Review: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Blurb:

Nearly seventy years after its original publication, Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

Review:

I find myself once more struggling with these reviews. Ray Bradbury is one of those names amongst not just the world of science-fiction, but of literature more broadly, that stands as a titan among titans. Bradbury exists amongst the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Stanislaw Lem, or Frank Herbert—authors whose contributions to the genre, and to the literary world as a whole, cannot be understated. And yet, like each of the authors I’ve named here, I have read criminally little of their respective canons. Of Clarke I have only read Childhood’s End (you may review my review of it here), of Lem I have only read Solaris (and what essays of his are collected in Microworlds), of Herbert I have only read Dune and The Dragon in the Sea (another which I have reviewed for SFF Insiders), and of Bradbury—before undertaking the work of reading Fahrenheit 451—I had only read The Martian Chronicles. 

My struggle with each of these authors, whose works have already, quite clearly, stood the test of time and have been poured over and unpacked and critiqued by academic minds far superior to mine (in fact, the back third of my copy of Fahrenheit 451 is almost entirely essays about the work itself) is this: given the work of those who have come before me, what could I possibly add to the discussion? 

It does not help that Fahrenheit 451 is, on the surface, a fairly simple book to understand. Guy Montag, the “protagonist”, is a fireman. The twist of 451 is that in this world firemen do not stop fires, they start them; and they start them for a very specific purpose: to burn books. And this was certainly not an act to which Bradbury lends any amount of moral ambiguity. Bradbury had begun writing the novella from which Fahrenheit 451 would eventually be adapted (titled The Fireman) in 1950, a mere five years after the end of World War II. Images of Germany’s Nazi party burning books en masse would still have been very fresh in reader’s minds. The book burners in Fahrenheit 451 are likewise, Bradbury would have us understand, the bad guys; and so right from the jump, we know that Montag will surely, eventually, defect from this horrendous world that’s been built up around him.  

The World War II imagery is not merely confined to the act of book burning. There is a war occuring in the background of the text, off at the edges of the world Montag inhabits. Characters mention the V-2 rocket, and at one point Bradbury evokes the imagery of an atomic explosion. All this is tied together. In the internal logic of the story, the thesis of the book burning is essentially this: books require a reader to be attentive, and attentiveness promotes thought and reasoning, so in order to make a perfectly docile, perfectly stagnant, perfectly distracted populace, books must be destroyed. This process is not immediate, though. In the text, the catalyst for the obsolescence of books is laid at the feet of the other popular forms of mass media: radio, television, and film (though I’d like to believe this is merely for the sake of moving the plot along and not that Bradbury regards any of these as a higher form of art than the other. He did, after all, pen several feature-length screenplays—including a 1966 filmic adaptation of this book—and one episode of The Twilight Zone). As movies and radio became shorter, punchier, and shallower; so too did books need to compete, becoming condensed and abridged and edited and trimmed until they hardly resembled their original selves, becoming little more than bullet points with titles. And then becoming nothing but titles. Even the automobiles of this world are designed to be faster than necessary, designed to blur the landscape outside the window such that you cannot grasp its detail, lest such details distract you from being distracted. From here the final destruction of the written word is easy. Montag’s boss at the fire station proclaims:

“Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”

This bookless world allows the people within it to ignore the aforementioned war, to not think about it apart from the abstract notion of the thing itself. Montag even encounters a woman whose husband is off fighting in this war, and all she can muster to talk about it is, “It’s always someone else’s husband dies, they say,” as though this platitude might—if one believes in it hard enough—be made true, and save her husband from death on the battlefield. 

I mentioned in my most recent review, of Sandra Newman’s Julia (a retelling of George Orwell’s 1984), about the harrowing bleakness of Orwell’s dystopic vision of the future; and though the world of Fahrenheit 451 falls into a similar textural family, it is overcome by an entirely different kind of bleakness. 

1984 is a dystopia in which the people within it can plainly grasp the horror of its world. Most of the characters in the story are simply playing a part, going through the motions of true-believer-hood merely to survive until the next sunrise; but in Fahrenheit 451 Bradbury shows us a world in which its people well and truly believe that this world is right. In the steady undoing of the written world, and the replacement of it by maximalist, shallow entertainment; the people of Bradbury’s world do not consider even for a moment that the world could be better than it is, that they are prisoners in a soft, padded, aimless America; blank slates onto which the State may daily impress fresh beliefs. And it is seemingly by happenstance that Montag is shaken from this stupor, by a chance encounter with a young girl living down the street from him. A girl whose natural curiosity sparks a similar curiosity in Montag’s mind—a spark that ignites a flame. 

It is this curiosity to which I would like to draw your attention. I will not spend much more time further convincing you to read Fahrenheit 451. You should! I recommend it! But I want to spend this last section here talking about why I think you should read it, and why you should read anything at all. And that’s because I want you to be curious. 

Bradbury presents us here a world without curiosity, without deeper thought; and in that loss we see a world of painful solitude. Everyone is connected, but hardly anyone really knows each other. Small talk is essentially the only conversion people are capable of having. They’ve lost the tools to speak any other way. So read this book if you’re curious. Read any book to feed that curiosity; and then never stop feeding it. Though book burning has gone out of vogue since the middle of the last century, its innocuous and insidious cousin book banning is quickly making a comeback. Those seeking to ban these books do so for the same reasons the framers of Fahrenheit 451’s new America did. They want you to remain ignorant and incurious, because then you are more malleable, more suggestable, and easier to control. Do not fall for it. Keep reading. Keep recommending. Keep reviewing. Keep telling stories. The world, and you, will be all the richer for it.