Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen. (Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury)

Member Name: pje

Product:	Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Date:	01/03/02 (1040 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's a brilliant book and you're ALLOWED to read it.

Disadvantages: There are no pictures, and it's full of people who don't exist disagreeing with each other.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books. Welcome to the future, where houses are fireproof and books are banned...and burned.
[ At this point I must cofess to plagiarism. Those first two sentences are 'borrowed' from every other review of Fahrenheit 451 there's ever been, but it's such a good line I had to use it. ]

Fahrenheit 451 was the synthesis of five short stories Ray Bradbury wrote in the early 1950's. Including "Bonfire" - about one man's thoughts on the night of the end of the world; "Bright Phoenix" about a small-town bigot whose book-burning activities are thwarted by people memorizing them; and "The Pedestrian" about a time in the future when walking is banned and pedestrians are treated like criminals - a tale based on an encounter he had with a cop in Los Angeles in 1951. Making use of a coin-operated typewriter on the UCLA campus, he rattled off "The Fireman" - which later became "Fahrenheit 451: the temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns." In 1953 Bradbury sold the story to Hugh Hefner (for $150) and it was serialized in the second, third and fourth issues of Playboy.

So, as I was saying, Montag is a fireman, he smells of kerosene and his job is to burn books. But one day he meets a teenage girl called Clarisse who asks him if he is happy, and he realizes that he's not. Then when he gets home, his wife Mildred has taken an overdose of sleeping pills - something which happens a lot in this dystopic society.

This book offers a subtle version of totalitarianism (more akin to Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" than George Orwell's "1984") in which the powers-that-be control people by anaesthetizing them with wall-to-wall television - literally. Houses have parlours with television screens on all four walls, playing interactive shows. In a way it's the exact the opposite of 1984: Big Brother
isn't watching THEM - THEY are watching Big Brother.
[ Now that WAS my line... © pje 2002 ]

It's a frightening world in which kids break windows, go joy-riding and smash up cars; and where communication devices called "ear thimbles" reside in everyone's lug-holes. It's a world dominated by television and advertisements and where no-one ever reads. And, in the background, there is an ongoing war with some enemy from abroad. It doesn't bear thinking about, does it?

Montag is unsettled when first Clarisse disappears, and then a woman, caught with a stash of books, chooses to go up in flames with them. During the course of his duties, he has pocketed a few books and hid them in his house, and to the horror of his wife, he starts reading them.

Meanwhile, his boss (Captain Beatty) is clearly suspicious about Montag's behaviour and warns him how dangerous books are: how they all disagree with each other and are full of people who never existed...

" A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. [...]

Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of the state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a *sense* of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. "

Books... you are the weakest link, goodbye! ;¬(

Fahrenheit 451 is a short but profound novel, with an exciting climax i
nvolving an eight-legged mechanical hound programmed to hunt and kill...

In 1966, François Truffaut directed a classic film version of Fahrenheit 451, starring Julie Christie, so you don't even have to read the book at all, just switch on your parlour wall televisor screen and veg out. But bear in mind what Bradbury points out in his preface - you don't HAVE to burn books if people stop reading them of their own accord...

And you can always put people off books by bumping up the price too...

¶ Paperback: £4.99 ¶ ISBN: 0006546064 ¶ pp 172 ¶ 1993 ¶
¶ Paperback: £7.99 ¶ ISBN: 0007117108 ¶ pp 172 ¶ 2001 ¶
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