Green Shadows, White Whale abandons the bite of Bradbury’s satire while retaining his humour for what becomes, ultimately, a more light-hearted project. His biggest joke, though, may be on his audience.
One might expect that the book is more of a memoir, but it’s unclear how much is real and how much is fictitious. Branding the book as a novel is also dubious. There’s very little through line, other than some repeated characters and a common setting. A more honest assessment of the text is that it’s a collection of short stories masquerading as a novel. Even the idea that it’s a novelization of making Moby Dick is laughable, because only a few of the chapters even mention Moby Dick; hunting the white whale becomes completely tangential, Bradbury’s attempt at a script splashing through the surface once in a while. To be fair, as the book progresses there are a few more references and arguably the climax of the book is Bradbury finishing the script.
In Green Shadows, White Whale, Bradbury once again presents himself as a conceptual writer, despite it not being a science fiction book. The premises of many of the stories are their point. The characters populating the stories are essentially flat placeholders for the comic moments at the expense of the realism. The key characters are a group of regulars at a local pub, many of whom tell stories Canterbury Tales style, which Bradbury records—and not to make accusations, but this would be an excellent framing device for presenting complete fabrications and getting away with it.
Some stories land beautifully. One of them deals with a toxic couple living in sin trying to get married. There’s some entertaining dialogue with the priest, but the real highlight is that the wedding needs to be delayed and, trying to save on costs, they keep the wedding cake around for another week or two. The story culminates with the cutting of the cake and Bradbury’s account is wonderfully unbridled. The cake completely shatters apart and the hyperbolic comedy is fantastic.
By far my favourite story, though, is a farce of Irish rebellion. One of the pub-goers gives an account of going to an Irish Lord’s home with the intention of burning it down. The mob arrives to find Lord Kilgotten is home. They inform him of their intention to burn his house down. Lord Kilgotten says that they have a soiree planned with friends and kindly requests that they burn his house down later. So, they go about scheduling an appropriate time—but wait! There is so much priceless art in the home; they wouldn’t want to burn the art with the home, too, would they? So, Lord Kilgotten leads the mob through the home, offering them pieces of artwork to take home. A particularly funny moment is when they arrive at a portrait of Lord Kilgotten done by his wife and he doesn’t offer it to anyone. Its understatedness is what makes it such a funny moment.
The downside, in my mind, is that Bradbury sometimes goes too far in solidifying the joke. Rather than trusting his audience, there are moments where it feels like Bojack Horseman doing stand up and asking if the audience gets the joke. Towards the end of the story mentioned above, it’s revealed that the mob, stealing the heavy artworks, start to sink in the swamp and so they ditch the artwork. Lord Kilgotten ushers them back, but then takes his wife’s portrait of him and throws it out into the swamp. It takes the joke a step further than necessary.
Subtlety is key. Yet, a few other stories deliver the punchline too directly. In one story, a notoriously careful driver starts driving like a maniac following Lent. It’s obvious that giving up alcohol has led to this comic inversion. The basis of the joke is obvious, but Bradbury takes it too far: “Tonight, for the first time in all the nights I had driven with him, Mike was sober” (139). Obviously. Another chapter is so outlandish where there’s basically an eternally youthful man in the body of a baby who is used as a prop across generations of women beggars in Ireland. It’s moments like this that make the “novel” so impossible as a memoir and a bit too extreme to be my brand of comedy.
Peppered in between the sillier moments Bradbury is in full force with one chapter so compelling and psychologically riveting that it’s a complete shock in such a collection of tales. Bradbury remembers his time with Nora, a woman with whom he has a (would-be?) affair. She owns a large home in Ireland and the two visit it. What emerges is a story compelling in its darkness: the home burned down and Nora painstakingly recreated it. She spends years commissioning replicas and rebuilding the home. Essentially, it’s the story of a haunted house, but in much more psychological terms. The unstated central question is essentially: ‘if we rebuild the Ship of Theseus piece by piece, do its ghosts still linger?’. Throughout the story, it’s beautifully ambiguous how much Nora is projecting onto the home and how much is the story of a genuine haunting. There’s even some question, in my mind, whether the house actually even burned down. Nora is the most compelling character in the text, longing for an impossible past but also trying to usher Bradbury into a dreamed-of future, gallivanting around the world and disappearing before morning (as if she were the ghost all along). The chapter is completely engrossing.
That story also exemplifies Bradbury’s style of clean prose with moments of flourishing style. One page of Bradbury’s prose stands out as the most beautiful, elegant, and energetic section. In describing his relationship with Nora, Bradbury writes, “Or it was as if at high noon midsummer every year or so we ran off up the vital strand, never dreaming we might come back and collide in mutual need. And then somehow another summer ended,a sun went down, and there came Nora dragging her empty sand pail and here I came with scabs on my knees, and the beach empty and a strange season gone, and just us left to say hello Nora, hello William, as the wind rose and the sea darkened as if a great herd of octopi suddenly swam by with their inks” (97). Gorgeous, understated tenderness with that undercurrent of tragedy. Excellent. It then continues: “Somewhere back in time there had been one moment, balanced like a feather trembled by our breaths from either side, that held our love warmly and perfectly in poise” (97). That image of the fragility of their relationship is simply excellent. The wistfulness of the following passage culminates the description: “Somehow our mouths had been too busy with each other to ask permanence. Next day, healing our lips, puffed from mutual assaults, we had not the strength to say forever-as-of-now, more tomorrows this way, an apartment, a house anywhere!” (97). The optimism runs so counter to the haunted nature of the story that it forms a perfect tension, a feather in balance.
Towards the ending of the book, Bradbury delves into his writing career a bit more. In one chapter, his work receives a review that John Huston reads aloud, inventing criticisms that wound Bradbury deeply. In another, Bradbury receives an award and takes it to the bar, only to be shamed and leave feeling lousy. In yet another, Huston challenges Bradbury on his progress on Moby Dick and then Bradbury writes a story about him and Huston. The effect is fractal-like: this fake novel includes a story wherein Bradbury writes a story, which is included in its entirety. The story itself is neat; it’s a creepy little tale of a banshee trying to seek revenge on a John Huston-like lover. The novel eventually ends with Bradbury having a breakthrough and there’s a frenetic section wherein he completes the script for Moby Dick.
Since the book leaves Moby Dick in the background most of the time, the ending ultimately feels a little unearned. There’s very little build-up, so the ending doesn’t really deliver to my satisfaction. It’s another vignette. I guess that’s more true-to-life life, really, but maybe not as well-suited for a novel, or even a “novel.”
Ultimately, Green Shadows, White Whale is an acceptable collection of short stories with a loose thread in the undercurrent. I’d suggest that Irish literature tends towards absurdity in its humour, and Bradbury seems either well-aligned in his style for his Irish-set book or perhaps he absorbed their style by osmosis and authentically replicates it here. Depending on your humour, you may find a great deal of value in these stories. If nothing else, read chapter 15 as a standalone—it’s well-worth reading the haunted house story Bradbury snuck into this collection.
Happy reading and have fun!
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