime of summer; the dread of seeing summer’s end; the thrill of scaring one’s self; the fear/acceptance of death and celebration/acknowledgement of life; everything seemed to be so clever and extremely relatable in the analogies and descriptions. In the end, I felt I lived through that Midwestern US summer of 1928 with Douglas and Tom in Illinois.

Whereas authors like Gaiman can be polarizing with their cuteness and subsequent filth in times of comic relief setting the stage for a quick, dark surprise, I felt like Bradbury simplified things in this book. Which serves well as much of the story revolves around two young boys, one a teenager and his brother a ten-year-old. Together they fantasize about the endless possibilities of new shoes. They philosophise and write down everything they learn and categorise human behavior as something “traditional” or “new”, something I found highly advanced for kids but was jealous of their cleverness; not because I could never think of that but because, in my experience, brothers tend to have a mutual let’s see what the riskiest thing we can do/dumbest lie we can tell/most dangerous behavior  complex. Not always, but two young males usually push each other in much the same way as Douglas and Tom, only in a direction that is less productive. So that was cool.

Pavane

Geez a month since I last blogged here, what the fuck has been up? Oh yeah, illness, work, travel and holidays. Sorry folks. Enjoy my review of this one though, I loved this book.

Keith Roberts wrote Pavane in 1968 as an alternate history if Queen Elizabeth was assassinated before England’s big battle with Spain and the Spanish Armada won; hence the Catholic Church ruled, Protestantism never began; hence technological developments and indeed all progression of human development was done only with the oversight of the Church. Need I say more?

It is a collection of short stories, or a novel told in small parts, all of which intertwine of course and have a few common denominators: the power of the Church, stunted technological growth (i.e. no electricity), the mechanical wooden semaphore towers and their Guild, feudal system, and the family of Eli Strange and his hauliers business of steam engine hauling cars.

I had no idea what a steam engine car looked like either. Makes sense though.

The Catholic Church being the sole source of knowledge, progress and science in a much less than preferred society was very reminiscent of one of my all-time favourite books: A Canticle for Leibowitz. It’s Dark Ages, monks abound and people fight and torment themselves in a helpless, hopeless, heart-wrenching quest for progress. Sad, but the empathy seems to come easy for characters fighting these fights.

The rebellion is also a thrilling factor. Or should I say, the Rebellion, as you seemingly cannot find anything about this book without someone quoting the first page’s brilliance:

"Over all, the long arm of the Popes reached out to punish and reward; the Church Militant remained supreme. But by the middle of the twentieth century widespread mutterings were making themselves heard. Rebellion was once more in the air . . ."

Brother John, who when I read this immediately thought of my new musical hero Father John Misty, is a monk tasked with witnessing and transcribing the acts of punishment to witches conducted by the contemporary equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition, referred to in this book simply as the Inquisition.  The torture scenes, for that is what they really are, become almost too much to bare, and are more violent and obscene than just about anything I have read lately, including 200 pages of Cormac McCarthy’s masturbation material, but is over and done with fairly quickly (maybe 3 pages) and helps shape Brother John into one of the most powerful, demented (yet not quite powerfully demented) heretics I have ever come to know in the world of books.

There is really nothing more fascinating to me than human beings behaving like non-human beings. It’s really a something I could study the rest of my life. Holy wars, for example. Totally awful behavior. But torturing people who speak out against your beliefs, or either just do not believe, quite innocently, or simply do not believe hard enough. That takes it to a whole new level. Incredibly awful stuff, and Roberts conveys it in a very meaningful way. Violent, yes, but not so much that you lose your lunch and have another 100 pages of baby impalement to get through after ten hours of stomach churning gore. Do I sound like I’m still bitter about Blood Meridian? Good.

The book also incorporates a feudal war. As a bit of a nerd for Medieval Epics and some of the stories of Middle English/Middle Germanic Kings and Queens – some of whom I still tell friends of whenever drunkenly possible – I really enjoyed the second to last story titled “Lords and Ladies.” It was the best for me, as the aristocratic governess, once again tying into the Strange family as she is the grand-niece of the main character of the first story, defies the orders of the Holy Roman Emperor and a war ensues with the Catholic Church as she tries to defend her people. The woman holding down the castle as the greatest army assembled on Earth has her entire land under siege was very much like one of my all-time favourite Germanic Medieval epics, Willehalm, and had perhaps an even more charming ending.

Really wish I had more to say without spoiling anything, but definitely pick up a copy of this book, or ebook it or audio it some way. Just....give it a go, it is great.

Kalpa Imperial

This collection of short stories chronicles the Greatest Empire that (n)ever was, a sort of fictional history about a fictional empire that remains true to South American style fantasy worlds. Rather than load it with monsters and dragons and legendary heroics, it shares relatable common heroes/heroines in their all-too believable world that mirrors ours, or at least a universe we recognise as something that actually exists. South American fantasy worlds like those created by Gabriel Garcia Marquez are never so unbelievable that you feel it is difficult to get into the story.

Argentine author Angelica Gorodischer is no different. Though some of the history is a thinly veiled sarcastic commentary on greedy, despotic rulers and the problems with monarchs who hand down the reign to the next generation of poorly raised high-born tyrants, many of the stories involve on the philosophies of the outsiders: story-tellers, noblemen, rebels and workmen and peasants and their impact on the various Emperors.

The second to last story I found very interesting, it involved an individual who escaped the Empire and its reach to head south, the South, if you will, where savages live in small villages and have none of the benefits/drawbacks that the folk living within the Empire receive. His quest is one of escape and survival at first, but takes an inadvertent turn and becomes a quest for knowledge. There are some prophecies and other nonsense, and eventually the Empire comes for him and all hell breaks loose in a few pages; but what I noticed about this short story is how closely it mimics the plot of Robert Silverberg’s Nebula Award winning novel A Time of Changes (1971).

I don’t wish to make this review too A Time of Changes­-y but I will say that it is a fantastic novel. A lot of egoism and hence, individuality, has been banned from the states that make up the empire in the civilized North. A drug that opens minds (this novel came out the same year as my favourite movie, Vanishing Point, also about individual freedom and rampant drug use, and I don’t believe that is by mere coincidence) and teaches people the of love, comes from the uncivilized Southern continent (no silly, it is not a sci-fi Colombia, or Kolombya or anything like that) and after using it regularly and realizing he just does not fit into his society, the protagonist loads up on drugs and begins expanding people’s minds. He makes almost a diplomatic mission of it, not so much to change the culture but to share love with the people he cares about. After getting into some majour shit for this, he fleas for the south to live with the natives down there, score some hallucinogens and live in the desert until, alas, the Empire comes for him.

They sound similar, do they not? Well something about that sort of world, that sort of treachery and intrigue sets up an enjoyable atmosphere for me in both stories. And the writing styles by the authors are sufficiently different, with different worlds and different characters with varying purposes that each story is unique, despite my trying to make them sound like the same thing. I am also glad I read A Time of Changes first because I would hate to have started that book and then, 60 pages in, gone “ah wait, I know how this one ends.”

Some of the stories in Kalpa Imperial are actually weak; they just cannot all be winners. But the good ones are very good and the universe in which it takes place is at least consistent and consistently interesting, and very well thought out. I would recommend this book to any casual sci-fi/fantasy fan, but since there is no hardcore magic or monsters I would be hesitant to get LOTR nerds or sci-fi space alien loving nerds into it. Great read though.