Fahrenheit 451 (Flamingo Modern Classics) Book

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.

Published in the 1950s, Fahrenheit 451 is Ray Bradbury's hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in the not-too-distant future. Books are forbidden and are burned by a special task force of firemen. But fireman Guy Montag is unhappy, does he have books hidden in his house?