Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451

By Ray Bradbury

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. 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 then 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.

When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.

This is a tough one to review, because this book has been exhaustively picked over - the edition I read came with like, ten mini-essays in the back, PLUS a foreword PLUS like, Ray Bradbury's notes on everything.  Let me start by saying that I was already very familiar with the story (who isn't, at this point) but not like, the "plot".  I put that in quotation marks because the plot is definitely not the main attraction for Bradbury.  Neil Gaiman wrote the intro on my copy, and he basically said, readers today have to recreate a past that created a future, which was good warning, because they are super casual about atom bombs in Fahrenheit 451 and that is because they didn't really know that they were making radioactive hellscapes and so being like, hey, let's walk back to the city makes a lot more sense.

I was... not super impressed? It's that weird hurky jerky style where people can only speak in deeply meaningful abrupt phrases, which resembles actual human conversation not at all, and Bradbury can be super flowery it at points, especially in the beginning.  This is page 3:

"The autumn leaves blew over the pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and leaves carry her forward.  Her head was half bent to watch her shoes stir the circling leaves.  Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes so fixed to the world that no move escaped them. Her dress was white and it whispered. He almost thought he heard the motion of her hands as she walked, and the infinitely small sound now, the white stir of her face turning when she discovered she was a moment away from a man who stood in the middle of the pavement waiting."

He also has a white fixation that was distracting, honestly: Clarisse was white, his wife was white, the books were white, stones were white, if there's any color described ever, it's white. Snow white, milk white, moon white, pale white, on and on and on.

It's interesting that part of the underlying premise of Fahrenheit is that the onset of special interest groups leads to the destruction of books, because each group finds something objectionable and censors it until eventually there is nothing left.  Interesting, because I feel like that has become such a popular position to take nowadays, that "political correctness is ruining free speech" and yet no one has brought Bradbury in on their side.  Probably because the people arguing it are not really here for fine literature.  And ironic because the people arguing it are those most likely to advocate for a prison society. 

I thought of a great way to end this review, but it was late at night and I was going to bed and didn't write it down.  You'll just have to imagine it.  Also, and not to sidetrack the issue, I just realized I've been imagining the world of Fahrenheit 451 as completely pastel colored, and I have no idea why.  Maybe because the whole thing strikes me as suburbia gone wild, and I have this weird association of suburbia and pastel colors since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  Gosh, I wish I knew how brains worked. Aaand we've come full circle for discussion of nuclear bombs!  Excellent! (let's ignore the fact that I just re-watched that scene and it is not pastel at all.  What the hell am I thinking of, then? Gosh darn it, it should be pastel! And I just looked up Stromae's music video for Papaoutai, which I ALSO thought was pastel, and it...only sort of is, and I'm out of ideas, so who knows where I came up with that, but it sure makes Fahrenheit 451 less spooky.  I'd love living in a pastel neighborhood.  It would almost make up for living in a dystopic version of the future.)

*No, I am not thinking of Edward Scissorhands, I've only seen parts of that movie, and that had to have been at least twenty years ago. Or am I? Isn't that a horrible thought, that something I saw only a glimpse of a lifetime ago would continue to distort every recollection I have?  Now, let's write a book based on that nightmare.

05 - A Book With At Least One Million Ratings On Goodreads