. Spinning .

I’ve been planning a post on a phantasmagorical story by Borges, but this, this must come first…

An action-packed scary dark night battle between boy and witch; boy on a rooftop, witch in a balloon-hanging basket.  Exciting as all get-out.  Barely reading for even enjoyment; racing through words to the fast beat of my pulse.  The boy wins, the witch rides the broken balloon away on the wind.  And then this:

Chapter 31

Nothing much else happened, all the rest of that night. 

Chapter 32

Now that is something I have never come across before. That is just freakin’ brilliant! 

Ever on the alert for the mellifluous metaphor, the sizzling simile that strikes to the heart, runs upstairs to the brain, finds a corner and settles in forever, I find Bradbury to be generous of creative use in smoothing the story with delightful images based on these elements of writing.

That said, there’s a couple of what to me sound like clunkers:

(…)Will slung off limp-falling clothes with tipsy arms and delightfully aching legs, and like a fall of timber chopped himself to bed… (p. 140)

So you know, you feel, you are sure, lying abed, that a balloon is submerging the ocean sky.  (p. 142)

"chopped himself to bed?" 

"a balloon is submerging the ocean sky?"

The first just doesn’t make much sense, at least without a real stretch of imagination which is counterproductive to the purpose of metaphor.  On the second, I think what Bradbury means is that the balloon, drawing closer, getting bigger, blocks out the sky.  To call that submerging is again, asking a bit more of what was sounding pretty neat up to that point. It also would seem that Bradbury is telling us the balloon is taking in or covering (submerging) the "ocean sky," so there’s a conflict of meaning right there with the use of the word "ocean."

It’s little things like that that can halt you in your tracks.  In the meantime, I got to use lots of alliteration in the opening paragraph of this post.

It’s easy to see why Bradbury is held by so many in such high esteem as a writer.  The particular brand of horror he brings to story would have an appeal to a diverse group.  I believe that horror is one of the best loved and widest read of the genres and as Bradbury sticks it with his magical realism style into a well-wrought story of realistic normalcy–much as does Stephen King–it stings smarter for its surprise.

His characters are fully formed, each main character having a life and accompanying conflicts enough to bring interest and caring from the reader.  Will and Jim are fourteen, an age full of its own natural questions and changes but with the dimension of their friendship adding so much more to the development of their stories.  They are very different: Jim, an adventurous and mysterious sort; Will, a follower yet desirous of the temptations Jim holds out to him.  Will’s conflict within himself is between safety and danger.  The boys are extremely close friends, complementing each other’s traits and yet this one excursion into seeking out the mysteries of the carnival appears to threaten that bond.

Will’s father, Charles Halloway, is a walking conflict.  He is old, wanting to be young.  He is envious of the boys’ freedom yet takes his own freedom by hiding within the library, getting his excitement out of books because he cannot run with the boys.

The characters of Cooger and Dark, the carnival runners are each a contrast in good and evil.  Cooger, a menacing forty year-old, then a sweet young boy masking maliciousness of mind, and finally–or so at this point of the story–an ugly and venomous over-a-hundred-year-old, brought-back-to-life man.  Dark, the illustrated man.  So swift-talking and generous, yet we know he is the mastermind of some evil doings of the carnival he oversees.

The imagery may at times be overdone, yet I think it is well appreciated by lovers of words.  All elements of style are used to perfection in writing; sentence structure dramatizes, fragments emphasize, arcs are in the form of what I’d call la petit mort–the little death–and cause the reader to build up to a near faintness before the swoon of release comes with the safe turn of events for our heroes.  Mini-arcs within the capsule of the more slowly building story, put together like puzzle pieces of lightning rods and carousels and men who turn into strange little boys.

What could be more normal than two boyhood friends in the heart of America?  What could be more abnormal than what they see?

I’m not as familiar yet with Bradbury (though I recall now that I did read, several years ago, The Illustrated Man and many short stories) so I don’t know his use of metaphor or symbolism in story, but it’s pretty obvious that the block of ice meant to hold the world’s most beautiful woman means more than just that.  Both the lightning rod salesman and Will’s father are fascinated by it, as it sat in the empty store window.

And then, the night the carnival comes, Will’s father, walking home from the library, stops in front of it: 

Inside stood two abandoned sawhorses.  Between lay a pool of water.  In the water floated a few shards of ice.  In the ice were a few long strands of hair.

Charles Halloway saw but chose not to see.  He turned and was gone.  The street was soon as empty as the hardware-store window.  (p. 54)

Bradbury has taken us here many times, building up to the implausible effect of a woman being encased in the ice.  Now that possibility doesn’t exist for Halloway to see; but was she there?  Did he miss it? 

And what else, what was he hoping for, and what did he miss?

Bradbury, fifty pages into this novel, is still setting up the scene for something quite dreadful to occur.  We know that it will be tied in with a strange carnival coming to town.  We know that Will, his father, and Jim have been stirred up by the possibility.  Will is excited yet anxious and a bit worried.  Jim is near burning with anticipation.  Will’s father seems to focus on it as if it will be a life-changing event for him personally.  He has been watching this block of ice that lay on two sawhorses in the window of an empty storefront, knowing that it supposedly will eventually hold the most beautiful woman in the world. 

The night the carnival comes by train into town, it is in the hours just after midnight.  The boys, Jim and Will have snuck out of their homes to follow the train down to the meadow and watch the setting up.  Will’s father has left his bed too, to go to the library where he works, and thinks.  He works there as a janitor; we’re just getting a glimpse of how he thinks.

If a man stood here would he see himself unfolded away a billion times to eternity?  Would a billion images look back, each face and the face after and the face after that old, older, oldest?

(…) I’ll go there, thought Charles Halloway.  I won’t go there.  I like it, he thought.  I don’t like it. (p. 55)

Bradbury is adept at creating both character and environment with his imagery. Some readers may in fact think there is too much prose and description, yet as a writer I enjoy the working with words, seeing the power of language choice built tension slowly.  Bradbury believes, I think, that the worst horror is one that gnaws like mice at your ankles rather than the tiger coming at you full speed.   

Really am enjoying Bradbury’s writing style along with the story; he is truly proficient and a bit innovative on writing, such as this fine way of ending one chapter and opening another:

The storm was coming.  The storm wasn’t coming.  No matter which, he was glad Jim had that grand contraption up there.  "
Night!"  "
Night." 
Their separate doors slammed.

Chapter 8

Will opened the door and shut it again.  Quietly this time.  "That’s better," said his mother’s voice.  (p. 33)

So skillfully done just by rearranging the way it would normally be set up, i.e., giving the mother’s admonishment to "close the door quietly." 

But then sometimes an author messes up.  I was rightfully admiring this little bit at the time I read it:

Way down the third book corridor, an oldish man whispered his broom along in the dark, mounding the fallen spices.  (p. 14)

That’s a Wow.  "whispered his broom," mimicking the soft swish of the bristles.  The "fallen spices" that refer to Will’s thoughts of all the worlds and things in it that a library full of books offers.  Then, this:

Happy?  But how and why?  Here, a few feet off, was the janitor, the library man, the stranger, his uniform gone but his face still the face of a man happier at night alone in the deep marble vaults, whispering his broom in the drafty corridors.  (p. 35)

Too soon; too soon.  The whispering broom is strong and lovely enough to make its mark on the careful reader’s mind.  Within the same book would be bad enough, but here, within twenty pages?  It ruined the image for me, though it might have been meant to reinforce, or maybe it was just an oversight.

To be fair to Bradbury, whom I deeply respect as a writer, I’ve caught this sort of repetition in Cormac McCarthy’s novels as well.  I don’t recall exactly now what it was, but the terminology he used was so similar in two different books–that I’d read at least a year apart–that it died instantly for me the second time around. 

Beautiful wording stays in the mind of the reader; perhaps it stays in the mind of the writer as well and he simply forgets that he has already placed it on the pages to share.