Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
Reviewed by Tim Deland
If you've read this book, why not

Chances are, whether you've read this book or not, you've heard about it. It's one of the modern classics of American literature (not just sci-fi) and rightfully so. This is probably Ray Bradbury's most important novel, at least in terms of his subject matter. Published in 1953--the same year he wrote the screenplay for John Huston's Moby Dick--it's also one of his earliest.

The story concerns Guy Montag, a fireman in a not-so-distant future, whose job it is to burn books, which are illegal possessions. Montag is fairly contented in his life until he meets Clarisse, a teenaged neighbor who seems wise beyond her years and asks him questions nobody else ever has before--namely why. Why is the world the way it is? And, most poignantly for Montag, are we truly happy? Soon Montag finds himself questioning everything he once took for granted--including the most taboo subject of all. What's inside those books that make them so dangerous?

Many people who have never read Fahrenheit 451 often make an incorrect assumption about its meaning. It is not, in fact, just another book about government repression as often alluded (in Michael Moore's recent film 'Fahrenheit 9/11' for example) but is also an impassioned outcry against the dumb-ing down of culture as Bradbury saw it. In his world, it is not government that has forced people to stop reading books (and watching meaningful plays, movies, etc.) but rather themselves. Desiring to avoid the annoyance of conflicting ideas and painful facts, people simply gave up their right to read--and their right to think as well.

For the most part, Bradbury's criticisms remain as pertinent today as when they were first written, whether you agree with them or not. The future he describes is a frenetic world--where the five second news blurb and video soap opera (eerily similar to certain online role playing games) rule. People don't have time to sit down and read a classic, and would find all the thinking it required disturbing and bothersome if they did. While the government did not create this mess, it is glad to take advantage of people's purposeful ignorance, waging wars overseas that nobody actually understands or really cares to (including the widows whose husbands have died there).

It is easy to see how Bradbury's book still resonates in our increasingly fast-paced, politically correct, and, far too often, shallow society. Besides its ideas though, there are other features to recommend this book. Bradbury keeps the tension at a constant boil, as Montag skates closer and closer to the edge, his enemies all the while piling up against him--including his oppressive boss Beatty, his vacuous and suicidal wife, and the cold metal jaws of the Hound, a robotic dog programmed to hunt down any and all book-reading lawbreakers.

Of particular interest is Beatty, one of Bradbury's stronger characters, a man absolutely convinced that destroying books is in society's best interest. While it is clear he is the villain (we're reading this in a book after all, right?) Bradbury provides him with compelling arguments, rather than making him the jackbooted pseudo-Nazi we might expect. "Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all," he asks Montag at one point, "People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? ...Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it?" People don't want or need philosophy and sociology and so on, he argues, because that way lays confusion and "melancholy." And in some ways we know he's right. How many intellectuals do you know who are truly happy people?

There are, unfortunately, some bad points to Fahrenheit 451 as well. Despite how short the novel is, it still manages to drag at times, particularly during the beginning and end. Much of this is due to Bradbury's wordy prose. He has a tendency to go off on lengthy tangents, over-describing a scene or action in a way that makes me skip to the end of the paragraph just to get through it. To this complaint Bradury provides his own answer in the Afterword--"If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture." Er, touché, I guess.

In my final analysis, Fahrenheit 451 may not be perfect, but it's still an absolute must read, whether you're a fan of speculative fiction or not. If you haven't picked it up and read it yet, do so. Now.
The above found at:http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.asp?book=458

Fahrenheit 451, written by Jean-Louis Richard and Francois Truffaut from the book by Ray Bradbury, directed by Francois Truffaut, 1965, 110 min.

Francois Truffaut, the noted French New Wave director, made one foray into science fiction as a director, Fahrenheit 451. I'm a fan of Truffaut's artsy movies, especially his debut film, The 400 Blows, one of those works of art that lives up to its hype, and Day for Night, a mid-career effort from Truffaut that is a loving tribute to movie-making itself. Truffaut's only acting role in a movie that he himself did not direct was as the French investigator in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a role that supported the ideas of that movie in an integral way. How does Fahrenheit 451 fit into Truffaut's oeuvre? It remains an anomaly and somewhat of a flawed effort. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is a lyrical book that is simultaneously quite angry. It's a mix that is difficult to achieve; in fact, it could be argued Bradbury is the only one who can truly do Bradbury. Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 keeps many of the plot elements of the book but somehow misses some essential part of the book that has made it inspirational for so many years.

Montag is a fireman, in a society where all houses are fireproof and the fireman's job is find people who are hoarding books and burn the books. Montag is stuck in a loveless marriage; his wife Linda takes too many pills in an early scene and has to get her stomach pumped. Montag meets a girl named Clarisse who spurs him to question his way of life and why books need to be burned. Montag begins reading David Copperfield and is soon hooked on the experience of reading books. He also gets more involved with Clarisse and her problems; she has been fired from her teaching position and later her uncle is denounced for having books in his house. One night while Linda is hosting a party, Montag can't take it anymore: the vapidity of Linda and her friends causes him to read a book to them. From then on, the trajectory of Montag's life is out of the position of power as a fireman and towards the margins of society.

The movie makes two or three major changes to the plot of the book. Truffaut leaves out the whole Mechanical Hound sequence, a part of the book where Montag is chased by a robotic police pursuit device. Judging by the cheesy effects for some flying cops that show up later in the movie, the Mechanical Hound is perhaps not such a bad thing to leave out. The main character Clarissa stays alive for the whole movie, something that might have given the story some rather typical twists near the end but Truffaut keeps the audience guessing. Part of the surprise of the ending has to do with Truffaut's answer to the problem of the book: how to fight back against a totalitarian society bent on destroying freedom. Bradbury's book showed that such a society would self-implode, lacking flexibility and the ability to generate new ideas out of old ones. Truffaut's rebels at the end aren't interested in political power or military retaliation -- they are intelligent people, fighting back directly against one specific area of oppression. They are waiting for the oppressors to self-implode, but that cataclysm is not shown. It works, even though most modern viewers have been conditioned by other movies to expect a fiery, violent, confrontational ending. Truffaut uses the ending to fit the philosophical implications quite neatly.

Truffaut includes a great deal of fascinating human insight. A woman who chooses to be burned with her books, as a message to society -- a largely deaf society, but why else would a martyr need to take that final step? When Montag reads to Linda's party, one of the women starts weeping, having been reminded too much of how deep emotions can be. In a devastating scene, not found in the book, the firemen are checking out a public park, and most of the women with young children are used to the outrageous lack of civil liberties. The Fire Chief confiscates a tiny book from a baby and chastises it -- the baby's hand reaches up for the book. The movie even gives us some humour in this vein: watch for the mop-up squads, in a commercial telling us that law enforcement can be fun. The Fire Chief's monologues are also witty, even as they are terrifying. Characterization is hampered by a problem sometimes typical of science fiction: this is a society where people have been emotionally repressed and their lives are empty. The movie has other interesting details as well. Every training book for the firemen's classes had blank pages and the opening credits were spoken, not printed out (although that does raise the question of how anyone knew how to read). But there were also details that felt wrong -- for one, I don't think the overall look of this society worked, much less futuristic than the society in Bradbury's book. Perhaps the implication that oppression already occurs is effective too.

Overall, Fahrenheit 451 is a movie that tries as hard as it can, has its heart in the right place, gets many details right, but somehow fails to gel into a compelling whole. It's recommended for fans of the book but it remains more of a curiosity piece than gripping cinema in its own right.

DVD Note: Fahrenheit 451 is available in a nifty new DVD reissue. It has an audio commentary, as well as background material on Ray Bradbury, Francois Truffaut, and Bernard Herrman (composer for the film).
The above found at: http://www.challengingdestiny.com/reviews/f451_movie.htm.
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, Simon and Schuster, 2003, 190 pp. (originally published in 1953)

Fahrenheit 451 is one of Bradbury's most famous books, and it reads like a fever dream -- intensely cinematic, directed by its own weird dream logic, and full of the quality of images that haunt you for days. The book is a cautionary tale about what happens when books are forgotten or actively suppressed, and it forms one of its own best arguments in favour of the book as a keystone to intellectual freedom. The society it describes is a dystopia, but unlike other famous dystopias like 1984 and Brave New World, the book holds out some hope, however fragile and tentative. Fahrenheit 451 is a deceptive book too; it's a quick read, and it seems to be about people burning books.

Fahrenheit 451 begins with a famous opening line: "It was a pleasure to burn" (33), a line which resonates throughout the book in interesting ways. The story centres on a man named Guy Montag, who is a fireman, but in his future, the houses are all fireproof and the main job of the fireman is to find books and burn them. By the third page of the story, though, we have already learned of Montag's unease with the repressive social order that his profession helps to prop up. He meets the neighbour girl, Clarisse McClellan, who is out walking one night when he is returning from work. After an unsettling conversation, Clarisse asks him if he is happy, and his ready answer is belied by his sudden realization that not everything is all right. This is followed closely by what happens when Montag arrives at home. His wife Mildred has overdosed on sleeping pills and needs to have her stomach pumped. Mildred participates enthusiastically in all of the distractions the society has ordained for her: driving too fast in her car, listening to her Seashell all night, and most of all, paying attention to the "family" in her living room, three walls of which have been converted to giant televisions. But none of these are enough. The next morning Mildred denies that the overdose ever took place.

Montag also becomes disillusioned while at work. For one thing, the Mechanical Hound, a strange and terrible robotic beast that is kept in a kennel at the firehouse, doesn't seem too certain of his scent anymore, and the Hound always gets its prey. And the Fire Chief, a disquieting and intelligent man, begins to doubt Montag's devotion to his job. What would it hurt to save one book from the next fire? Does Montag even see his own role in society as clearly as the Fire Chief does his? The rest of the book is a snapshot of Montag's journey from fireman to human being, which is the reason why the book has endured as long as it has. Bradbury is not talking about the physical burning of books, although that too can be part of the spectrum of things he refers to. Book burning is a singularly effective metaphor, set up as it is to hit a hot button at the literal level.

The book is divided into three sections: "The Hearth and the Salamander" introduces Montag at home and at work; "The Sieve and the Sand" finds Montag increasingly disillusioned with his society; and "Burning Bright" concerns Montag's escape and the eventual end of the society he left behind. The sections are 40-60 pages in length, and the overall book is perhaps shorter than its reputation would suggest. It's somewhat of a truism that Bradbury's writing works best at shorter lengths -- he has written a number of novels after all. Fahrenheit 451 has the same strong imagistic writing as Bradbury's short stories, and this has the effect of making the book seem longer. The compressed bursts of metaphor and description and tangled phrase tend to slow the mind's eye as the extra layer of meaning and intent gets deciphered. Take, for example, the famous opening line of the book, and the subsequent paragraph:

It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning. (33)

This is almost everything we need to know about Montag and why he has been a fireman. This is also some extraordinary writing, and indicative of what's to come prose-wise: several metaphors can be jammed into one sentence, and repetition of words and rhythms is used very carefully.

Bradbury can be an off-kilter plotter. Clarisse, who arrives in to the book like a breath of fresh air, is killed off within a few pages. This is tragic, of course, but also shocking. Readers who come to the book with expectations that have been conditioned by repeated exposure to conventional plots will find this most true. Ironically, in Truffaut's version (see my review), by no means a conventional movie, Clarisse survives all the way to the end of the story, and as Bradbury points out in his introduction to this edition, Clarisse also survives in the play and the opera that he wrote based on his own book. Leaving aside for the moment that Clarisse's death removes the only charismatic and non-passive female character, I don't mind the way that her death functions in the book. It's a shock, but she is also balanced thematically and structurally by the introduction of an older male character, a former professor named Faber. The young girl and the old man serve as guides for Montag on his journey of self-awareness.

Both Brave New World and 1984 ended with the total victory of the totalitarian state and the breakdown or suicide of the individual. Fahrenheit 451 is a little different. Bradbury's book argues that such a repressive society, in support of which the firemen burn so many books, would self-implode, simply because it has no flexibility and has no fertile ground of old ideas to generate new ideas. The victory of the individual at the end of Fahrenheit 451 is achieved at the cost of the self-destruction of the rest of society, which is scant hope for those individuals who are currently in the grip of a repressive system. Indeed, the bookish rebels that Montag meets at the end of the story are simply waiting; they are in no way actively encouraging change. It's amazing in a way that Bradbury can pull off such a dispassionate and non-heroic ending. Is Bradbury's optimism naive? The methods of control in Montag's society are certainly clumsy and inefficient compared to the biological ones used in Brave New World. It's reassuring to have at least one cautionary tale that has a hopeful ending.

The strength of Bradbury's vision leaves this future etched in our minds long after the book is finished. His collection of strange speculations somehow works, probably because he is working so effectively on our fears: crazy teenagers, out to drive over helpless pedestrians; a war that no one cares about, but eventually ends our civilization; relationships completely empty of emotion and the systemic stifling of minds. There is deep loneliness in this book, the lonely of heart and the lonely of mind. It becomes unbearably sad, and what replacement for intimacy, for humanity, can the literary gathering at the end ever be? Bradbury wants to hold out hope, I think, and it's not the literal solution that he trusts in. Everyone should read this book. Not to find out about the Mechanical Hound, or the future and its gadgets, or anything like that. This book doesn't predict the future and it doesn't want to. We find in Bradbury's creation a small part of our own angst, and in turn it creates an outlet for our own unbearable rage. The book is an astonishing masterpiece.

Fahrenheit 451 is available in a 50th Anniversary Edition from Simon and Schuster. This is one of those "prestige" hardcover editions; it looks handsome but its restraint feels a little divorced from the vivid narrative between the covers. The edition includes three introductions by Bradbury, from 1966, 1993, and 2003 respectively. Unfortunately, the three introductions repeat some material, such as the inspiration for the book and the manner in which it was written. Otherwise, these introductions make for fascinating reading.

The above found at:http://www.challengingdestiny.com/reviews/f451_movie.htm ( )