Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

1953

Set a couple of generations or so in the future Ray Bradbury gives us a chilling view of a future where the great mass of people no longer have any desire to read. Over the years, more and more of a person's information is gained from the visual media. Particularly the television, transforming itself from a box in the corner of the room into, first, a wall, then gradually into the room itself.

Meanwhile books gradually die away with new books getting shorter and classic books becoming condensed then published in digest form, soon becoming nothing more than single line entries in dictionaries of literature.

As the population grew and diversified it became wrong to show societies that showed the difference. A government eager to keep it's people quiet willingly acquiesced in the suppression - it's not as if the books were being read, was it? But once you've started banning books it becomes addictive and so more and more titles find themselves on the pyre until things have got to the stage where it's easier just to ban everything.

And with the introduction of the genuinely fire proof house, there's suddenly a load of unemployed fire-fighters. So what was more natural than to employ the fire-fighters to start fires? And so the books burnt and it became a criminal offence to own any book.

In the schools, people were taught from video screens how to, but the why was left unexamined. People were stuffed full of facts but left untutored in the analysis of those facts. A rare person it was who couldn't repair a video wall but the person who knew anything about history was even rarer.

The society that we find ourselves in is eerily like our own, with gangs of teenagers acting with unthinking violence with nothing else to do. The two nuclear wars have yet to be fought but who knows?

Can the lost books be recovered before the next war is fought?

Montag is a fireman happily going about his duties, burning the books his bosses direct him to, but seventeen year old Clarisse moved in next door and she proved to be better than the average teen, still a free spirit in a world buried in conformity. Her questioning of Montag brought out his discontent with his life and his wife. A dissatisfaction exacerbated by his wife's near overdose. But it was the death of a stranger that caused his breaking away. On a call out to a book hoarder, the woman refused to retreat from her library and perished with the books in flame. Without telling anyone, Montag slipped a book in his jacket and back home. But his captain had spotted him and he is visited at home to be warned. But rather than surrender to the normalities of his society, he goes on the run.

Is this the end of literature in society, or are there those who would see the stories themselves survive?

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