From The Dust Returned: A Family Remembrance by Ray Bradbury
01/10/2002 . Source: Sue Davies 

Pub: Earthlight/Simon and Schuster. 204 page paperback. Price: £ 6.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-7434-2998-2.

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The House 'arrived first' and attracted the town to grow up around it. After many years of waiting, the Family arrive.
They are different to us.

They are people, visible and invisible, winged and un-winged, some merely dust and even one who is the squeak created when the 'first hinge was invented'. They are the outcasts of our imagination and they flee from all corners of the modern world as the places they might exist shrink. This is a story of love and loss, death and life, the pain of mortality and the pain of immortality.

The characters in this book will be familiar to anyone who has picked up an anthology of Ray Bradbury tales. He has been writing about the Family for fifty years and he has finally given them a home. Father sleeps by day in a 'shiny bin' in the basement and 'works nights'.

Cecy sleeps all day and all night except for meals. She 'travels' to experience every drop of life and to find love. Timothy is the odd one out. With his 'illness' he is unable to stomach the not quite red wine and the 'soups better left from menus' that his family enjoy. He bemoans his 'poor teeth that nature had given him.

Corn kernels, round, soft and pale! And his canines? Unsharpened flints!' His mother, the 'lady of the Fogs and Marshes' who has no reflection, also feels sorry for him and promises that when he dies his 'bones will lie undisturbed...lie at ease forever'.

The Family may or may not be vampires. They certainly shun the daylight and have a strange diet. However, they are more than just vampires - they are fairy folk, creatures of our darkest imaginings.

They also have their place in the world.

The Family is under attack by the desire in the modern world to know and analyse everything. The 'ghastly passenger' on the Orient North' must travel to the House to survive. He is fading away because no one believes in ghosts and fantasy. Knowing what he is, Miss Minerva Halliday is able to help by reading ghost stories to him!

Telling tales to children, who are not sceptical like their parents, further strengthens him.
This is a wonderfully descriptive book and it is full of love. A thousand Times Great Grandmere is 'a pharaoh's daughter dressed in spider linens and warm breath silk.'

When Cecy travels she describes the sensations of moving from animal to human. 'It was a good body this girl's...this brain was like a pink tea rose, hung in darkness.' There is a strong sense of place and setting and of times that are past. There are also comic moments, not least when Uncle Einar reduced to mortal concerns becomes the first winged spin-dryer.

A truly excellent work this novel encompasses all human and not to be non-humanist, all non-human traits of kindness, compassion, forgetfulness, fear, maliciousness and most everything else, too.

It can be read and re-read and always offers up more.
There are chapters that stand out because they have been previously published but it is all pulled together in a satisfying whole.

This is a perfect return to the novel for Bradbury who obviously has still plenty to offer us.

Sue Davies