posted on 17 Feb 2016

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

I last read this book at some point in my early 20s and to be quite honest I can’t say that I had a detailed memory of the world Bradbury had created for his dystopian vision of the future. It turns out that most of what I thought I knew about the book comes in fact from the Francis Truffaut directed movie of the same title. Having now read the book again I think it’s fair to say that the film is more ‘inspired’ by the book than an attempt to capture its very bleak, dark heart. Reading it this time around I found myself genuinely terrified by Bradbury’s future world and, at the same time, transfixed by the exposition of how this state of perpetual war and book burning came to be – something which is missing from the film.

Guy Montag is a fireman but unlike today not an extinguisher of fires but a burner of books. In a post nuclear war world where individual thought is frowned on, bland television ‘parlours’ provide entertainment and sanctioned sedatives are routinely overdosed, Montag and his colleagues hunt down book collections with the aim of eradicating them from society altogether. Small enclaves of resisters to this live in fear of being uncovered, denounced and arrested. There is also a suggestion that this future America is permanently at war with some unspecified enemy – not the only echo of Orwell’s 1984 that can be found in this book.

Montag has doubts. When we join the story he is clearly at the beginning of a personal crisis and has begun to covertly save some of the books he is meant to burn – reading them without discrimination or really understanding their meaning. His growing doubts about the society he lives in and the nature of his job are fed by a meeting first with an unorthodox young neighbour, Clarisse, who later disappears mysteriously (almost certainly killed by the authorities in a staged ‘accident’) and then by a dissident academic called Faber – himself a book hoarder -  who feeds his growing sense of rebellion.

Ultimately, the obvious happens and Montag is denounced by his conformist wife and her equally brainwashed friends. His house is raided but he escapes after killing his immediate superior, Beatty, by turning the book burning flamethrower on him. He runs off to try and find a way out of the city and into the countryside where, it is rumoured, there are groups of ‘outcasts’ living rough and unmolested by the authorities who have bigger fish to fry. He ultimately makes his getaway and finds sanctuary with the travellers where he discovers that many of them have become ‘living books’ having memorised texts that have been burned so that the stories  and content can be passed from generation to generation.

As Montag digests his new state of being, the nearby city he has just escaped from is attacked by planes equipped with nuclear missiles and completely destroyed – the  outcasts however survive the blast and shock wave to head off and begin to rebuild civilisation, hopefully, Bradbury suggests, based on more progressive values.

 

For me, however, the centre of this book is the chilling encounter between Montag and Beatty that happens nearly half way through. Beatty ( surely a close relative of O’Brien in Orwell’s 1984) visits Montag at home to explain to him what the genesis of the fireman service was and why it is socially desirable to rid the world of books. It’s a truly frightening exposition of the way in which the population itself demands a dumbing down of their lives and how they fear the need to think.:

 "Ah." Beatty leaned forward in the faint mist of smoke from his pipe. "What more easily explained and natural? With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word "intellectual, of course, became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally 'bright,' did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal,  as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes.   They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors. That's you, Montag, and that's me."

This scene is so closely reminiscent of Winston Smith’s discussions with his tormentor O’Brien that it is impossible not to infer that Bradbury wanted to make the links. However, where Orwell took us into the abyss from which there was no escape, Bradbury pulls back and gives humanity and  its culture a second chance. But there are no promises.

Although not the masterpiece that 1984 is, Fahrenheit 451 is a terrifying glimpse into the human desire to infantilise and to enslave itself. Bradbury’s unnerving view of ‘progress’ seen from the perspective of 1954 provides us with an analysis of our present that seems to reach out from the past as part of an unbroken and inevitable timeline. I was genuinely shaken after reading this book  - which is not a criticism but an accolade.

 

Terry Potter

February 2016