This year, I promised myself that I would devote more of my time to reading classics, and reflecting on the books I’ve chosen to read, I’m a little shocked at how many classics I’ve somehow skipped over the years. Fahrenheit 451 is a great example. When do people normally read this, and what was I doing instead?
Maybe it’s weird that I never read this book, but, being on a science fiction kick, now seemed as good a time as any.
Being perfectly honest, I didn’t love this book at first. I felt the world wasn’t as fully realized as it perhaps could’ve been, and I didn’t particularly identify with the protagonist, Guy Montag. Even the plot, itself, didn’t hold much interest for me, though I can’t quite identify what the problem is. I loved 1984, and similar dystopian fiction. Maybe the ubiquity of this books influence has made the story so familiar that it has lost some of its power for me.
Whatever the case, once Bradbury sets up the world and begins delving into the mechanisms that allowed it to fall into place, I was hooked. I’m not turned off by polemicists, and I found Bradbury’s critiques to be biting and prescient. As a society, we very much have become impatient and more heavily dependent on less thoughtful forms of entertainment. Gone are the days when current events were debated on television by learned and stuffy men. We are inundated by “Breaking News” (regardless of the content) and pretty women dressed in miniskirts. Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley debating? No. Jon Stewart retired and we’re left with Sean Hannity yelling at whatever brainless opposition he deigns to have on air with him. There is no room for the spacious beauty of Akira Kurosawa or Stanley Kubrick, our films are modeled after the paint by numbers garishness of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay. Instead of the elegant beauty of baseball, we glory in the loud and violent tumble of football.
This book brings out my closeted conservative. Oh to live decades ago, when we could trust our news, enjoy a calm summer day, and get lost in the epic grandeur of this years latest cinematic epic!
I’m not entirely sure how seriously I should take this reaction. At it’s core, there’s an underlying disregard for minority opinion in Fahrenheit 451. Much is made of how this is a grand warning against censorship and book burning, and while I think there certainly is that element to it, I can’t help but feeling that – in the midst of the incipient Civil Rights movement – Ray Bradbury sensed changed in the air and wanted to remind us that there is a storied past that we should be striving to maintain. I fundamentally disagree with that idea. I think that all that is good in humanity is reliant on our ability to constantly move forward, to progress to some future, unknown existence that is better than all that we’ve known in the past, but which is consistently beyond our grasp. Our best selves lie in front of us, not behind. To hold to the past is to reject our true potential, and to forsake all that is good and worthy about our dreams.
So I don’t think I agree with the underlying reasoning behind this book. Which is very unexpected, because this seems like the kind of book that everyone agrees with. Like 1984 or Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 was written to warn us against losing our path. What’s to disagree with? Well….I don’t think I want to be on the same path as Bradbury.
But despite all this. the book is excellent. Beautifully written and thought provoking, a paean to intellect, art, and the shared wisdom of literature. Even if I can’t fully get on board, I can appreciate what he was going for.
Reviewed three times before, with an average rating of 4.
Great review. You’ve inspired me to read more classics as well. It’s amazing how many books I haven’t read that I think I should have by now. This one sounds intriguing.
Do it!
Seriously, though, once I started going through classics, I realized how much I’ve never read. The titles are all familiar, and even the stories are well known – but to actually sit down and read them? I haven’t done that since I was in school, and my education seemed to skip more than it covered.
I read this book too early I think. We read it as assigned reading in 7th grade, and I just don’t think I had the faculties to really sink into it then, and I don’t think I want to go back to it now.
I know I’ve gotten more out of these books reading them by choice, as an adult, than I ever would’ve as a teenager.
I have always enjoyed this book, but I don’t find it to be a paean to the past so much as it is a warning to not allow other people to do our thinking for us. Hilariously, I get the very opposite from it that you do. The book burning element, the theme everyone remembers, is probably the least important one. But the most important one is to warn that we don’t get too complaisant in our lives, to the point where we no longer care if books are burned. The MPD character, I can’t remember her name, who shakes Montag out of his comfortable life to me represents the revolution of thought that the sixties brought about. Montag is there in his comfortable life, a pastiche of mid-century Americana, and the revolution shakes him up and makes him think.
It’s been years since I’ve read it though, and my most recent association with the story was a production of the play Bradbury wrote as a companion to the novel.
There is absolutely no dismissing the idea that the main thrust of this books to attack complacency and indifferent to the disappearance of knowledge. I didn’t miss that at all.
But underneath that, there’s a vein of conservatism that I found shocking and repellent. I acknowledge, though, that I probably shouldn’t take this reading too seriously. My finding that in the text may be more indicative of my own thoughts and feelings than of Bradbury’s actual intent.
For instance, there is ranting against “minority views”, here. While I don’t pretend that “minority” means “people of color”, this argument is very prominent in the political right. Also, I remember there being some kerfluffle over Fahrenheit 9/11. So, fair or not, Ray Bradbury is a conservative.
Ultimately, this point is far more trivial than I implied by the amount of time I discussed it in my review. I probably should’ve given this a second draft, in hindsight.
I didn’t mean to imply that you missed the attack on complacency, but that I didn’t see the underling conservativism in the book. Like I said, it’s been years since I’ve read it, but I don’t remember that at all.
i LOVED this book!