Fahrenheit 451 - Book Review

As I watched the 2018 movie on Hotstar last week I couldn't shake off the feeling that I knew the story, had seen it or read it before. Found out that I had seen the earlier adaptation directed by Fran?ois Truffaut.

Wanted to read the book and watch Truffaut's version again and thus the weekend went in savouring these fine gems. I highly recommend this small dystopian novel. It's still very relevant after 70 years.

The story is of a time when books are banned and if found are burned by a specialised unit - FIREMEN. The firemen now burns books after a change in their job description since dousing fire became a thing of the past. Houses were built fireproof and thus their old skills were no longer relevant. So the department changed with time.

Our protagonist is a fireman who starts to have doubts regarding this whole burning business. He finds himself alone, lost and alienated from his surroundings. People around him are all obsessed with happiness and entertainment. They do not want to get bothered with any unpleasant business. His boss explains why the world became like this. He explains how the world had room for diversity once but then with population explosion things were produced for mass. Things were dumbed down and levelled to appeal to everyone. Serve the bigger market and base emotions.

"Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending."

"Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column. ”

The world changed. Even the way the people speak has changed. They speak fast, superficial and glossy. People were not given choices as they tended to make them unhappy. It was also because the citizens wanted it that way. They were obsessed with being happy all the time.

“If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the Government is inefficient, top?heavy, and tax?mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year.

and Montag is the name of our protagonist. People wanted fast facts and easily crunchable meaningless data and facts.

Sounds familiar? Are we far off today?

I found an immense connect with what is happening around me now - immerse yourself in entertainment or survival, do not question the government and those in power about what is happening around. If you do, you will be bothered a lot by those in power.

If you have existential questions, suffer alone - drink some more, watch some more Netflix and the questions will die down. Drug yourself to sleep and put on that plasticky smile, otherwise you will scare everyone. Post that fathers day picture and be part of the sameness that we all are part of. Blend in at a meta level.

“Cram them full of non?combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely `brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with.”

The government obliges. So the banning of books did not happen overnight. Over the years people did not like to read or to think deep. 'Intellectual' became a swear word because people dread the unfamiliar.

“ We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution ” says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. ”

Around this time he meets a young girl who is a free thinker. She is not afraid to think deep.

"I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly," she said. "If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he'd say, that's grass! A pink blur? That's a rose-garden! White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows.

“Have you seen the two-hundred-foot-long billboards in the country beyond town? Did you know that once billboards were only twenty feet long?

But cars started rushing by so quickly they had to stretch the advertising out so it would last.”

She shows him a side of life which he had forgotten and slowly he awakens from his slumber. Conversations with her awakens something inside him that was like an itch which he was trying to ignore.

Let's talk about something else. Have you ever smelled old leaves? Don't they smell like ”“cinnamon? Here. Smell."

"Why, yes, it is like cinnamon in a way."

She looked at him with her clear dark eyes. "You always seem shocked."

"It's just I haven't had time--”

His wife is one of the model citizen of this world. She immerses herself in entertainment throughout the day streaming from the radio and the reality television beaming on the wall to wall screens in their house. She pops some pills when she wants to rest and relax and life goes on like clockwork.

He finds it excruciatingly painful to adapt himself to this world. He has some heated sessions with his wife. he confronts her once -

Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

Our protagonist at this part of the story is exhausted and tired of the life he is leading and wants to break free. He finds a mentor from the other side. He submits to him -

Nobody listens any more. I can't talk to the walls because they're yelling at me. I can't talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it'll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.

The walls mentioned here are wall screens. Bradbury envisioned in 1953 that people will have these in their houses. Futuristic interactive televisions. Entertainment rooms that will envelop people giving them an immersive experience.

His mentor explains to him that books are burned because they are an immediate threat since they can be easily picked up. People of their own accord has lost the patience to explore the other receptacles of knowledge in this fast paced life.

It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisions, but are not.

No, No, It's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.

Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

So long story short and not giving out the details - he rebels and murders someone then runs away and meets some interesting folks.

Hope I have piqued your interest enough to make you download the book and read it. If you are not the reader type watch the two movies. One is easily available, for the other you have to be a little resourceful.

451 Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper becomes combustible and Bradbury used that for the name. He was going with 'Firemen' but Fahrenheit 451 is much cooler and intriguing.

Some quotes I liked

If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.

A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring; There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.

He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.

But that's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing.

'Stuff your eyes with wonder,' he said, 'live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal.”

We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we'll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them.

And some day we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddam steam-shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we're going to go build a mirror-factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.