Driving Blind

Driving Blind was among the last major collections Bradbury published before his health began to decline, and it reads as the work of a writer aware that he is in the final phase. The twenty-one stories here are suffused with a valedictory warmth, with the sense of a man looking back across a long life and finding it, on balance, remarkable.

Several stories revisit familiar Bradbury territories: a Green Town summer, a midnight carnival, a rocket ship heading for the stars. But the domestic stories, the ones about marriages and friendships and the strangeness of ageing, are the heart of the collection. Bradbury had been married to his wife Marguerite for decades by this point, and her presence, thinly fictionalised, is felt throughout.

The title story, about a man who insists on driving with his eyes closed because he trusts the road, is one of his most transparent metaphors, but transparency in Bradbury is never a flaw. He believed in saying what you meant. He just believed in saying it beautifully.