Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Important Dystopia Almost Immolated by Overwriting Thirty-year-old Guy Montag is a “fireman” whose job involves not putting out fires (houses etc. are fireproofed) but burning books and even the people who possess them. He thinks he likes his work and life, until a free-spirited, “antisocial” sixteen-year-old neighbor girl called Clarisse befriends him and asks him things like, “Are you happy?” Montag is really, of course, deeply unhappy, being in a state of despair verging on insanity. Though he lives with his wife of ten years, Mildred is so cut off from him by technology like “Seashell Radios” inserted in her ears or like their living room “walls” showing inane interactive TV dramas that she, too, is unconsciously unhappy, such that she now and then needs to drive her car recklessly fast or overdose on sleeping pills. As if all that weren’t enough, Montag is also feeling guilty about something he’s hiding behind a ventilator grille in his home. It couldn’t be a cache of verboten books, could it? What will happen if Mildred finds out what her husband’s been hiding? Will she ever get the fourth television “wall” to complete her living room? Will the firemen’s dreadful “Mechanical Hound” continue growling at Montag? When Montag stays home “sick,” will his boss Captain Beatty calm the fireman’s unquiet soul? And why has Clarisse suddenly stopped running into Montag before or after work? Just how has America turned into the kind of place where pretty much everyone is unhappy? First there was a lowest common denominator dumbing down of culture so as to entertain the maximum number of people and a related simplifying of literature via things like digests (and digests of digests). Meanwhile, new technology like television began occupying more of people’s time. Then it was decided to ban and burn all books because there are so many different kinds of people that any given book would inevitably hurt the feelings of one or another minority and because reading makes people think and thinking often leads to doubt and pain. The resulting America is a totalitarian state that warps history, uses technology, “education,” and advertising to control people, and has neighbors informing on each other and citizens turning off their minds by turning on their TVs and conforming and consuming. Even the Bible has been banned, leaving Jesus Christ to shill for various products. From 1953, Bradbury imagined a nightmarish dystopic future that exposes flaws in American culture that are still relevant today about seventy years later. And he isn’t just targeting the replacement of reading books by viewing screens in his dystopia. He also works in numerous other of his betes noirs like majority rule, fast cars, amusement parks (“Fun Parks”), caesarean sections (!?!), advertising, cities, war, and young people who go out “shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another.” And he offers no reassuring remedies. The “resistance” and its passive, patient, long-game off-stage is strange (and both less convincing and less unsettling than in Truffaut’s fine 1966 film adaptation of the novel). Apart from wondering how Montag or anyone for that matter can read in a society without books, or how easily the firemen burn the supposedly fireproof houses of closet bibliophiles, the problem I have with Bradbury’s novel is that it is too often unsubtle and overwritten. Bradbury repeatedly bludgeons the reader over the head with overblown descriptions of Montag’s perceptions, as when Mildred watches TV: “A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head. He was a victim of concussion. When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness and emptiness and never-quite-touched-bottom-never-never-quite-no not quite-touched-bottom... And you fell so fast you didn't touch the sides either... never... quite... touched... anything.” (41) He writes lines from television programming or from Mildred and her friends that are too vapid to be satirically funny, like this: “Doesn’t everyone look nice!” “Nice.” You look fine, Millie!” “Fine.” “Everyone looks swell.” “Swell.” “Isn’t this show wonderful?” “Wonderful.” And when, as in the following speech, he bursts through Montag to rant, it’s just too damn much! “Jesus God . . . Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it! We’ve started and won two atomic wars since 1960! Is it because we’re having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the rest of the world? Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are? I’ve heard rumors; the world is starving, but we’re well-fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much? I’ve heard the rumors about hate, too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don’t, that’s sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes! I don’t hear those idiot bastards in your parlor talking about it. God, Millie, don’t you see? An hour a day, two hours, with these books, and maybe…” Such moments yanked me out of immersion in the dystopia and prevented me from sympathizing with Montag, as if Bradbury thought I were already one of the mindless unhappy people living in his future America and thus in need of garish messaging. Such moments made me feel the compact novel was too long. The book is said to be a classic, but I think Bradbury’s passion for his remarkable book burning firemen concept nearly ruined it by overwriting. Zamiatin and Orwell also exaggerated the targets of their earlier (and greater) dystopias We and 1984 so as to satirize and criticize aspects of their contemporary societies, but they restrained their writing enough and imagined vivid and convincing societies enough and created authentic characters enough for me to care about their plights. All that said, if lines like “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them” ring true, Fahrenheit 451 (1953) should speak to you. Despite his being known for fantasy and science fiction, Bradbury here (as he does in most of his work) exhorts the reader to fully and imaginatively embrace life in the real world. For him in this novel, worse than not reading books is not experiencing life in all what he calls its “texture.” View all my reviews
0 Comments
|
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
April 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University