Reveiw: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – Something has to stop burning

Novel: Dystopia, Sci-fi. Contains drugs, obscenity, adult situations, violence, and disturbing imagery.

(This review contains minor spoilers)

I read this book as a summer project, and I was permanently changed. It is my all-time favorite book and probably will remain so for quite some time. I can remember so many great scenes from it, one of the things that Ray Bradbury is great at is his ability to set a scene. He can capture your imagination and use it to form a vibrant and engrossing atmosphere. I remember how many times per day I would read some because I couldn't keep my eyes off of it.

Our protagonist is Guy Montag, a fireman. But of course his job isn't to put out fires, instead, he and a team of other men, are hired by the government to burst into homes with books in them, and burn all the books to ashes. The houses of this not too distant future are fireproof, so the firemen may cover all the books in kerosene and light them on fire without destroying the property.

After a “successful” night, Guy decides to walk home and on the way he meets a teenage girl named Clarisse. She speaks to him honestly, asks him blatant questions, and talks strangely, which disturbs him, so he asks her if she knows what the salamander (The symbol of the firemen) on his apron means. This grants, even more, insight into their society, where these men are respected and feared, and where young people are expected not to ask questions or be too frank. They are also not expected to walk around at night, in fact, no one except the two of them is out walking at this time, everyone is inside watching TV.

The two of them have a conversation, and she bids him farewell. Once Guy gets home we start to get a fairly clear picture of the relationship between him and his wife, Mildred. When Guy thinks about the distance between him and his wife he thinks that there are “Three walls between them” to which he refers to their three TV screens (Each covers a wall, and all three are in the same room).

There is one scene involving the two of them which very much shows their dynamic or the lack thereof. Guy tries to speak to her about something important (I don’t want to spoil anything else) and she ignores him, to wrapped up in listening to her music, which she listens to via a device which is alarmingly similar to earbuds and an IPhone.

Which brings us to a very important part of the book (in my eyes at least it is important) how much it resembles today. The book industry is still very large today, however so many of the books released are knock offs, or follow the exact same plot. The same can be said for our TV shows, which I am not going to pretend that all TV is bad, but in my opinion, most of it isn’t very good. The same thing can be said for our movies, and, our video games. 

One of the TV shows that Mildred watches is called the White clown and the entire shows is merely a series tiny skits with nothing to do with one another, one after the next. It is disturbing how Bradbury seems to predict the rise of giant flat-screens, iPod music, and YouTube comedy videos. This book was published in 1953, before TV became violent and vulgar, long before the internet. Which doesn't exist in his world, but the TV they watch is very reminiscent if something can be reminiscent of something else which doesn't exist yet, of what many people do on YouTube, watching a 20-second clip after 20-second clip (rinse, wash, and repeat). Free time has turned into ingesting the taste of funny, not that actual thing, let alone anything which challenges you. 

I’m not going to pretend that there wasn't bad TV in the 1950’s, but I stand by the fact that Bradbury has made many accurate predictions of what was to come and is the present. All of this is just another reason why the book works, it isn't just “Books are better than TV” it is also a society where people don’t walk, they don’t talk to each other, and they are literally programmed not to care what their government does. They are in the middle of a war with a country which they don’t know the name of. Their society is built off of personal satisfaction and ignorance, and their society and ours if we are not careful, will crumble because they have given up their liberty in exchange for temporary bliss.

Keep in mind that this was written during the McCarthy era and Ray Bradbury said in an interview in 1956 that he wrote it because he was afraid of book burning, but the book goes to say so much about the future and what our society would become.

The book has a perfect message, a perfect beginning, and a perfect ending. If you haven’t read this masterpiece then I suggest you buy it, if you already read it then I suggest you read it again, if you don’t like Bradbury then I suggest you read this. And if you don’t have enough money to buy it then I suggest you steal it (I’m kidding, mostly). The book is fantastic and you won’t forget it for a long while.

I rate it Brilliant.

If you haven’t read my previous posts, I suggest you go read as soon as you care done reading this ;), here is a chart of how I review books.

Awful - Bad - Good - Great - Brilliant

Thank you for reading and have a nice day!