Ray Bradbury - The Halloween Tree

Alas! I am now 99% sure I will never have access to a time travel machine, because if I ever do, I fully intend to scoop up a large handful of Ray Bradbury's books and drop them in the path of my ten-year-old self with a note attached: READ THESE. And as my first encounter with Bradbury took place less than six month ago, at the ripe old age of 24, I can only assume that no such time-traveling opportunity will be presented to me in the future.

This didn't look like much when I pulled it off the library shelf (which I did largely because it looked short) -- a novel about a group of boys in a small American town on Halloween. Being Australian, the whole idea of Halloween has mainly entered my consciousness via the consumption of American media. A couple of optimistic kids might show up at the door every year, and we will have to cast around perplexedly for something to give them. During high school it was a good excuse for costume parties.

The first thing that struck me is that these are very boyish kinds of boys, so distinct that I think I could probably pick a Bradbury child from, for example, a Wynne Jones child, should they ever appear in the same story. The way the story is told, hyperbolistic and rapid and rough and overwhelmingly wondrous, is the perfect style for a children's story that refuses to talk down to you.

Over the course of Halloween Night, the group of boys is swept through the midnight histories of the human race: the realities and the myths behind each of their costumes -- skeleton and witch and caveman and mummy, all those classical figures that run through Bradbury's works -- and through it all they are chasing the missing member of their band, who appears to need saving from some unknown fate. It's just enough of a driving plot on which to hang ragged handfuls of fantasy and mythology and horror, and it works. Each of the scenes is evocative, and scary, and manages to sneakily educate you as well. Plus, it's overwhelmingly about how people conceptualise and cope with death, which is right up my alley.

My absolute favourite aspect of it, though, is the sound of the words. I was only a few pages in when I started doing something with this book that I've never done with any other: I read most of it aloud, or at least imagined myself speaking each word inside my head. I couldn't help it. I want to read it to children, with pauses in the spooky bits, and proper sound effects. I want to show them how words can roll together and echo, how rhythm sings when it's done right.

Here's a bit that's death-mythos and language all at once:

"...When you and your friends die every day, there's no time to think of Death, is there? Only time to run. But when you stop running at long last -"

He touched the walls. The apemen froze in mid-flight.

"- now you have time to think of where you came from, where you're going. And fire lights the way, boys. Fire and lightning. Morning stars to gaze at. Fire in your own cave to protect you. Only by night fires was the caveman, beast-man, able at last to turn his thoughts on a spit and baste them with wonder. The sun died in the sky. Winter came on like a great white beast shaking its fur, burying him. Would spring ever come back to the world? Would the sun be reborn next year or stay murdered? Egyptians asked it. Cavemen asked it a million years before. Will the sun rise tomorrow morning?"

I'm on to a book of Bradbury's short stories, now, but I haven't yet met anything that impressed me as much as this small book.

Mary Renault - The Friendly Young Ladies

For a long time I thought Mary Renault only wrote historical epics about Alexander the Great and the like, but last year I read her book The Charioteer which is set during WWII (I don't think my obsession with war literature has had a chance to air itself on this blog yet, has it?), and it was a pleasant surprise. When looking up her other more modern works, I was struck immediately by the catalogue tags assigned to this one on the local libary system: Triangles (Interpersonal relations), Bohemianism, Young women, Physicians, Houseboats, Lesbians, Sisters, Bloomsbury (London, England), Psychological fiction, Love stories.

How was I supposed to pass that up? I would have read it on the basis of any one of those, let alone the stunning mishmash of appealing images conjured up by the full list.

The book begins by following Elsie, a sheltered eighteen-year-old whose mind is the product of too many of the wrong sorts of books, and who runs away from her emotionally unbearable home situation in search of her older sister, Leo, who ran away in a similar fashion many years earlier.

Although the story purports to set Elsie up as the protagonist, at first, one of the best things about it is that in face Renault is telling the story of five people: Elsie, Leo, Leo's lover Helen, thier neighbour Joe, and Peter, the young doctor who becomes fascinated by all three women. She jumps around between their points of view to reveal the differences between people as they see themselves and as they are seen by others. When thinking about the relationships and the narration and how they interact, I couldn't go past the concept of the Johari window; if you've never heard of it and can't be arsed with Wikipedia, it's sort of a division of an individual's personality traits into those recognised in themselves and those recognised by others. Renault has a deft way of combining close third person and a more impersonal narrative voice to highlight human nature. One of my favourite quotes concerns the misunderstandings that underpin all human interaction by necessity, because we are not telepaths:

Thought's secrecy must be one of the most wonderful of the works of God. Everything else is explorable, or violable, or reacts to chemistry, or can be laid open with a knife. But thought can only be given. That's the ultimate dignity of man.

(I have perhaps been thinking too much about X-Men and Charles Xavier lately; any kind of commentary about the privacy of thought grabs me.)

Two of the characters are writers; different types of writers, working on different types of books, which means there's a lot of scope for insight (and snark) about the writing process, and creativity, and the publishing industry. Those were some of my favourite parts; I also (predictably) loved the parts set in 1930s London, especially a London seen through sets of eyes that are by turns entranced and bored and interested.

If you're looking for plot, well -- there's really not much of a plot at all beyond the progression and deterioration of interpersonal relationships, and a few progressions of individual character, but I can't say I cared while reading it. It's one of the most character-driven things I've ever read, and isn't pretending to be anything else, and the way it sketches and analyses character makes it all-in-all very enjoyable.