he Elliotts—the Family—are an odd and eerie clan. They occupy the House, a self-assembled half-alive manse brooding deep in the heart of America. There's a Thousand-Times Great Grandmère, a four-millennium-old living mummy. There's Cecy, the Sleeper Who Dreams, a young, High-Attic-bound woman capable of astrally traveling to inhabit the shell of anyone she chooses. There's the Lady of the Fogs and Marshes and her gaunt husband. Not to mention Anuba the cat, Arach the spider and the singular Mouse. Along with these steady residents, scores of far-ranging spectral relatives such as the winged Uncle Einar flit in and out of the House.
And then there's Timothy, a merely mortal 10-year-old boy, abandoned as an infant on the doorstep of the House and adopted into the supernatural Family. Yet Timothy, despite his "failings" and seeming insignificance, is central, for it is Timothy's point of view that serves to link the disparate episodes into a whole, starting from the prologue, where he learns Family history from his dry-mouthed Grandmère.
This novel's impressionistic form pivots around one central event: the Homecoming. Occurring a quarter of the way through the book, this reunion of far-flung Family members informs all that precedes and follows. Here Timothy finally realizes that he will never fit into his adopted Family, and thus, when the centuries-long traditions of his clan are about to end, thanks to the vindictive actions of one of its members, he is able to strike out on his own and rejoin the mortal world.
But this narrative arc—from stability through disillusionment to new beginnings—is less important, really, than all the vignettes along the way. Cecy tries poignantly to experience love while immured in her High Attic. Uncle Einar overcomes a frustrating disability in a comical fashion. Timothy encounters a female Family member who might have become his adult lover, save for being temporally askew. Like any family history, the Elliott saga consists less of some artificially imposed linear thrust than a mosaic of quotidian highlights.
The original Addams Family
In the parlance established by critic John Clute, Ray Bradbury's new novel is a "fix-up," an organic whole assembled from earlier publications and fresh material. In this case, the germinal nuggets consist of six stories previously published between 1945 and 1988. "The Traveler," "Homecoming," "Uncle Einar," "The April Witch" (herein retitled "The Wandering Witch"), "On the Orient North" and "West of October." But these constitute only six chapters out of 23, guaranteeing a majority of unseen wordage. Additionally, Bradbury supplies an afterword detailing the long genesis of this project, including his collaborations with illustrator Charles Addams.
As the author of one of the most famous fix-ups in genre history, The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury is a past master at the kind of mortaring needed to cement together stories that were never originally conceived of as a whole structure. Indeed, the bridging chapters here are consistent in tone and style and theme with the older material, and also allow Bradbury the satisfaction of tying up some loose ends, such as the outcome of Cecy's romantic quest begun in "The Wandering Witch." But there are some minor unrectified inconsistencies along the way. Sometimes the House has nearly 200 rooms, other times only 30. A barn burns in Chapter 10, but is still standing in Chapter 13. Most glaringly, at one point Timothy wonders if he'll still be alive in the distant year of 2009. While a far-off date some 50 years ago, 2009 no longer symbolizes the same thing, and should have been pushed forward.
When Bradbury's stories first appeared in the field, they often expressed a core nostalgia for Bradbury's own youth of the 1920s, and a distaste for much of the modern world, a thesis that some readers embraced wholeheartedly and others repudiated. But all those of us who, as youthful readers, joyously encountered Bradbury in the '50s, '60s and '70s, now inevitably regard his work with our own nostalgia, tied up with our own childhoods. Thus, reading From the Dust Returned is a multilayered experience, composed of many mixed frissons. In this sense, its title is perfect, describing not only the life of the archaic revenants known as the Elliott Family, but also our own sense of meeting old fictional friends again.
Yet it is useful to remember that Bradbury was also always intimately involved in contemporary affairs as well, as his topically anti-authoritarian Fahrenheit 451 (1953) reminds us. So this new book contains, besides many affectionate glances backward, some meditations on how the modern world has changed so as to exclude and dismiss such phenomena as the Elliotts. Indeed, the final chapter postulates a kind of fusion of science and magic that points the way toward a hopeful new synthesis.
