The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 28 March 2012
by Ray Bradbury
In the classic movie Sunset Boulevard we watch as washed-up actress Norma Desmond clings desperately to her starstruck past and yearns for a return to the big screen. It is a great movie, steeped in the legends of Hollywood, and the sense that actors and movies decay and become relics much more quickly than the rest of the world. This light, somewhate bizarre, novel, published in 2002, has much in common with that old movie. It also has much in common with Bradbury's earlier novels, Death is a Lonely Business and A Graveyard for Lunatics. It is 1960, and our unnamed narrator, a pulp author of science-fiction, is disturbed during a dark and stormy night by aging actress Constance Rattigan. She is dripping wet and carries a couple of books full of names. She feels haunted and chased by ghosts and by death itself. Leaving the books behind, she vanishes by dawn, and our hero and his friend Crumley seek to track down the clues of her terror. What ensues is a strange and somewhat seedy journey through a peculiar underbelly of Hollywood and Constance's history. When people start turning up dead, the story turns into a murder mystery. But there is more going on here, and all is more tied to Constance's instability and yearning for a kind of Hollywood rebirth, her second act. The book has a jittery quality, as the characters speed through the night picking up clues from what seem to be the most tenuous of connections. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and the search seems almost pointless. But the book is also an aging author's opportunity to reflect on life in a city in which he has lived for many years. Bradbury touches on his own Hollywood experience (such as his screenplay for Moby Dick), his own hopes for a kind of cultural immortality, and, no doubt, elements of his younger days. It is a bumpy ride, a bit less satisfying than Bradbury's earlier more famous works, but it has its moments of wit.
Also by Bradbury: [Death is a Lonely Business] [Fahrenheit 451] [The Golden Apples of the Sun]