A review of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ by Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451 is a novel set in dystopian America against the backdrop of an impending war. Now in this fireproof future, firemen bring literature stashing rebels to heel. This is because every thought and idea that sways from the dictated normal is seditious. Argo books are public enemy #1. Fiction is a story of lies and only makes you more unhappy by stoking your emotions. So, burn it all away. Make sure that no one has a brain to think. Make sure that no one has any leisure to ponder. Flood them with as much content as you can. Glue their eyes to screens and steal away all their attention. In the pursuit of non existent goals, make them oblivious to the small joys in life.
Guy Montag, a fireman, has a picture perfect life. He has installed a third screen in his living room so that his wife have a better “family” experience. This “family” is a show that the government runs to lull citizens into a false sense of camaraderie. One day he meets Clarisse. This little girl with spark in her eyes and colour in her life, asks him a lot of questions. These make Guy uncomfortable but also make him think. Fate has it that she isn’t yet bleached and sanitised to fit into the world of orderly pales. Sooner or later the powers to be decide her family and she are not going to fit in and she disappears. This is the first tremor in his life. There are two more to follow and in the end, the walls in Guy’s head crumble and let the light in.
The second tremor in his life is a woman’s self immolation along with her books. Guys calls in sick after this and his captain visits him. The conversation that ensues is one of the two pivotal monologues in this book. Here I quote it verbatim, for it needs to no commentary:
Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you, Mrs. Montag), whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up. with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery, there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more”
Empty the theaters save for clowns and furnish the rooms with glass walls and pretty colors running up and down the walls like confetti or blood or Sherry or sauterne.
Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dish water. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay! Happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.
Guy breaks-down in front of his wife’s friends after this conversation. He then rushes to meet Faber, an acquaintance who he believes can help him. Faber assuages him and gives his thoughts a lot more clarity. He tells him that the world has reached this stage because of three reasons:
- Quality of information
- Lack of leisure to process that and think.
- Right to carry out actions based on learnings from the first two.
This is his third tremor. Faber along-with Guy now plots to overthrow the tyranny they are under. But, the fates intervene and Guy turns fugitive under very dramatic circumstances. Thus, in a swift stroke life fills colour into his world. First some shades of fire, then total darkness and finally earthen hues.
One can agree that the picture painted in this dystopian novel is not outlandish. It is a very slippery slope down this hill and one step in the wrong direction is all it takes.
Here is another quote from the book that resonated with me a lot:
It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the ‘parlor families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.
One can fathom Bradbury’s love for books from his introduction to this novel where he writes
… when Hitler burned a book I felt as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history they are one and the same flesh. Mind or body, put to the oven is a sinful practice….
This book is a love letter he pens down to books and a plethora of other things that make our lives bearable. I would definitely recommend you to pick this one up at least once.
