Before I start writing about my Sunday Salon selection for today, a word of warning. Fahrenheit 451 has been out for nearly six decades. I will be freely spoiling the plot. Do not read on if you care.
I’ve had Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451 in my recommended science fiction reading, but I haven’t read the novel in 10 years. I thought I would refresh myself on the book. I had forgotten a lot of things, but found that some scenes were still vivid in my memory.
The book starts off with one of the best opening lines I can think of: It was a pleasure to burn.
Guy Montag is a fireman. He lives sometime in the near future. His job is not to put out fires anymore. Houses have been fire-proofed. His job is to start fires, to burn things. Specifically, books, which are now illegal. It’s been a good burning to start off the book. He heads home.
One of the neighbor girls, Clarisse McLellan, waits for him on the street. She’s a little different. She wants to see what a fireman is like. Clarisse doesn’t find him nearly so frightening as she imagines. She talks. And she questions. As Montag states, You think too many things.
But she also asks him in parting, Are you happy?
Montag hasn’t ever considered the question.
He walks in on his wife Mildred, in the bedroom, passed out. She’s taken a whole bottle of sleeping pills. After a quick visit from the suicide prevention people, who pump her stomach, they tell Montag that they see this all the time. Millie doesn’t remember the incident the next day and is sure that she only took the regular amount. Then she goes back to her parlor television. Three walls of a chattering something that is probably similar to today’s reality television. Millie pesters Guy for when they will get the fourth wall installed. She lives in there. She can’t remember what it is they tell her. But it’s comforting nothingness nevertheless.
And so Montag’s visit with Clarisse starts to make him think, as do further encounters with the young dropout on his way to and from work. And he begins to realize he isn’t happy, that his life is empty. So he starts looking to the one thing that is forbidden to him as possibly his salvation. Books. He starts to question his job.
The first part of the book is probably the hardest for me. Although I have a fair amount of cynicism in me, I have a hard time believing in the dystopias that populate science fiction. How does something like this arise? The explanation that Bradbury uses to set up his milieu isn’t something that I buy. Oh, I can believe that we’ll have governments that ban books. But I have a hard time believing that we could turn around a job such as fireman so completely. I can’t think of another job that is so 180° opposite today from what it once used to be.
I also have a hard time believing that a government would have such success in getting the population all together on this, even gradually. There’s are dissenters in the novel, to be sure. Otherwise the job of book burner wouldn’t even be needed. But the book readers are few and far between. All the oppressive regimes of which I am aware, there exists significantly more opposition and discontent than exhibited in Fahrenheit 451.
These are minor quibbles though. It’s science fiction. Bradbury gets to ask what if?
by the very nature of the genre. what if books were burned and the population did go along with it?
He paints an increasingly vapid society. In addition to the parlor televisions, cars travel at incredible speeds. Billboards must be stretched into football field length for drivers to even read them. Millie often just drives fast for a long time to work out whatever underlying angst she has. The proposition is that discontent is something that people dislike so much they will resolve
it by drowning it out in themselves and ignoring it. That isn’t so hard to believe. Some of our current entertainment is so empty that it easily resembles the television parlors in the book. Reality television, popular music, singles bars. It’s still a long way to what’s in the book though.
Thing is, Montag was ripe for the pickings. Clarisse was just a catalyst. Montag had already stashed away a few books he’d saved from fires. He’d already caught a furtive former English professor and let him go, though keeping his number. He returns to the professor, Faber, to ask him whether he’s on the right track or not. Can the books answer his discontent?
Faber tells him it’s not books that are the answer. It’ something that used to be in some books. It’s something that could be in the television, but isn’t. They could carry detail. Freshness of life. Instead their entertainment shows wax mannequins. In other words, it isn’t so much books as remembering experiences, whether they are good or bad, so long as they are real.
Faber and Montag hatch a plan. Multiple plans perhaps. Montag will return to the firehouse. His suspicious captain will want him to return the book he’s stolen, though he doesn’t know Montag has stolen others. Perhaps Faber and Montag will copy the books they have. They might plant them in firehouses to sow discontent. They aren’t sure. But Faber does have a small earpiece that let’s him hear and talk to someone, like you’d see with the F.B.I. Montag will return to the firehouse with the earpiece, and Faber will help him suss out whether Captain Beatty will cause trouble or not.
But Montag is a hothead. Before he even gets to the firehouse, he’s listened to his wife and her friends in the parlor. He wants to wake them up. He wants to throw books in their faces. And so he does, with Faber yelling at him in his ear that he’s being foolish. Not surprisingly, the thoroughly indoctrinated ladies freak out and rush off rather than wake up to their own oppression. Which ends up messing up the plan. It gets Bradbury’s book stretched out a lot more!
I mentioned before that Beatty was suspicious? Beatty is the best character in the book, though Bradbury did something a bit later that I really didn’t like. I’ll get to that in a bit. Prior to Montag meeting up with Faber, Beatty visits him at home. Many of the firemen have a crisis of conscience, and Beatty has learned to recognize it. During the visit, Beatty explains how firemen became firemen. How people didn’t want the ideas in the books, because it made them unhappy. How books were full of philosophers picking fights with other philosophers. Here’s the thing: Beatty quotes quite a few books. As Captain, he’s had to read a few to know if they were something that needed burning or not. And he leaves Montag with a warning, that when firemen have their crisis and take a book to look inside, the department lets them. Gives them 24 hours to do so and then turn it in.
Montag goes in for his shift and turns in one of his books. The first call of the night brings the firemen to Montag’s house! And this is where Beatty really becomes interesting! He makes Montag prove his devotion to the department by burning his own house! The women had all called in tips on the books. It’s a very twisted scene, Montag burning his own house, when he knows he will be arrested right afterward for having possession of the books. The scene immediately afterward is classic as well! It brings a new twist to the term suicide by cop
. Beatty pushing Montag by quoting even more books, and Montag finally breaking, turning the flame thrower on Beatty, thinking he can get away. What I really didn’t like was Bradbury having Montag come to the realization later that Beatty wanted to die!
I loved the twisted ambiguity, and that took away from it.
The rest of the book is partially a chase scene from a bad pulp book, which is great considering Fahrenheit 451 comes from the pulp era. In the movie, it all ends with Montag getting away to find a group in the woods where each person memorizes a single book. The scene has them all walking around reciting their book. They introduce themselves by the book they remember. The book version is a little different. The group instead knows that once a person has read a book, it’s in their head, and they’ve developed a method to retrieve it later. A little less dramatic and a little more science fiction-ey. In the woods they wait until war (or something else) destroys society and the knowledge of the books is needed again.
Lastly, I want to mention that I think the cover by Joseph Mugnaini is awesome! If that isn’t an evocative painting I don’t know what is. Click through on the image above to see a larger version.
Title: Fahrenheit 451
Author: Ray Bradbury
Cover artist: Joseph Mugnaini
Imprint / publisher: Del Rey / Ballantine / Random House
Format: Paperback
Length: 179 p.
Publication date: August 1996 (originally 1951)
ISBN-10: 0-345-41001-7
Subject: State-sponsored terrorism — Fiction
Subject: Totalitarianism — Fiction
Subject: Book burning — Fiction
Subject: Censorship — Fiction
LC classification: PS3503.R167 F3 1996
2 Comments
I don’t have high realism standards for science fiction — so if something is implausible I’ll just take it as parabolic. But then I’m not a very good critic :)
I think one reason that this sort of dystopia is hard to believe is that in this country and in “normal” countries, the general trend is toward liberalization and more personal freedom. And to extrapolate from “now” to a F451 kind of situation, we’d have to be going in the other direction.
However, there have been times and places where things have gotten more oppressive rather than less… Iran and the Ayatollah comes to mind, but there are probably other examples in the Middle East, Africa, South America, etc.
So maybe one thing to think about is that this does happen (how? why?). What of my own oppression am I not aware of? And how does it work to be a dissenter, how much self destruction do you risk vs compromising your ideals to get on with your life ?
The dystopian societies that chill me the most are the ones that sound like they very well could happen. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale are two that come to mind. Though, like Fahrenheit 451, it’s been a few years since I’ve read Atwood.