Just Finished Reading: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (FP: 1953) [227pp] 

Montag was a happy man. He had a house full of modern conveniences, he had a wife and a satisfying job he was proud of. What more could anyone want? He was happy, until one night, on the way home from work with the smell of kerosene still clinging to him he saw Clarisse. She almost looked like she was waiting for him whilst looking up at the stars. Their first conversation was surreal but Montag was intrigued and began looking forward to her strange questions and almost childlike ethereal quality. Then, without warning, she disappeared. Missing her questioning, Montag began to notice how empty his life was becoming. His wife barely spoke to him and spent her waking hours either plugged in or entranced by her TV ‘family’. Even his job as a fireman, a vitally important job, became the source of tension with the rest of his crew and especially his boss. Worse, he started wondering. Wondering why they did it. Wondering why they put themselves in harm's way, and for what? Knowledge? The lies of fiction? The so-called pathos of poetry? The plays of Shakespeare? But still, he wondered. Was he missing something? Despite what his boss said, so eloquently, about the uselessness of books was he wrong? Were they all wrong to have turned their back on the written word? It was an itch he needed to scratch and so he took a book and started to read... 

The 1966 movie version, directed by François Truffaut, is one of my favourite movies of all time. But oddly, I had never read the original novel until now. I do have a rather vague memory of trying to read it in my callow youth but ended up DNFing it. On re-reading (or actually completing it this time) I can see why. Apart from a few central set pieces the original movie and book versions are very different. The core ideas are the same – a world without books enforced by the ‘firemen’ whose job it is to ensure the books never rise again – but the worlds in both media are quite dissimilar. The moral decay comes across very clearly in the book with parents who both don’t know and don’t care about their children, with seemingly constant war or threat of war (very reminiscent of 1984 I thought), with juvenile delinquency encouraged and not just tolerated and with TV and (presumably) radio designed purely to keep people both ‘occupied’ and off balance as they drown in noise and flashy graphics. What came across time and again is that people have ceased to care about anything and that they can barely remember what happened last week never mind anytime longer than that. In the middle is Montag, the everyman, wondering why he feels lost and wondering how he can find something to keep him tethered to the world. 

I can see why this is such an iconic book and why it became part of western culture, but I can’t honestly say that I enjoyed reading it much. It was interesting seeing how things changed between page and screen and it was interesting finally reading the classic but it hasn’t really aged all that well despite being prescient in some ways (the fact that Montag’s wife constantly had her air-buds in made me laugh muchly). It is very much a book of its time and is definitely worth a read if for no other reason that it's so iconic but I wasn’t massively impressed overall.