Book Review: Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

1953

Awards: Retro Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Fahrenheit 451 is about a man, Guy Montag, who is a fireman. In Montag’s time, many years in the future from ours, it is illegal to read books. And the job of a fireman is not to put out fires, but to burn any books he finds.

The reason that books are illegal (we hear from Montag's boss, the Fire Chief) is that books make people unhappy. Books can be violent, melancholic, confusing, requiring of deep thought, and full of different philosophies and conflicting ideas that require hard work to reconcile. This makes people confused and upset. By burning the books, firemen are standing guard against societal unhappiness.

To make themselves even more constantly happy, people have also surrounded themselves with distracting stimuli in their homes, businesses, and subways. Everywhere they go they are assaulted by advertisements, jingles, and empty, content-free virtual reality dramas. Left with nothing but vapid entertainment and an absence of introspection or critical thought, society has become almost sociopathic. Suicide, murder, and drug overdoses are common. People think nothing of hitting animals and even people while they are driving.

          

At the beginning of the book, fireman Montag loves his job; he gets a ridiculous grin on his face as books turn into ashes. He enjoys having a respected place in his community. And he thinks he has a perfectly fine relationship with his wife Mildred.

But one day on the way home from work he meets a girl, Clarisse, and her conversation is so radically different from what he’s used to that it sets him off balance. Clarisse observes the world, asks questions, notices details. She likes having actual conversations with other people. She gives him presents of flowers and chestnuts and autumn leaves.

He can’t stop thinking about Clarisse, and that makes him start questioning everything. And once he starts questioning, it isn’t long before everything starts falling apart. He realizes that his life is empty. He and his wife never have conversations; she spends all day watching empty dramas on their wall-size TVs. And when she’s not watching TV, she listens to constant chatter on her earbud radios, or takes sleeping pills to conk out.

And he realizes that all this time he has been burning books without even once reading any of them, to see if they really are as bad as he’s been led to believe.

So at his next book burning call, he slips one into his shirt and takes it home. And then we discover that he’s been doing that almost unconsciously, blindly, for quite a while.

And then Clarisse and her entire societal-norm-flouting family mysteriously disappear from their house.

And then Montag goes to a call where they are burning the books hidden in the home of an elderly woman. She is so distraught by them burning her library that she throws herself on the fire, and he sees her burn to death before his eyes.

Oscar Werner as Guy Montag in François Truffaut's
somewhat plot-altered, but still Bradbury-approved,
film version of Fahrenheit 451

At this point, Montag knows he can never go back to his job. He is so distraught at having to question everything that he has taken for granted that he makes a series of bad missteps, from showing his wife and her friends his books to getting in contact with a member of the book-saving underground. And when the firemen finally show up at his own house, Montag knows he’s in deep trouble.

~

When I was in sixth grade, a family friend gave me an anthology of Ray Bradbury’s short stories. I didn’t have any idea who Bradbury was, but I gobbled the book up. Stories like A Sound of Thunder, Skeleton, and There Will Come Soft Rains were vivid and disturbing and delightful; I read them over and over again. When I was able to get my hands on more of his short stories and a copy of The Martian Chronicles, I gobbled those up, too.

             

But I only first read Fahrenheit 451 because I had to, for a class assignment in junior high school. I liked it all right; I enjoyed the story and I was surprised that my teacher would assign such a modern and readable book. But it didn’t make much of a deep philosophical impact on me at the time. I don’t think I had enough life context to give it meaning.

When I was in college and had gained a little more experience and knowledge of world history, I read Fahrenheit 451 again. It had a lot more power for me than it had before. It resonated with my outrage at real-life book burnings and at people who wanted to proscribe what other people could read and think simply because it bothered them. I saw it as an artful illustration of the evilness and impossibility of thought censorship.

And now, many years later, I have read it a third time. My life is completely different now than it was when I was in either junior high school or college. I have a full-time job that eats up the bulk of my week. I have family obligations and stresses and much less leisure time to fit in all the projects and travel and socializing I want to do. In the evenings I often sit on the couch and watch TV and let my mind go blank. And this book spoke to me now in a different way than it had before: this time, it made me think about how I am constantly running, fending off demands on my attention, and how I allow the self-centeredness and lack of content in the media around me to use up my time and mental energy so that I don’t take the time to observe, listen, create, and think.

Fahrenheit 451 is, itself, the kind of book that the firemen were protecting society against. It is melancholic, unresolved, and requiring of deep thought. It is fiction, but it forces us to take a hard look at our reality. And that’s exactly what makes it so important.

I think one of the marks of a great book is that it has richness enough to mean many things to many people, and all of them can be true. This is certainly true of Fahrenheit 451. It carries many messages: about the destructiveness of censorship, about the need to step back and be in the world, about the need to relate to other people, about the need to be curious, about coping with clashing inputs to come up with your own standards of what is right. To do all this and to do it in the form of a well-written and entertaining story is beyond impressive.