Dandelion Wine ~ Ray Bradbury

Inspired by reading The Halloween Tree recently, my wife and I chose this book by Bradbury to read aloud. My wife remembers reading it in her teens, but it was new to me.

There’s no question in my mind that Bradbury was one of the world’s greatest short story writers. Apart from perhaps his novel Farenheit 451, all of his books are either explicitly collections of short stories, or a string of short stories bound together by some overriding theme or linking narrative. The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man – collections of wonderful short stories joined together into longer narratives.

Dandelion Wine is just like that: a set of stories set in Greentown, Illinois, in the year 1928 (just one year after the annus mirabilis explored by Bill Bryson in his book One Summer). They are linked by the characters of 12-year-old Douglas Spaulding and his younger brother Tom. It’s a book about growing up, full of both sweet nostalgia and childhood fears, clearly at least semi-autobiographical. There’s both humour and terror, and a way of life now long past when children could explore the world unencumbered by regulations or too much parental concern.

And the writing is gorgeous, beautifully crafted, again a delight to read aloud. Just listen to Colonel Freeleigh, an old man who the boys call ‘The Time Machine’ for his marvellous ability to take them into the past as he reminisces about his life:

‘Eighteen seventy-five … yes, me and Pawnee Bill on a little rise in the middle of the prairie, waiting. “Shh!” says Pawnee Bill. “Listen.” The prairie like a big stage all set for the storm to come. Thunder. Soft. Thunder again. Not so soft. And across that prairie as far as the eye could see this big ominous yellow-dark cloud full of black lightning, somehow sunk to earth, fifty miles wide, fifty miles long, a mile high, and no more than an inch off the ground. “Lord!” I cried, “Lord!” – from up on my hill – “Lord!” the earth pounded like a mad heart, boys, a heart gone to panic. My bones shook fit to break. The earth shook: rat-a-tat rat-a-tat, boom! Rumble. That’s a rare word: rumble. Oh, how that mighty storm rumbled along down, up, and over the rises, and all you could see was the cloud and nothing inside. “That’s them!” cried Pawnee Bill. And the cloud was dust! Not vapors or rain, no, but prairie dust flung up from the tinder-dry grass like fine corn meal, like pollen all blazed with sunlight now, for the sun had come out. I shouted again! Why? Because in all that hell-fire filtering dust now a veil moved aside and I saw them, I swear it! The grand army of the ancient prairie: the bison, the buffalo!’

Isn’t that glorious? I could quote pages like that. What a writer!