‘The Illustrated Man’ – Ray Bradbury (Harper Voyager)

Page Count: 294 Pages

Now here’s a book that I haven’t read since I had to study it for GCSE English (which is so long ago now, I’m really trying not to think about it). Well, I say study… I think we looked at one story (‘The Veld’) and then we had to try and write a story in the style of Ray Bradbury. Seriously :o) Lets just say I was better at writing about ‘TheVeld’ and leave it at that.

‘The Illustrated Man’ had been on my mind just recently so when I saw a copy on the shelf, in Waterstones, it didn’t take too much for me to buy it and take it home for a read. It’s been a long time since I read a short story collection from cover to cover but that’s just what I did here and that should tell you something about this collection. I’m not a big reader of science-fiction but I ended up very glad that I made an exception to that rule here…

If El Greco had painted miniatures in his prime, no bigger than your hand, infinitely detailed, with his sulphurous colour and exquisite human anatomy, perhaps he might have used this man’s body as his art…

Yet the Illustrated Man has tried to burn the illustrations off. He’s tried sandpaper, acid and a knife. Because as the sun sets, the pictures glow like charcoals, like scattered gems. They quiver and come to life. Tiny pink hands gesture, tiny mouths flicker as the figures enact their stories – voices rise, small and muted, predicting the future…

The older I get, the more I come to realize that I want to read books by storytellers, not just writers. Don’t get me wrong, a writer has to know what they’re doing and have some mastery over the tools they employ. If they don’t have a voice that delivers a compelling story though, that mastery of the craft ultimately doesn’t count for much.

Reading ‘The Illustrated Man’, it quickly becomes very clear that Bradbury was a master writer and storyteller. The over-arching concept of the Illustrated Man is an immediate hook, to grab you, and a very efficient way of tying each tale to the next. And the stories themselves were superb. It’s not often that you’ll see me say that about a short story collection, nine times out of ten the quality of stories will inevitably vary; that’s just the nature of anthologies. Here though, every story is a winner, either with a lesson to be learned or a twist that had me swearing quietly to myself.

I’m aware that certain books, and ‘The Illustrated Man’ would be one of these, have been around for so long now that it must feel like everything that can be said, has been said about them. With that in mind then, I thought I’d try and head off on a little tangent. Here are some thoughts and feelings that each of the stories left me with…

‘The Veld’ – Years ago, I read this story as a warning against over-reliance on technology and it is still that. This time though, I got more out of the sense of horror running through the piece. I couldn’t help but wonder, are the parents digitized copies of themselves, forced to relive their deaths over and over again? I think they might be.

‘Kaleidoscope’ – Space is vast and space is inevitable, all at the same time. And beautiful too. A sad tale but strangely optimistic as well.

‘The Other Foot’ – I think I would have been a lot less forgiving than the settlers of Mars ultimately were. Definitely a lesson here for me to learn.

‘The Highway’ – When your world ends at the limits of your sight, nothing beyond that really matters, does it? Not here it doesn’t, sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

‘The Man’ – There’s a parable here but I can’t quite get my head round it. Which probably doesn’t bode well for any spiritual journey that I might be on. Oh well, I’ll have to read it again.

‘The Long Rain’ – I really felt for the survivors here and that’s a real testament to how relentless Bradbury made the rains of Venus. And the ending is still with me, making me wonder just how sane the Lieutenant was at the end.

‘Usher II’ – I like the idea that the more a society suppresses imagination the more likely it is to resurface in more imaginative ways. I also enjoyed the parallels that Bradbury draws with Poe’s original tale.

‘The Last Night of the World’ – I loved how chilled out and understated the tone was here. Sometimes, the world will end without a bang or a whimper, it will just end because it’s time.

‘The Rocket’ – The most heart-warming story in the collection. Space is infinite but so is your imagination.

‘No Particular Night or Morning’ – And talking of space being vast… Here’s a bleak look at exactly why you should screen astronaut’s mental health before sending them into space. Bradbury’s vision of space is a little too vast for me, I’ll keep my feet firmly on the ground.

‘The Fox and the Forest’ – An exercise in hiding the ‘twist’ in plain sight, done so well here that I never saw it coming.

‘The Visitor’ – A retelling of ‘The Goose that laid the Golden Egg’ but with some sympathy for exiles looking to stave off a miserable death. I’d probably do exactly the same thing as Saul and that’s the sad thing.

‘Marionettes, Inc’ – Another tale about the dangers in becoming too dependent on technology that is becoming less dependent on us. I liked the deliberately vague ending.

‘The City’ – When you leave revenge to a machine, it really is a dish served cold. I loved the scale of the timeline here, where things could happen so long ago that they have passed out of memory entirely but something still remembers, albeit mechanically.

‘Zero Hour’ – Bradbury lets his readers in on the secret, fairly early on, and that just makes things all the more agonising, watching those in charge sleep walk into an alien invasion.

‘The Playground’ – What a tale to end on, especially for someone like me who never played well with others as a child. A necessary part of growing up but my vision of hell on a page. I know nothing about Ray Bradbury but have to wonder if he was a new father when he wrote ‘The Playground’.

And the Epilogue? I think it could have gone two ways and I’m not sure which one was the most likely. There’s something that will be bugging me while I should be working, it’s worth it though.

‘The Illustrated Man’ is highly recommended by me then; I won’t leave it so long until my next re-read.