Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.86 AVERAGE
3.86 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
reflective
tense
medium-paced
challenging
dark
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
“It was a pleasure to burn.”
Thus begins one of the most famous books in science fiction.
These days, nearly 65 years after its original publication, it is generally known by science fiction fans and non-science fiction fans alike for its key idea – that in the future firemen will not put out fires but set them. Their job is to burn books. (The title of the book comes from the fact that 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper burns.)
I first came to it, though I had a general idea of the plot, through its visual version. Francois Truffaut’s movie version, his first English movie, was released in 1966 and starred Oscar Werner and Julie Christie. It is a strangely subdued, sombre and bleak portrayal of most of, but not all of, the book. It is, for all of its faults, still one of my go-to movies, appropriate for an autumnal evening or a rainy Sunday afternoon.
The book, which I first read in the early-1980’s, on the back of the movie, both surprised me and frustrated me. For anyone else, who, like me, comes to the book after the movie, there are surprises. The general plot is the mainly the same, although many elements of the book are altered. It is, if you like, an alternative version of an alternative future.
I had by this time read some of Bradbury’s short stories, with somewhat mixed results. I remember reading The Veldt, The Playground, The Foghorn and The Pedestrian – I’m sure there were others - and enjoyed them. Others I had admired, but had not loved them. They were admittedly, passionate, emotional, even lyrical – but not, to my young mind, “science-fiction”. As much as I had enjoyed the television series of The Martian Chronicles (starring Rock Hudson), I was disappointed by the lack of scientific accuracy and rigour there. This was magnified when I read the collection of short stories the television series was based on. They were fanciful, enigmatic - and fantasy, not SF. (Something which Ray would wholeheartedly agree with.)
Fahrenheit 451 was more “science-fiction-y” than many of the other Bradbury stories I had read, I was pleased to say, though still not as science-fictional as, say, Isaac Asimov’s Robot stories or Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nevertheless, I had to admit that there was a certain something.
And on re-reading, many years later, and with experience and the passage of time, I can now appreciate it more, much more than my teenage-self did.
"You weren't there, you didn't see," he said. "There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing."
PLOT SUMMARY
In the future following a war, Guy Montag is a fireman – in this future firemen go around burning books and using a robotic sniffer-dog named “The Hound” to assist them in his work. He is married, to Mildred, and they live a peaceful, straightforward life. One day Montag meets his neighbour, a teenage girl named Clarisse McClellan, whose different and radical lifestyle leaves Montag to question his life and his occupation. Whilst Montag is at work, Mildred stays at home surrounded by, and interacting with, her television programmes which are shown throughout the day on three walls of her parlour. All seems well, but unbeknownst to Montag, Mildred is deeply unhappy, as Montag finds one day when he arrives home to find Mildred has taken an overdose of sleeping pills
To Montag’s horror, he discovers that this is not an uncommon occurrence in suburban America as the medical team who arrive to pump Mildred clean tell him of their work.
As the week progresses, Montag begins to wonder more about the way everyone lives and the purpose of life. He is tempted to keep books and read them. This does not go unnoticed by Montag’s fire chief at the station, Captain Beatty. Clarisse disappears but Montag is told that she died after being hit by a car and the rest of her family moved away as a result. Montag forms a friendship with an ex-English professor, Mr. Faber, who is connected to an underground network of exiled readers.
The end of the novel shows us how Montag deals with the situation when he is discovered to be a book hoarder whilst at the same time a nuclear war begins.
Now I can see that Fahrenheit 451 is not 'just' about a gloomy dystopian future (although that is part of it, admittedly). It is really about something much dearer to Ray, and myself – it is more about the value of books, the necessity of libraries and the importance of knowledge, all things that Bradbury himself loved and valued. And what Bradbury does in his future nightmare is deny all of these things to his characters.
Of course, there is one big flaw to this, which I remember thinking when I first read the novel – if people spend all of their time looking at television, how do they know how to read, and understand what they’re reading? In these days of visual imagery smart phones and emojis, do we need vocabulary?
The answer is, of course, that they do read, albeit simply.
“It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.”
The important point made by Bradbury is that the lives of the masses are poorer without it, and that ultimately they become uncritical and unquestioning - they only read what they are told to/allowed to read:
"Montag, take my word for it, I've had to read a few in my time, to know what I was about, and the books say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe. They're about non-existent people, figments of imagination, if they're fiction. And if they're non-fiction, it's worse, one professor calling another an idiot, one philosopher screaming down another's gullet. All of them running about, putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun. You come away lost."
The similarities between this and communism, where everything is done for the good of the state, is not a subtle one. From the viewpoint of 2017, similar claims have been made about fiction, fiction masquerading as reality and fake news, although is usually through social media and the visual medium.
Nevertheless, there is an idea throughout Fahrenheit 451 that books are more than print and paper. They actually become emotional things – you can grow to love them, regard them as old friends, react to them. It is clear throughout that this is Bradbury’s own view, that Bradbury knows this, but then in Fahrenheit 451 shows us what would happen in a world that doesn’t have them.
"What traitors books can be! You think they’re backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives."
By showing us the negative, Fahrenheit 451 reinforces the point that prose, vocabulary and creative thought are important and beneficial.
Bradbury also uses this to pick up the argument that reading books is more worthwhile than watching or interacting with television. Books are more creative and immersive, and more complex. This is shown when Montag crashes a girl’s night that Mildred has set up. He makes the visitors all sit down and he reads them some poetry out loud. The reaction of the visitors is unexpectedly startling, and not what is usually experienced by being involved in interactive wall-to-wall television:
Mrs. Bowles stood up and glared at Montag. "You see? I knew it, that's what I wanted to prove! I knew it would happen! I've always said, poetry and tears, poetry and suicide and crying and awful feelings, poetry and sickness; all that mush! Now I've had it proved to me. You're nasty, Mr. Montag, you're nasty!"
And, of course, the real reason for denying people the right to read text is that you can control what they do, think and say:
“With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.”
What is the book’s strength is that, even when we know what it suggests could happen is unlikely today, the power of the lyrical prose still keeps our attention. Bradbury is known for his emotive use of language, his ability to present thoughts as near-poetry, and this is what I remember, even now.
For example, a speech from Captain Beatty to Montag when Montag pulls a sickie is a glorious rant, and one that shows that Beattie has himself, and presumably without permission, read books, even if he takes quotes from them out of context:
“Do you know, I had a dream an hour ago. I lay down for a cat-nap and in this dream you and I, Montag, got into a furious debate on books. You towered with rage, yelled quotes at me. I calmly parried every thrust. Power, I said, And you, quoting Dr. Johnson, said `Knowledge is more than equivalent to force!' And I said, `Well, Dr. Johnson also said, dear boy, that "He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.'" Stick with the fireman, Montag. All else is dreary chaos!"...Beatty chuckled. "And you said, quoting, `Truth will come to light, murder will not be hid long!' And I cried in good humour, 'Oh God, he speaks only of his horse!' And `The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.' And you yelled, 'This age thinks better of a gilded fool, than of a threadbare saint in wisdom's school!' And I whispered gently, 'The dignity of truth is lost with much protesting.' And you screamed, 'Carcasses bleed at the sight of the murderer!' And I said, patting your hand, 'What, do I give you trench mouth?' And you shrieked, 'Knowledge is power!' and 'A dwarf on a giant's shoulders of the furthest of the two!' and I summed my side up with rare serenity in, 'The folly of mistaking a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself as an oracle, is inborn in us, Mr. Valry once said.'" Montag's head whirled sickeningly. He felt beaten unmercifully on brow, eyes, nose, lips, chin, on shoulders, on upflailing arms..."Oh, you were scared silly," said Beatty, "for I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point!.... And at the very end of my dream, along I came with the Salamander and said, Going my way? And you got in and we drove back to the firehouse in beatific silence, all dwindled away to peace." Beatty let Montag's wrist go, let the hand slump limply on the table. "All's well that is well in the end." “
In such rhetoric Beatty shows that he has become the voice of government-serving services – in another book he would be called Big Brother.
There are some caveats to the book. It’s not perfect. Not all aspects have aged well, and in places the tone can seem a little shrill or linear to today’s more nuanced tastes. The richness of the prose can seem a little stilted today. The use of a nuclear war as part of the plot clearly mirrors the fears of 1950’s America but do come across badly, forgetting the wider impact of atomic damage and the fact that radiation does not usually contain itself to small areas of the world. In places the need for books, but only ‘the right books’ can come across as elitist and snobbish, which is not what Bradbury was proposing at all.
But overall, there’s still a lot to enjoy and gain from reading Fahrenheit 451. Like a lot of the best science-fiction, it leaves you with things to think about when you’ve finished. Even now, 60+ years after its publication, it still has the power to generate lots to think about, in terms of individual’s liberties and rights and the role and purpose of governments. It is also rather memorable, as it vividly evokes what for many is a nightmare – a world without books and without knowledge, heading towards a potential nuclear holocaust.
In summary, as much as I love the film version (and there are differences between the book and the film, admittedly some worse but some for the better, I feel), the book may actually achieve its objective as being a richer experience than the visual medium. Which is what Bradbury would have wanted, I feel.
In 1954, Fahrenheit 451 won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and the Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal. It has since won the Prometheus "Hall of Fame" Award in 1984 and a 1954 "Retro" Hugo Award, one of only four Best Novel Retro Hugos ever given, in 2004. Bradbury was honored with a Spoken Word Grammy nomination for his 1976 audiobook version.
Thus begins one of the most famous books in science fiction.
These days, nearly 65 years after its original publication, it is generally known by science fiction fans and non-science fiction fans alike for its key idea – that in the future firemen will not put out fires but set them. Their job is to burn books. (The title of the book comes from the fact that 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper burns.)
I first came to it, though I had a general idea of the plot, through its visual version. Francois Truffaut’s movie version, his first English movie, was released in 1966 and starred Oscar Werner and Julie Christie. It is a strangely subdued, sombre and bleak portrayal of most of, but not all of, the book. It is, for all of its faults, still one of my go-to movies, appropriate for an autumnal evening or a rainy Sunday afternoon.
The book, which I first read in the early-1980’s, on the back of the movie, both surprised me and frustrated me. For anyone else, who, like me, comes to the book after the movie, there are surprises. The general plot is the mainly the same, although many elements of the book are altered. It is, if you like, an alternative version of an alternative future.
I had by this time read some of Bradbury’s short stories, with somewhat mixed results. I remember reading The Veldt, The Playground, The Foghorn and The Pedestrian – I’m sure there were others - and enjoyed them. Others I had admired, but had not loved them. They were admittedly, passionate, emotional, even lyrical – but not, to my young mind, “science-fiction”. As much as I had enjoyed the television series of The Martian Chronicles (starring Rock Hudson), I was disappointed by the lack of scientific accuracy and rigour there. This was magnified when I read the collection of short stories the television series was based on. They were fanciful, enigmatic - and fantasy, not SF. (Something which Ray would wholeheartedly agree with.)
Fahrenheit 451 was more “science-fiction-y” than many of the other Bradbury stories I had read, I was pleased to say, though still not as science-fictional as, say, Isaac Asimov’s Robot stories or Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nevertheless, I had to admit that there was a certain something.
And on re-reading, many years later, and with experience and the passage of time, I can now appreciate it more, much more than my teenage-self did.
"You weren't there, you didn't see," he said. "There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing."
PLOT SUMMARY
In the future following a war, Guy Montag is a fireman – in this future firemen go around burning books and using a robotic sniffer-dog named “The Hound” to assist them in his work. He is married, to Mildred, and they live a peaceful, straightforward life. One day Montag meets his neighbour, a teenage girl named Clarisse McClellan, whose different and radical lifestyle leaves Montag to question his life and his occupation. Whilst Montag is at work, Mildred stays at home surrounded by, and interacting with, her television programmes which are shown throughout the day on three walls of her parlour. All seems well, but unbeknownst to Montag, Mildred is deeply unhappy, as Montag finds one day when he arrives home to find Mildred has taken an overdose of sleeping pills
To Montag’s horror, he discovers that this is not an uncommon occurrence in suburban America as the medical team who arrive to pump Mildred clean tell him of their work.
As the week progresses, Montag begins to wonder more about the way everyone lives and the purpose of life. He is tempted to keep books and read them. This does not go unnoticed by Montag’s fire chief at the station, Captain Beatty. Clarisse disappears but Montag is told that she died after being hit by a car and the rest of her family moved away as a result. Montag forms a friendship with an ex-English professor, Mr. Faber, who is connected to an underground network of exiled readers.
The end of the novel shows us how Montag deals with the situation when he is discovered to be a book hoarder whilst at the same time a nuclear war begins.
------------------
Now I can see that Fahrenheit 451 is not 'just' about a gloomy dystopian future (although that is part of it, admittedly). It is really about something much dearer to Ray, and myself – it is more about the value of books, the necessity of libraries and the importance of knowledge, all things that Bradbury himself loved and valued. And what Bradbury does in his future nightmare is deny all of these things to his characters.
Of course, there is one big flaw to this, which I remember thinking when I first read the novel – if people spend all of their time looking at television, how do they know how to read, and understand what they’re reading? In these days of visual imagery smart phones and emojis, do we need vocabulary?
The answer is, of course, that they do read, albeit simply.
“It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.”
The important point made by Bradbury is that the lives of the masses are poorer without it, and that ultimately they become uncritical and unquestioning - they only read what they are told to/allowed to read:
"Montag, take my word for it, I've had to read a few in my time, to know what I was about, and the books say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe. They're about non-existent people, figments of imagination, if they're fiction. And if they're non-fiction, it's worse, one professor calling another an idiot, one philosopher screaming down another's gullet. All of them running about, putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun. You come away lost."
The similarities between this and communism, where everything is done for the good of the state, is not a subtle one. From the viewpoint of 2017, similar claims have been made about fiction, fiction masquerading as reality and fake news, although is usually through social media and the visual medium.
Nevertheless, there is an idea throughout Fahrenheit 451 that books are more than print and paper. They actually become emotional things – you can grow to love them, regard them as old friends, react to them. It is clear throughout that this is Bradbury’s own view, that Bradbury knows this, but then in Fahrenheit 451 shows us what would happen in a world that doesn’t have them.
"What traitors books can be! You think they’re backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives."
By showing us the negative, Fahrenheit 451 reinforces the point that prose, vocabulary and creative thought are important and beneficial.
Bradbury also uses this to pick up the argument that reading books is more worthwhile than watching or interacting with television. Books are more creative and immersive, and more complex. This is shown when Montag crashes a girl’s night that Mildred has set up. He makes the visitors all sit down and he reads them some poetry out loud. The reaction of the visitors is unexpectedly startling, and not what is usually experienced by being involved in interactive wall-to-wall television:
Mrs. Bowles stood up and glared at Montag. "You see? I knew it, that's what I wanted to prove! I knew it would happen! I've always said, poetry and tears, poetry and suicide and crying and awful feelings, poetry and sickness; all that mush! Now I've had it proved to me. You're nasty, Mr. Montag, you're nasty!"
And, of course, the real reason for denying people the right to read text is that you can control what they do, think and say:
“With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.”
What is the book’s strength is that, even when we know what it suggests could happen is unlikely today, the power of the lyrical prose still keeps our attention. Bradbury is known for his emotive use of language, his ability to present thoughts as near-poetry, and this is what I remember, even now.
For example, a speech from Captain Beatty to Montag when Montag pulls a sickie is a glorious rant, and one that shows that Beattie has himself, and presumably without permission, read books, even if he takes quotes from them out of context:
“Do you know, I had a dream an hour ago. I lay down for a cat-nap and in this dream you and I, Montag, got into a furious debate on books. You towered with rage, yelled quotes at me. I calmly parried every thrust. Power, I said, And you, quoting Dr. Johnson, said `Knowledge is more than equivalent to force!' And I said, `Well, Dr. Johnson also said, dear boy, that "He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.'" Stick with the fireman, Montag. All else is dreary chaos!"...Beatty chuckled. "And you said, quoting, `Truth will come to light, murder will not be hid long!' And I cried in good humour, 'Oh God, he speaks only of his horse!' And `The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.' And you yelled, 'This age thinks better of a gilded fool, than of a threadbare saint in wisdom's school!' And I whispered gently, 'The dignity of truth is lost with much protesting.' And you screamed, 'Carcasses bleed at the sight of the murderer!' And I said, patting your hand, 'What, do I give you trench mouth?' And you shrieked, 'Knowledge is power!' and 'A dwarf on a giant's shoulders of the furthest of the two!' and I summed my side up with rare serenity in, 'The folly of mistaking a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself as an oracle, is inborn in us, Mr. Valry once said.'" Montag's head whirled sickeningly. He felt beaten unmercifully on brow, eyes, nose, lips, chin, on shoulders, on upflailing arms..."Oh, you were scared silly," said Beatty, "for I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point!.... And at the very end of my dream, along I came with the Salamander and said, Going my way? And you got in and we drove back to the firehouse in beatific silence, all dwindled away to peace." Beatty let Montag's wrist go, let the hand slump limply on the table. "All's well that is well in the end." “
In such rhetoric Beatty shows that he has become the voice of government-serving services – in another book he would be called Big Brother.
There are some caveats to the book. It’s not perfect. Not all aspects have aged well, and in places the tone can seem a little shrill or linear to today’s more nuanced tastes. The richness of the prose can seem a little stilted today. The use of a nuclear war as part of the plot clearly mirrors the fears of 1950’s America but do come across badly, forgetting the wider impact of atomic damage and the fact that radiation does not usually contain itself to small areas of the world. In places the need for books, but only ‘the right books’ can come across as elitist and snobbish, which is not what Bradbury was proposing at all.
But overall, there’s still a lot to enjoy and gain from reading Fahrenheit 451. Like a lot of the best science-fiction, it leaves you with things to think about when you’ve finished. Even now, 60+ years after its publication, it still has the power to generate lots to think about, in terms of individual’s liberties and rights and the role and purpose of governments. It is also rather memorable, as it vividly evokes what for many is a nightmare – a world without books and without knowledge, heading towards a potential nuclear holocaust.
In summary, as much as I love the film version (and there are differences between the book and the film, admittedly some worse but some for the better, I feel), the book may actually achieve its objective as being a richer experience than the visual medium. Which is what Bradbury would have wanted, I feel.
In 1954, Fahrenheit 451 won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and the Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal. It has since won the Prometheus "Hall of Fame" Award in 1984 and a 1954 "Retro" Hugo Award, one of only four Best Novel Retro Hugos ever given, in 2004. Bradbury was honored with a Spoken Word Grammy nomination for his 1976 audiobook version.