"Fahrenheit 451" By Ray Bradbury--Book Review

Ray Bradbury--Photo by britishfantasysociety.org

Reading "Fahrenheit 451" represents a return to reading dystopian literature for me which I have done intermittently since November 8, 2016.  In that time span I have read and posted about "1984" and "Animal Farm"  by George Orwell.  I have also attempted to maintain my regular reading list of Appalachian and general great literature but it has become increasingly more difficult to do so as the current illegitimate occupant of the White House has steadily veered farther toward compliance with his Russian Owner Vladimir Putin's wishes and attempted to force the country into a dystopian and Fascist bent in line with his own craving for illegitimate power and in response to his own seriously dangerous mental illness.  In many ways, this rereading of "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradury has been a pleasant return to a genuine classic of American Literature which I first read in my youth more than fifty years ago less than a decade after its original publication.  But the necessity of reading dystopian literature which has been forced on me and millions of other Americans by a treasonous band of Russian Agents who have managed, with the assistance of Vladimir Putin and his hackers, to seize the US White House has been a terrifying experience which those of us who actually value American Democracy have lived every day since November 8, 2016.  

But let's just get to the book in question and why it is a book you should also be reading with particularly close attention today.  "Fahrenheit 451" is a classic American novel which has generally been considered to be within the broad field of science fiction since its author, Ray Bradbury, was an acknowledged master of science fiction.  But it is bigger than one genre, any genre, since it has truly become one of the most important novels in the much broader field of American Letters.  It is also one of the acknowledged most important books in the much narrower field of dystopian literature.  As Bradbury says in an interview published in the Del Ray 50th Anniversary Edition of the novel, it did not start out, on its initial publication in 1953, as a bestseller or a potential classic. The hardcover first edition sold only 5,000 copies and the simultaneously published paperback sold about 50,000 copies.  Bradbury also sold a shorter version of the story to "Playboy" in the summer of 1953 for only four hundred dollars.  But over time, readers worldwide, especially politically and socially cogent readers turned it into one of the most widely read and bought books in all of American Literature.  It's place in all three of the genres I have mentioned above has been literally written in stone over the course of the last seven decades.  It is one of the greatest books in both science fiction and dystopian literature and will forever be solidly ensconced in the classics of all American Literature.  

Dystopian literature, especially dystopian fiction, is literature which examines the problem of governments which manipulate, control, and minimize their citizens often with overbearing, destructive, and invasive laws whose intent are to give the government absolute power and to homogenize the citizenry into a class of people without the power to resist the desires and goals of those in control of the government.  In "Fahrenheit 451", (the term is actually the temperature at which book paper burns), the United States has become a country in which books are banned, libraries have all been destroyed, and the people are mindless minions of the government whose lives are controlled by constant projections of government propaganda into their homes which often have every wall completely covered by large screens.  It is a crime to own and read books and the only job of the firemen, in a world where homes are all fireproof, is to find and burn books along with their owner's domiciles and, at times, even the owners.  The protagonist, Guy Montag, is a fireman who eventually begins to steal books from the homes which he is sent to burn, hides them in his home, and begins to read them.  Eventually, his wife and neighbors report his crimes and his own commander at the firehouse, Captain Beatty, brings the firetruck and firemen to burn Montag out.  But Montag manages to kill Beatty and escape into the countryside where a few well read resistors live on the lam constantly moving in small groups and working to memorize and save as many books and as much knowledge as possible.  The novel ends in a nuclear war which destroys the cities and leaves these resistors with their memorized knowledge to save the world.  This memorization of books and the knowledge contained therein is a reminder of the Polish Resistance during World War II who formed what they called Living Rosaries in which each member attempted to memorize as much of the Bible as possible in case the Nazis controlled the entire world and outlawed the Bible.  It is said that Pope John Paul II, known then as Karol Wojtyla, managed to memorize the entire Bible. 

Ray Bradbury was a masterful writer and this novel is composed of alternating uses of long, flowing complex sentences and other periods of short, staccato phrases which pop like gunfire or walnuts falling on a tin roof.  It is a wonderful use of the language to tell a story which must be told on a daily basis in a world rapidly veering toward the governmental terrorism which it relates.  While some less astute readers tend to read the book simply as a work of science fiction describing a world which will never occur, the thinking reader will find it to be just as terrifying as anything written in the last two hundred years in America.  Bradbury wrote the book less than decade after the end of World War II and in many ways it is a response to the Nazi attempt to gain control of the world via the Blitzkrieg and the Holocaust.  But he also foresaw the world of helicopter televised police chases more than forty years before O. J. Simpson was able to illegitimately seize America's attention in a white Ford Bronco. Bradbury also built much of the book out of his knowledge of how effectively the World War II resistance movement helped in the defeat of the Nazis and Adolph Hitler.  The resistors who memorize the books and hope to teach them to others are also rooted in groups of WWII resistors who formed secret groups to memorize the Bible in case the Nazis won the war.  One of those resistors was the future Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla, as discussed above.   This is a book which every person should read and most can since it has been translated into more than thirty languages.  It is a book which has direct bearing today on what has happened in America since November 8, 2016, and should be seen as a lesson in just how rapidly a group of amoral, power hungry criminals can distract, divert, and destroy democracy even in the greatest country in the world.