Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury


My rating: 4 of 5 stars


From Goodreads.com:  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.


First published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 is a classic novel set in the future when books forbidden by a totalitarian regime are burned. The hero, a book burner, suddenly discovers that books are flesh and blood ideas that cry out silently when put to the torch. -- from the Publisher
Read as audiobook. Narrator was the author himself.

>
A classic which I had not yet read, and with the passing of the author this year, decided it was time to correct this oversight.


Written in 1953, I thought this aged fairly well - which can be problematic for books that address the future, and now that future is here. 60 years forward is not an insignificant time span, really. Society has witnessed the burning of books several times: Hitler in WWII, Russia burned books, we’ve seen books burned in even more modern times across the globe, even here in the states. Library’s will dictate what they will and won’t carry on the shelves because books still carry the stigma of being dangerous, with the ability to corrupt peoples thoughts and minds.


I thought it was interesting to have turned the fireman into a policeman of sorts. A future society’s morality police. No longer there to protect and serve, only to protect from the insidiousness of what books can do.


Perhaps Bradbury’s future wasn’t all that far off in his depiction of ‘Wall TV’s’; one, two or three panels in a room immersing the characters in whatever TV program the government wants them to watch or interact with. There are some pretty massive plasma TV's on the market.  And aside from the governmental control dipicted in the book, today’s society is pretty immersed 24/7 in the world of electronic newsfeeds, social networking and games.

Would I have gotten as much out of this if I had read it 20 years ago? Hard to say. I’m glad to have added this to my ‘read’ list. Recommended.




View all my reviews