Ray Bradbury died this week.
Before the internet, I was worried about this prospect. He wasn't a fashionable author in the 1980s; TV news had limited time, I didn't read/couldn't afford newspapers and few of my friends were aware of his existence. I became scared. Supposing he died and I never knew about it? The prospect seemed horrifying.
Which is why it's ironic that I heard of his death through Twitter, hours after it happened, ironic because Bradbury was hugely skeptical of the internet's significance; it took him until about two years ago to agree to e-books of his material. I'm glad he did, because I want to take a copy of Dandelion Wine everywhere with me in life and also The Illustrated Man and Something Wicked This Way Comes...
Ghost Transmissions is really about the stories that shape us, nowadays. Bradbury did this for me, but I don't think I can comment better than the swathe of impossibly talented writers who have been talking about him for the past two days; Neil Gaiman talked about how the story Homecoming made him feel as though there were other people like him in the world and that made me happy, because I remember feeling exactly the same way when I first read it.
His stories were fast and emotional and strange; one was never sure what was real and what wasn't. The tattoo that moves at night, the children who get taught to play the game 'invasion' by the funny voice from the shadows, the wonderful green kite which is actually a wonderful father with green wings...yes, he worked with fantasy. But not exclusively; remember the old man calling Mexico City to listen to the sound of a streetcar as he dies, or the garbage man who quits when they put a radio in his cab, the better to organise the collection of bodies?
For me, there are two works that stand out.
The Whole Town Was Sleeping is the title given to a piece that forms part of a longer work, Dandelion Wine, but it operates so well as a stand-alone that it's often published as such. It's a simple, wonderful story, which encapsulates an experience common to almost all of us; the walk home at the end of a night out, as you realise that you have the furthest to go, that you'll have to walk the last ten minutes alone...I won't spoil this one; though it's been copied over and over again, the original remains undiminished. Read it.
How could I end without my favourite? As a child, sleeping with the window open, I was awoken by the sound of the trains under the bridge, late at night. When I stayed back at home for a summer at the age of 19, I heard that sound again and it seemed even more haunting now that I knew I'd be on one of those trains again soon, going away, far away. It seemed like a great and personal revelation and I wanted to write about it, but I never could.
Ray did.
Something Wicked This Way Comes is the story of those trains in the night and much more; on one level, it's about fear and monsters and wishes that, once granted, drive the lucky recipient into a particularly horrific insanity. But it's about adolescence and desire and envy, all those things that I felt when I first read it. And more besides; it's about the envy that age brings, the desire to be forever young, the fear of the dark that waits for us all. But more again! It's a book about winning freedom from both the desire of adolescence and the fears of aging. It's about telling death to go fuck itself and running free down the streets at night, about the moment when you know that the monsters are afraid of you.
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| Quite apart from anything else, this is where my work dress code comes from |
Yeah, I was sad when I heard about Ray. So were about a million other people. But he told us to take sadness, cry like mad about it, then laugh like a maniac for the joy of still living. And not to give a damn about what anyone else thinks.
A minute's noise then, for Mr Ray Bradbury.
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