The New Ray Bradbury Review: Number 1 2008

Dandelion Wine Audio CD

99 Dandelion Wine Audio CD Audio CD, Colonial Radio Theatre/Blackstone Audio. ISBN 0786165820. Published January 2007. Reviewed by Phil Nichols Production Credits Dramatised by Ray Bradbury, from his novel Music: Jeffrey Gage Director: Nancy Curran Willis Producer: Jerry Robbins Executive Producer: Mark Vander Berg Synopsis Green Town, Illinois, 1928. Douglas Spaulding, twelve years old, awakens the town and in so doing introduces the cast of characters: family, friends and neighbours. Doug, out picking grapes with his father and brother, has an epiphany. He discovers that he is alive. One evening, a stranger arrives in town. Bill Forrester seems to have an uncanny knowledge of the people of Green Town. Forrester moves into the Spaulding family guest house. During the summer, Doug, brother Tom and friend John Huff have a series of adventures. They encounter Leo Auffmann, who decides to construct a happiness machine. They have their fortunes told by a mechanical Tarot Witch. They listen to Colonel Freeleigh, a Civil War veteran whose storytelling transports them to the past. Forrester meets with Ann Barclay, and seems to know her remarkably well. Doug walks Ann home every night from the library where she works… except one day Doug is delayed, and Ann sets off alone through the Ravine, a frightening place that cuts Green Town in two…and where the murderous Lonely One preys on his victims. As summer comes to a close, and Grandpa is bottling the last of the dandelion wine, Doug falls ill. Bill Forrester visits him at his sickbed and reveals that he is an older version of Doug. Green Town, and all that we have seen REVIEW The New Ray Bradbury Review 100 and heard, is Bill’s memory of his childhood. He has come to warn Doug not to be afraid of change. Bill feeds Doug some dandelion wine, and this—with Doug’s vision of his future life—brings him around to enjoy the last day of summer. Review This audio production is taken not from Bradbury’s 1957 novel, but from his own stage play adaptation, first published in 1988. Dandelion Wine first came to the stage in the 1960s, as a musical production, and then had additional incarnations as a musical and a “straight” drama. Readers familiar only with the novel may be surprised to find an overarching plot thread that is almost completely new: the storyline involving Bill Forrester. Although Forrester appears in the novel, he is prominent for only one chapter. In the play, he turns out to be pivotal. The new storyline serves two purposes. One is to give the play a unity that would otherwise be difficult to achieve. As with many of Bradbury’s novelised story cycles, Dandelion Wine is more of a collection of incidents than a coherent linear narrative. It is difficult to imagine a ninety-minute play that could mirror the structure of the novel. That said, Bradbury has successfully adapted the novelised story cycle of The Martian Chronicles, structure and all, for the stage. The second purpose is to give an additional perspective to the boy’s-eyeview of the novel. Bill Forrester is, to some extent, Bradbury himself: returning to his memories, returning to his cast of familiar characters, to find some new insight into his older self. In 1964 Bradbury said: I believe the past is both bad and good, it can both wound and heal. If one goes to it to suffer [...] of course the junk must go out of the attic into the incinerator. But if it can be used to instruct so that a man, turning over the fabulous junk in his trunkroom, can feel like a centipede, I grew this leg that year, and this leg the next [...] then a man extends himself in time, and becomes whole (Bradbury, quoted in Anon, 1964). Forrester initially presents himself as writer, so Bradbury is doing something really quite complex here. He is revisiting his childhood, since Dandelion Wine is partly autobiographical. But he is also revisiting his text, and by reinventing Forrester he is able to revisit his text from the inside. As we shall see later, Doug and Forrester both succeed in extending themselves in time, and become whole. To facilitate this outsider, Bradbury has had to reshape some of the events 101 of the novel. The ageing Helen Loomis, Bill Forrester’s ice-cream parlour date in the novel, is here replaced by the...