This is quite simply one of the most well written sci-fi books ever. Ray Bradbury brings poetry to prosidy and one can't help but be carried along on the beautiful language of his novel. Although he's a master of the language, like Wolfe and Benford, with Bradbury he never uses obscure or archaic language to set the reader apart from the story. This book is written using words practically any reader can understand, which is a reason it's popular with English teachers. It gives it an accessibility that other books just don't have, which, while the snobbish denigrate, the rest of us appreciate. It's a device, of course, the same as in The Hobbit. In that book, Tolkien told the story from the point of view of a character any of us could sympathize with and using language all of us could understand. It's the same here, and because of the very real-world setting (an America which is quite familiar to us), we can feel the danger even more.
The story should be well-known to most readers, since probably all of us had it in school at one point or another, and if you didn't I just don't see how you could have avoided reading it anyway. To refresh you though, Guy Montag is one of the firemen, whose job is finding illegal books (mostly anything besides censored news and technical manuals, or rather, anything that makes you think) and burning them, along with their owners' houses. The purpose of this is that in this future, people have pursued their right to happiness to the extreme. They know of nothing to disturb them, and want nothing to disturb them in their media-induced stupor. Sounds familiar, eh? It's not even a case of people hearing what they want to hear; these people want to hear, see, and know nothing. Even though they know that a war is imminent, it has no reality to them. People are convinced it will be over in a matter of days and that all will be normal afterward. People run around with shells (earbud headphones) blaring noise at them all day and night, and if they don't, there's noise over the public broadcast system anyway. Guy is just another member of this society until his crew runs into an old lady who'd rather be burned herself than live without her books. When this event happens, Guy's world is turned upside down as he asks the question of what's so great about books. A lot more happens than that of course, but the basic shape is he leaves this society and ends up an outcast. The war happens at the very end of the book, and you get the feeling that the old world is gone and that perhaps a new world will begin in which books have a place again.
One of the notable things about this book is how prescient Bradbury was with some of these technologies. He envisioned a mechanical hound in an age when there was only one computer in all of the US and it had less processing power than the pc I'm typing on. He also envisioned wall-sized tvs that were incredibly intrusive in people's lives. He also envisioned "spin", in which the media affects people's views on politics and political figures. Before tv and radio, people actually got to see their candidates as they rode around the country on trains making stops to actually deliver speeches in person.
Above all, though, Bradbury's book is warning us of the dangers of stifling critical thinking, and especially thinking for ourselves. When you abdicate your authority to think for yourself, no one will guard you against the depredations of those who would use you. This is an important point. Montag is a criminal because as he says, "I don't want anyone to tell me what to think anymore." Bradbury's book was protesting tyranny of all sorts, including Nazism, Fascism, Socialism, and Mcarthyism. All of these movements were anti-intellectual, and where they were let loose they were highly destructive.
I'm not sure what the afterword contains in the book, but on the audiobook version there's a q&a with Bradbury about his work. A couple of interesting tidbits came out of that (regarding the book, that is, because most of the afterword dealt with other topics). One is that Beatty (the fire chief) turned against books because he was disappointed by them. He believed that books had all the answers, and when he was proven wrong, he began to take out his wrath on them. The second revelation is that Beatty himself kept hundreds of books. Never to read; just to own and let them molder unused on his shelves. Bradbury said that he regretted leaving that information out and that he was considering doing a rewrite and working those in (although he may not since he's not sure he should interfere with his previous work).
This book is really an American classic that's both valuable and understandable (which latter reason is why a lot of poetry goes unnoticed). Read it!
2 comments:
I think every teenager should have the good fortune to run across this book on accident sometime while they're in junior high or high school, as it has much to say about the perils of conformity, and the willingness of people to turn away from knowledge to simplify their lives. The moment I most enjoy in the book is where it's revelead to us that the people in the book didn't so much have their books taken away from them, as they willingly gave them up. Now some may think it's overly simplistic to equate books with knowledge and curiosity, but in truth what Bradbury is trying to tell us is that things really go bad when people no longer want to learn new things, are no longer curious about the world, and have no concerns beyond their own immediate pleasures. And I find all too often that people who read, read often and read widely-especially in their younger years-are those who nurture a curiosity to the world that is lacking in those who do not.
Yes, good points. The worst danger is not that someone will steal your freedom, it's that you'll give it up willingly. This is what we've seen much too frequently in the "war on terror", people saying that they'll give up whatever freedoms they have to in order to be guaranteed safety. I'm sure that's the same devil's bargain the people of Fahrenheit 451 made, and end the end they finally got shown the error of their ways. No one can guarantee you security, and perhaps if they had been a thinking, acting people they could have avoided their own destruction. As it was, they were destroyed as much by their own laziness and unwillingness to think for themselves as by the aggression of a faceless enemy.
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