Green Shadows, White Whale by Ray Bradbury

    Ray Bradbury is known primarily as a writer of dystopian science fiction stories, so the cover of Green Shadows, White Whale may strike you as a surprising departure, conceptually and geographically. Unlike some of Bradbury’s other works, this book is more grounded in realism and the cover offers the subtitle A Novel of Ray Bradbury’s Adventures Making Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland. If you’re uninformed like me, you had no idea that Bradbury worked on the film for Moby Dick. What a multifaceted fellow!

    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!

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry

    Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry is an odd duck of a book: it’s mainly a novel, but the influence of drama pervades the text alongside glints of poetry. The story’s central characters are Maurice and Charlie, two ex(?)-gangster Irishmen in search of an estranged daughter; which one of them is the actual father is a matter of some debate.

    This is another one of those novels that oscillates between present-day and years earlier. In the present, Maurice and Charlie are waiting in a Spanish port for the twenty three year-old Dilly, who fled from home three years earlier to join a kind of weird cult-like group of nomads with dreadlocks who take care of dogs. I’m a little fuzzy on how it all works, but basically it seems you can’t travel with dogs so there’s a network that trades off who takes care of dogs in different places. Anyway, Maurice and Charlie are trying to reconnect with her. The other half of the novel delves into the backstory of Maurice and Charlie and their involvement in drug trafficking, their tumultuous relationship with Cynthia, Dilly’s mother. 

    There is a dramatic difference between how much I enjoyed the two sections of the book. The present-day waiting room felt like a bottle episode of a TV show and I was absolutely for it. Beginning the book, I was prepared for 250 pages of waiting in the same location and the hijinx that would ensue. The flashbacks largely lost my interest and they lost even more steam towards the end of the book. There were two-point-five exceptions to the lacklustre flashbacks: 1) the moment Maurice contemplates a murder-suicide with his infant daughter, preparing to drive the car into the water 2) the moment Maurice slices his eye open with a razor — such a cringe-inducing visceral moment and 2.5) when Maurice and Cynthia have a bad land deal that makes them think their new build is haunted and that it will destroy their luck.

    It’s hard to place the two timelines into relationship with one another, but I will attempt to outline some differences:

    The present-day narrative is replete with snappy dialogue. It reads like a play, specifically Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were sinister while being comical. As a result, it feels far more lively than the flashbacks, which are more narration-driven much of the time. The relationship between the characters feels more sincere, whereas in the past I’m a little unclear on why Maurice and Charlie both fell in love with Cynthia or why it really matters that they reunite with Dilly*.

    The present-day, before Barry reveals the past, is more infused with tension. At the outset of the novel, you’re not clear on why they’re waiting for Dilly or what they’ll do if they get a hold of her. In one scene they are interrogating a boy they suspect knows her and there’s an underlying tension to the conversation which escalates when they jab their thumbs into his eyes. It’s a shocking scene and the stakes are unclear, which makes it even better: are they going to hurt Dilly, despite their love for her? Is she part of a more sinister network, too? Given that there’s a line in the book about how drug trafficking isn’t profitable anymore (with the implication that human trafficking is more lucrative), there’s an underlying tension with what the backstory might have been.

    The heart of the story was in the present and the past felt lifeless by comparison, leading me to the conclusion that not every book needs to delve into backstory or parallel narratives. As more about the past gets revealed, there are some surprising moments that serve to enhance the relationship between Maurice and Charlie in the present. Most notably, and this is a spoiler, it is revealed that Charlie and Cynthia were caught in bed together and Maurice stabbed him in the leg. Their reunion in a mental hospital is an amusing coincidence. (Okay, as I write this, maybe there were more charming moments in the past than I’m giving credit for).

    I used an asterisk earlier noting a complaint that I had about how the stakes and importance of finding Dilly are unclear. I think I needed more moments of Maurice bonding with Dilly and/or more of Maurice and Charlie talking about their reasons for loving the ambiguously-fathered Dilly. I voice the criticism with reservation, though, because Barry does offer something for consideration that would mitigate such a criticism. In the backstory, Maurice’s father is presented as having mental illness, possibly dementia, and Maurice seems to have a fulfilled genetic predisposition where he ends up in the mental hospital later. When Charlie joins him they hang out all day watching Goodfellas. Their perceptions of themselves seem so grandiose, kept in check by Cynthia and her daughter. To circle back, if the two of them are committed to reuniting with Dilly as a vapid “blood is thicker than water” mob mentality (excuse the pun), it gives their characters a purposefully pathetic dimension.

    When it comes to the writing quality, I’ve mentioned the dialogue, which is great. The other component that I quite liked were phrases of surprising poetry within the text. The whole book is written in short sections—whether one sentence or half-page paragraphs—that gives it an aphoristic quality. In turn, there are brief moments of poetry describing images. There are also poetic semi-philosophical claims, my favourite of which being “we are in the suburbs of hysteria” (7).

    Ultimately, though, the book ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. In the interest of seeing how my thoughts compare to those of other readers, I went to the Wikipedia page and found that Johanna Thomas-Corr “panned the novel and called its story ‘flimsy.’” The word that had come to mind for me was “thin.” Thomas-Corr says “A novel needs interiority, an intimacy between characters and reader [...] Barry does the bare minimum.” I feel like that’s a fair critique, if a bit harsh. There is much stated, I’m sure, in the subtext but I am not an adept enough reader to appreciate it. The idea of the book ending on a missed connection is fine, but I needed something. Some sort of transformation to make the book feel worth it (though the fact that the central characters never change is pretty crucial to some of their misadventures). I often get excited for Booker Prize winners and nominees, which is why I picked this up (it was longlisted), but overall it was just alright.

    Happy reading!