The Illustrated Man

With the news of the passing of Ray Bradbury this week at the age of 91 yesterday, I had to pull my copy of “The Illustrated Man” off the book shelf and have a read. Ray Bradbury is mostly known as a science fiction writer, famous as everyone would remind you for “Fahrenheit 451” and the “Martian Chronicles”.  Even Bugs Bunny (”) refers to his novel “Something Wicked this Way Comes” in the classic “Bugs Bunny in King Arthur’s Court! Buts its a shame, if this writer is consigned to the SciFi shelves of the local library, (In between Western and Popular Romance) because there’s a lot more lyricism and beauty in Bradbury’s prose than first meets the eye.

I will always remember him as the author who opened my mind up, as an impressionable teenager to a sense of wonder in the things of the everyday world, and also to finding the potential for horror and mystery in the most ordinary of subjects. The dark spaces between the lamplights on the way home from school, through Bradbury’s imagination, became peopled with ghouls and monsters. His “Dandelion Wine” in particular evokes a world, on the surface normal, even humdrum, and at the same time, full of mystery and wonder. Probably why, quite often, his short stories are set in a funfair or a circus, where the weird, the ghoulish and the over-the-top theatrical are plonked right down in the middle of a mundane suburban neighbourhood. Hope people will still be reading your books a generation from now, Ray.