Burn baby burn (again!) (Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury)

Member Name: theblackstar

Product:	Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Date:	26/10/04 (82 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's a book something we should all read, A scary comment on or world today, A prue classic

Disadvantages: That more people don't read

When I was about 11 years old I was obsessed with reading and writing Sci-Fi. Actively encouraged to both be a avid reader and writer my English teacher at the time handed me a book to read. Telling me he thought I should read this book I took it home. Eventually over the weekend I picked the book up and started reading. I didn’t put it down!

Ray Bradbury outside of the US is somewhat of an underrated writer. I have rated him since my childhood, and in particular that book. Fahrenheit 451, is a book about books, a book about the burning of books. But behind it there is much more than that, as I saw in the book when I re-read it as an adult, and was even more blown away by it than when I first read it as a child. A story full of social commentary about modern society, a prediction of a future in which we now live. Up there with 1984 and Brave New World this is a book that predicted our world with scary clarity.

Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which book paper burns, and in the story Montag the central character is fireman whose job it is to burn books. This is a world were all reading material is banned, and free thinking is against the will of the state. People are kept in line with state supplied drugs and huge screen TV’s in their homes (sound familiar yet?!) There is also the Hound, the robotic sniff dog that hunts down books and their owners. The Hound symbolises the world around it. It is without emotion, without reason, overseeing / guarding a people without purpose, without thought, without desire (familiar yet?!!) Like the Hound, society is mindless, “it just functions”, as Capt. Beatty Montag’s boss says of the Hound.

Montag eventually comes across Clarisse, who is a free spirit, and opens Montag to the idea of thought, of dare he think it, reading! Mildred, Montag’s wife plods through life watching her wall sized TV’s, and dreams of getting the next wall filled with a huge screen, while she interacts with the soap-opera. This is a terrible world, a world were books only survive the flames by being memorised by a few. These nomadic outcasts become the books, they are referred to by the books they have memorised, they pass them down as oral history. This a world gone mad, and world turned upside down, a world in reverse.

A book that should be read as a book, and not seen as a film (see my film review of the 1966 version.)

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