Fahrenheit 451

This book, a dystopian masterpiece by Ray Bradbury, is probably one of my all-time favourite novels (this is my third reading of it), being as it is largely about books, which astute readers of this blog will be aware I am quite fond of on occasion.

   In a futurised America where they're at war all the time but nobody really knows what for, where nobody talks to other people except shallow exaggerations of people beamed onto omnipresent screens, where sadness and anxiety and distrust permeate everyone's social consciousness too deeply to ignore such that all anyone can do to stay sane is distract oneself with meaningless jingles, entertainment, racing cars, self-medicating drugs; where (and this is where I am definitely talking about the novel and not hyperbolically describing the actual state of modern western society - oosh) totalitarian propaganda has persuaded everyone that freedom of thought and the existential quandaries one may think oneself into is the truest and deepest evil, and so to minimise sadness, items that prompt this kind of constructive, introspective, philosophical thinking - i.e. books - are to be disposed of. This is where our main character comes in. Guy Montag is a fireman; it is his job to go to locations where members of the public have notified him and the other firemen that there are books present, and upon arrival, burn them. (Point of trivia - the title is what it is because apparently 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the exact temperature at which paper catches fire.) Anyway, Guy encounters a weird* girl called Clarisse who doesn't care about the typical conformist norms entombing their society - and through conversation with her (plus probably some other things but SPOILERS) he finds inklings in himself awakening that plunge him into a thrilling and thought-provoking conflict with the culture he plays a part in upholding.

   This book is just jam-packed with beauty and horror and wisdom and humanity; it is superbly written,** with concise descriptions of nuanced emotional and psychological angles sometimes just twisting knives into the reader - I've enjoyed this more each time I've read it. Its sci-fi world (which technology-wise could feasibly be 2005 had America become a totalitarian state when this was first publish) is drawn sparingly, but broadly, and with enough tantalising detail to give a clear impression of what it is like - and boy is it bleak. Guy Montag's world scares me more in many ways than that of 1984, because there is such a veneer of superficial saccharine positivity draped over the hollow habit of its citizens lives. Dystopian fiction has always been an incisive means of worming out the most insidious, most harrowing, most potentially-ruinous characteristics of the societies that produce them - and in Fahrenheit 451 we have a staunchly-liberalistic poetic defense of intellectual freedom that cuts to the heart of many of the cultural tensions in the modern west, especially now in the era where the lines between Black Mirror episodes and actual possible implementations and implications of technologies are blurring.

   Basically, books are important but what's more important is what's in them - and this is something that can be in many things,*** but it is also something that can be suppressed. Free-thinking individuals should seek to resist and oppose such suppression wherever and whenever it may occur, even if that means memorising chunks of scripture and going to live with a gang of well-read meandering tramps in the woods to stay off the radar of the thought police. Even if that means, more plausibly, thinking for oneself and questioning and challenging commonly-held views, never fearing reasonable discussion. The reign of such dangers as ignorance and closed-mindedness are far more commonly down to individuals just not being bothered about the truth than authoritarian suppression or censorship of it. There's been a lot of use of the term 'post-truth' about our current political climate - we live in an age of social media echo chambers and 'fake news' mainstream propaganda machines. Dystopian states of affairs don't spring up overnight - they develop out of political exploitation of exigent sociocultural trends, and currently it feels like western society has walked straight off the cliff-edge of postmodernism and is plunging toward the rocks of utter anti-intellectual anarchy. If you are a reader, a thinker, join me and Ray Bradbury and Guy Montag and Stewart Lee in resisting these trends - or else who knows, we might end up with the democratically-elected President being an orange neo-fascist demagogue who people have only heard of because he used to fire ambitious businessnoobs on television.
   Oh, wait

* Weirdness is always relative. Clarisse is probably one of the most normal people in the book's whole world by our standards, but what a world.

** During a nine-day rush of creative effort on 10-cent-for-30-minute typewriters in the basement of a library. There's a great little epilogue by Ray Bradbury discussing the conception and construction of the novel.

*** The conversation Guy has with Faber about this has more solid-gold truth nuggets in it than some entire books I've read.