Farewell Summer

I read this book in one sitting, just over a month ago, and I'm still finding it hard to put it in words just how powerful it was for me. I had just read Dandelion Wine and moved straight on into Farewell Summer. The cumulative effect was nothing less than awe-inspireing, and I really think it's how you should go about reading the two works, almost as one. Dandelion Wine is without a doubt a masterpiece, and is told as a novel made up of short stories. Farewell Summer is a more concise story, and more of a straight forward novel. While they both deal with the topics of youth and mortality, they each come from a slightly different perspective. Dandelion Wine was written fifty years ago in Bradbury's youth, while Farewell Summer comes to us in his later years. In the end they act as bookends on a topic that is dear, and dreadful to all of us, and perfectly told in Bradbury's magical, poetic style. Read them, back to back, at the end of August, as summer slowly begins to fade. Think about your childhood, and ponder your old age. If you aren't moved, then check your pulse. If it's still there, pay very close attention to it. It's what it's all about.

Now in his mid 80s, at the close of a long, and most productive, career in American letters, Ray Bradbury has finally offered a tantalizing, moving sequel to his great novel on youth, "Dandelion Wine", which is once more a return visit to the fictitious town of Green Town, Illinois (Actually Bradbury's boyhood home of Waukegan, Illinois), meeting up once more with Douglas Spaulding, his brother Tom, and their friends, two years after the events chronicled in Bradbury's earlier literary triumph. Much to my surprise, Bradbury doesn't disappoint, offering a most fitting sequel to "Dandelion Wine", with the same graceful, lyrical prose that defined that earlier novel - and I might add, so much of his great work from the 1950s - but with a somewhat more somber, darker atmosphere, as the boys finally confront both the passage of time and their own impending adulthood. Moreover, Bradbury still demonstrates that he is still both a most persuasive spinner of tales and an elegant observer of the human condition, capturing well the nuanced, elaborate personal relationships between the young and old, and between boys and girls. Spaulding is now the leader of a "Grand Army of the Republic", in which he and his friends undertake several dastardly mischevious raids against the town's senior citizens, most notably the dictator of the local school board, Calvin C. Quatermain. Time and again, young Doug Spaulding leads his friends in brilliantly conceived raids in the vain hope of trying to stop the passage of time, thinking that they could live forever as twelve year old boys. And then suddenly, unexpectedly, Doug has a moment of epiphany which leads to an unexpected truce, and then, a brief friendship with Quatermain, an 81 year-old bachelor, who sees in young Doug, a brief reflection of his own youthful self many, many years ago. And Doug is also unexpectedly soon caught up in the mystique and magic of girls, getting his own first kiss from one in a rather unique, most surprising, manner. Does "Farewell Summer" rank alongside Bradbury's best works of fiction, like, for example, "Something Wicked This Way Comes", "The Illustrated Man", or "The Martian Chronicles"? I suppose a thoughtful, extremely erudite, critic of Bradbury's work might be inclined to say "No", but I would hope that such a critic would agree that Bradbury hasn't lost his superb skills in both storytelling and in writing elegant, lyrical prose. Regardless, Bradbury's latest, short novel, remains a most fitting sequel to "Dandelion Wine", and perhaps, a most fitting conclusion to a splendid literary career which has crossed genres from pulp science fiction to mainstream literature, earning Bradbury ample recognition and praise as one of our finest contemporary writers of fiction.

What a great time to release a gentle gem like this --- a nostalgic tale set in October that shares its longing with the real-time October going on all around us. I can honestly say that my emotive brain "composed" its thoughts on FAREWELL SUMMER in the midst of summer's waning breath, as we worked this week to clean up the nearly leafless orchard for another season. As I raked and carried mound after mound of leaves and twigs, I felt myself wholly embraced by the scene of bright, low-angled sunshine, cool northwest breezes, and a long slate line of snow-bearing clouds looming just beyond the old abandoned rail line to Princeton, Ontario. In this charming sequel to his equally memorable DANDELION WINE of half a century ago, Bradbury has returned to the lives of his teenage boy characters, still on the verge of puberty in small-town America. His fictitious Green Town, Illinois could be Berea, Ohio, or Gimli, Manitoba, or my familiar Princeton, Ontario --- any one of thousands of places that were once (or still are) imbued with a culture that understands change yet tenaciously protects old-fashioned values like character and loyalty. And no matter who you are or how long your family has lived in one place, those small town values don't simply come along with rural genes; they have to be experienced, absorbed and learned by each new generation. That's the delicate and essential space Bradbury has so charmingly re-visited in FAREWELL SUMMER, as Doug and his little "gang" wage a mini-war of wits against several local elders who wield power on the school board and at city hall. A series of boyish pranks culminates in the most daring escapade of all --- an elaborately planned night-time assault on the town hall clock. Stop time, and you stop the inevitable decline of life that looms with approaching adulthood --- or so Doug and his pals have figured it! But of course, the curmudgeonly old folks still remember the lovely wild dreams of their own youth, and a combination of coincidences and consequences catch up with the boys and show them another side of their onetime "enemies." This is how Bradbury has caught the essence of that complex yet evocative transition between childhood and a new level of awareness that comes with responsibility and self-worth. One day Doug and his cohorts, much older and wiser, would tough it out with a new generation and in turn take on the role of wise and eccentric elders who figure so prophetically in the young boys' lives. Bradbury easily could have exploited the archetypal generation-gap conflict that is a mainstay of so much literature and created a story with predictable proportions of humor, nostalgia, tension, conflict, winners and losers. But as his numerous fans in so many genres already know, that's just so much superficial "stuff" on his palette. The same Ray Bradbury who strides across undiscovered universes to find the footprints of God is just as adept with the comparative microcosm of a little town bask

A measure of how much I was drawn into this book is the fact that I picked it up at 2:00 in the afternoon- and by 9:00 that same evening I had finished it. I hope that Mr. Bradbury will not be upset that I felt compelled to finish in one afternoon what it took him 55 years to complete. It must be nearly 35 years ago now that I first read Dandelion Wine. I have lost track of the number of summers that I have reread it since. This book is a continuation of that unusually prolonged summer of 1928. While this book's predecessor is the penultimate anthem of eternal youth (second only to Huckleberry Finn) this second part is...different. Here, Douglas Spaulding runs up against adulthood in more ways than one (perhaps it was that fever that he suffered late in the first book.) He starts out by waging war against time and its avatars in Green Town. He ends up by accepting that time and life must flow or be frozen into an unnatural caricature of life. Both 13 year-old Douglas and his 81 year-old nemesis Calvin Quartermain come to realize this. Puer aeternus and "hold-fast the dragon" come to see themselves through each other's eyes- and time and life begin their natural flow once again. There are many references here to the characters and events of the first book- if you loved it you will find much in this second book to please you. However, the spirits of the two books are really quite different. I do not find this objectionable since it saves Douglas Spaulding from becoming a sort of eternal Peter Pan. Childhood can be magical, it should be remembered fondly and not sealed in or out, but you can't stay in that state forever. A word about the conclusion- if you can keep a straight face as the two main characters each say goodbye and hello to their "little friend" respectively then you are one up on me...

What a perfect way to cap his vocation! Hasn't Ray's entire magnificent journey led up to this final magnificent metaphor: the eyes of youth looking through the eyes of age, and the eyes of age looking back through the eyes of youth? And, in the words of Ray's greatest poem, the recognition of each by each: "I remember you". I REMEMBER YOU!!! For his entire life Ray has been writing about youth and age, life and death, and now he puts in the crowning piece of this dream between two sleeps that we call a lifetime. May you continue on to write more stories, poems, books, Ray, but remember this: come what may, so long as people read, here, on Mars, wherever, we'll remember you. And, we may not know all that may be coming, but be it as it may, we'll go to it laughing.