FICTION

GREEN SHADOWS, WHITE WHALE by Ray Bradbury, drawings by Edward Sorel (Alfred A. Knopf: $21; 269 pp.) In 1953, science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury went to Ireland to write a screenplay of “Moby Dick” for director John Huston, and spent seven months in the company of the hard-drinking, hard-working filmmaker. That relationship has already inspired several Bradbury stories, but this time he expands it into a novel about a young writer who faces a whale and a director, both larger than life, as well as his own feelings about the people and countryside. It is a charming, delicate story, for all the boisterous characters--Bradbury writes as though walking through a favorite recurrent dream, as though one misstep might send him crashing awake, robbed of his memories. He writes to preserve images he has nurtured for almost 40 years, and if at times the words seem hushed, muted in their reverence for history, the cast of characters, especially Huston, with his “lazy, half-lidded iguana stare,” keeps the story from sliding headlong into wistfulness. Bradbury seems to be cataloguing his past--setting down not just what he saw, but what it meant to him to see it--asking the reader only to slow down, be patient, and accept that the deliberate pace is the only way to acknowledge the wealth of detail.