Bradbury has yet another lesson to share about growing up and growing old.
It's Oct. 1, and the boys of summer are fighting one final battle. Brothers Doug and Tom Spaulding are squeezing the last bit of their freedom out of every day, but school is upon them.
Apart from time and the change of season, their primary enemy is Calvin Quartermain, gray-haired member of the school board. And then, with one burst of gunfire from a cap pistol, Doug finds himself the leader of a revolution. For the boys and their sidekicks, it's a revolution against growing up. For the opposition, it's a war against growing old. Skirmishes begin, with both sides suffering casualties in one form or another. Doug and curmudgeonly Quartermain are decades apart in age, but they have a common heritage. The small-town setting is really just window-dressing for the two main characters. The Civil War looms large in this story, framing each section, with Doug carrying the bulk of the narrative. Like Peter Pan, he is the boy who doesn't want to grow old. He's haunted by strange dreams, feelings he does not understand. In his mind, all he can do is lash out at the world. For Quartermain, the battle of wits is a challenge to his manhood. He has the most to lose. In an afterword, Bradbury reveals that this novel was originally part of Dandelion Wine (1957). There's a young boy inside every old man, and Bradbury is no exception.
A thin work, heavily reliant on dialogue, but one that serves as an intriguing coda to one of Bradbury's classics.
19 August 2006, 09:29 AM
philnic
Walloon,
well spotted! Interesting that the Kirkus reviewer finds it heavy on dialogue: this is something I have found of Bradbury's more recent writings, but I assumed that since Farewell Summer was largely written at the same time as Dandelion Wine, it would not be so dialogue based.
I've noticed that too about Bradbury's books: the novels from the last couple of decades are padded with a lot of dialogue. I found myself browsing through Death Is a Lonely Business looking for descriptive passages for some contrast. The ratio was reversed in his stories from the 1940s through the 1960s.
Notice the similar adjectives in the two book reviews: while both critics welcome the book, they find it "thin" and "slight".
Assume that Farewell Summer has gone through numerous revisions and additions over the decades. The Green Town material in Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked, and Farewell Summer has been spun off and expanded from a more nebulous master concept made in the 1950s. The genealogy is complicated; Jonathan R. Eller and William F. Touponce do a good job explaining it in their 2004 book Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction.This message has been edited. Last edited by: Walloon,
19 August 2006, 04:12 PM
fjp451
And this within the link Walloon initially posted: Has this been sited or commented on previously here?!
"The Homecoming" is part of From the Dust Returned, and is also available in The October Country and The Stories of Ray Bradbury.
So the novelty is that this short story is being published as a stand-alone book, with illustrations.
19 August 2006, 08:07 PM
Doug Spaulding
quote:
So the novelty is that this short story is being published as a stand-alone book, with illustrations.
It's a beautiful little tome - he had a copy at the house last Monday when we were there, and I glanced through it. It will be released on his birthday.