Fahrenheit 451: Ray Bradbury’s Firemen Who Burn Books
In a future society the government has banned books, and a curious, questioning girl like Clarisse McClellan is treated as an outcast. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, follows the fireman whose job is to burn those books, and the evening when a conversation with his young neighbour makes him question his life and his own happiness.
Author: Ray Bradbury (1920–2012)
Title: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Format: English paperback (HarperVoyager), 192 pages
Scope: Dystopian novel about censorship, mass entertainment and memory
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0006546064 (ASIN 0006546064)
Montag, Clarisse and Mildred
Guy Montag and his crew burn forbidden books. One evening, walking home, he meets Clarisse, whose free-thinking ideas unsettle him. At home he finds his wife, Mildred, has overdosed on sleeping pills and has to call for emergency help; she recovers, and seems to remember nothing. But Montag cannot stop thinking about the conversation with his neighbour.
In the following days, while his team raids the book-filled house of an old woman before the inevitable burning, Montag steals a book without his colleagues noticing. The woman refuses to leave her home and her books, and dies with them. Montag returns home shaken, hides the book under his pillow and tries to talk to Mildred, who cannot pay attention to anything he says. Later he learns that Clarisse has been killed by a speeding car.
Captain Beatty Explains the System
When Montag hints that he might stop being a fireman, his chief, Captain Beatty, visits him in person and explains how things came to be. Over the decades people embraced the new media, sport and an ever faster pace of life; books were cut down and dumbed down to suit short attention spans, while pressure groups objected to anything controversial. Comics, trade papers and sex magazines were allowed to remain for mindless entertainment. The government took advantage, turning firemen into guardians of peace of mind.
Montag confesses to Mildred that he has hidden a stash of books over the past year and proposes that they read them to see whether they are worth anything. Mildred, absorbed in her wall-sized television "parlour walls" and her friends, is a lost cause, so he turns to Faber, a retired English professor, for help in understanding them. The end of that road is best left for the reader to discover.
A Novel Typed in a Library Basement
Bradbury expanded Fahrenheit 451 from an earlier novella, "The Fireman", and wrote much of it on a coin-operated typewriter rented by the half hour in the basement of the library at the University of California, Los Angeles. The title refers to the temperature at which, he was told, book paper catches fire. He later insisted that the novel was less about government censorship than about how television and mass entertainment could make people stop reading on their own.
The Book People
The ending introduces a group of exiles living outside the city, each of whom has memorised a book so that it will survive: one person is Plato’s Republic, another a book of the Bible. With the help of Faber, a retired professor, Montag finds his way to them. It is the image most readers remember, and it answers the novel’s darkness with a quiet act of resistance. François Truffaut adapted the book for the cinema in 1966.
Pessimism with a Glimmer of Light
All of this makes it a sceptical and fairly pessimistic book about the future: humanity lulled to sleep, with very few people able to face society’s real problems. Yet it also casts some light, by suggesting that humanity can remember its mistakes and try not to repeat them. Seventy years on, its picture of screens, speed and short attention spans reads less like science fiction every year.
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