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Fahrenheit 451 (Flamingo modern classics)

  
Fahrenheit 451 (Flamingo modern classics) book cover
In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's classic, frightening vision of the future, firemen don't put out fires--they start them in order to burn books. Bradbury's vividly painted society holds up the appearance of happiness as the highest goal--a place where trivial information is good, and knowledge and ideas are bad. Fire Captain Beatty explains it this way, "Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs.... Don't give them slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy." Guy Montag is a book-burning fireman undergoing a crisis of faith. His wife spends all day with her television "family", imploring Montag to work harder so that they can afford a fourth TV wall. Their dull, empty life sharply contrasts with that of his next-door neighbour Clarisse, a young girl thrilled by the ideas in books, and more interested in what she can see in the world around her than in the mindless chatter of the tube. ... read more.

Written by Ray Bradbury.
Published 16 August 1993.
Published by HarperVoyager.
rrp £7.99.
192 pages Paperback.
ISBN: 0006546064
ISBN-13: 9780006546061		 
 
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Reviews

  
Erin Britton, 27/11/2008
    
Expanding on themes that Ray Bradbury first delved into with The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451 is a classic tale of the ruinous future of mankind, a future where the appearance of happiness is everything and where knowledge and ideas are subversive and criminal. In this bleak future of reality TV and a daily dose of soap operas firemen are no longer excepted to fight fires, instead it is their job to hunt out illegal stashes of books and burn them. In a society where thinking and imagining and questioning are heinous crimes, books are truly atomic bombs. Fire Captain Beatty explains the formula for a happy and contented society nicely when he says "Give the people contests they can win by remembering the words to popular songs. Don't give them slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie thing up with. That way lies melancholy". Of course not everyone is satisfied with this mind numbing lifestyle. Fireman Guy Montag is stuck with a wife who spends all day with her TV family hankering after a fourth television wall to make the experience more complete and a book burning job that no longer seems as valid as it once did. The only person who seems to understand his questioning nature is his young neighbour Clarisse and, after she and her family mysteriously disappear, Guy begins to horde the books that he should have been burning. Scared by the intrusion of the written word into her very visual life, Guy's wife turns him in to the authorities and he is forced to go on the run, linking up with a group of travelling intellectuals who have each memorised a book for a time in the future when society once again prizes knowledge and learning. Fahrenheit 451 is a great read, all the more so since the world that Bradbury describes isn't so vastly different from the reality of modern life. Books haven't been outlawed but they're far from as popular as they once were, society is shaped more and more by the entertainment industry and there really are adverts everywhere. More of a novella than a full blown novel, Fahrenheit 451 is written in Bradbury's trademark poetic prose style which somehow captures the beauty in destruction and the horror of apathy and is truly a masterpiece of intellectual fiction.