Ray Bradbury – A Graveyard for Lunatics

Finished: February 15, 2011

2012 Book Count: 7

Still loving Ray Bradbury. What a fantastic, fantastic writer.

A Graveyard for Lunatics isn’t one of his science fiction/fantasy novels, however. It’s a mystery story – and we all know how I feel about mystery stories.  The thing with this novel which so impressed me, however, was how he wrote it. When you looked at the events and the plot, it was a straight forward mystery with bad guys and good guys and suspects and secret passages – a beginning, middle, and end. But somehow Mr. Bradbury has managed to write this book as though it were magical realism. It took me a while to look past the fantastic and realize that there was a more than familiar structure underneath. It’s hard to explain. Everyday events become seeped through with a magical importance, so that a ride in a car is not a transport from a to b, but rather a noble quest filled with significance and metaphor and beauty, while never become pretentious or boring.

The story takes place mostly in a film studio and in a graveyard – conveniently located next door to each other. Blackmail and murder are afoot, or, at least our protagonist believes that they are, the crimes themselves have the curious habit of vanishing before they can be closely inspected.

Both the movie studio and the graveyard are inherently magical places. The movie studio can be any place in any country on the earth, and frequently is. The graveyard is filled with mystery and plots (of both varieties). The movie studio has magic in the fact that it never stops changing, and the graveyard has magic in its stasis. In the movie studio the secrets are buried and hidden away – in the graveyard they are obscured simply for being out in plain sight.

Mr. Bradbury does a really wonderful job in showing us that magic is really in our perception. The characters all see the world as  being alive with metaphor and allegory, and it’s with this that they create – in fact, there is really only one non-creative character in the novel, and that is the detective, whose role is mostly to keep everyone else grounded in the reality of the danger that the situation represents, something that is generally summarily disregarded by everyone else.

I relished every word of this book, and the moments in which I was prevented from reading it (damn you, responsible adult job!), were pretty agonizing. I forgot about most of the mystery until the very end because I was so enchanted with the writing and the characters themselves and how they saw the world around them – saw through the sets and costumes to the wonder and magic beneath them, that disguises were not necessarily to obscure what one really was, but to be something different, if you were lucky.

But enough gushing! This is an incredibly worthy bit of literature. I’ve had to resist the temptation to go round to all the used book stores and buy all the copies to distribute as a public service. Go forth and enjoy.