Fahrenheit 451

I don't know why I had expected Fahrenheit 451 to be bad. But as it turned out to be an entertaining and good read, I was pleasantly surprised. I had read Ray Bradbury's work before -- one or two short story anthologies at least -- but that was like two decades ago. That's a way too long time to remember what they were about or how was Bradbury's writing style.

Fahrenheit 451's protagonist is Guy Montag. He is a fireman but his job is not to put down fires, for houses are no longer flammable. Instead he and his colleagues burn books. And 451 °F is the temperature book paper catches on fire.

Books have been made illegal due to only bringing unhappiness with their unpleasant content. Instead everyone consumes brainless television shows. I found it particularly astonishing how the novel, first published in 1953, predicted the banning of anything that offends minorities. Maybe things aren't quite yet at that point but it sure is close. Fahrenheit 451 is no longer a warning rather than a statement of current affairs.

Montag's been content with his job but meeting an odd girl that lives next door makes him come to a realization. He starts thinking and is no longer fine with how things are in the society that reminded me a lot of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Unlike in that and Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 has a hopeful ending, which I thought was nice. The oppressive authority didn't beat the protagonist this time.

Bradbury apparently wrote many supplements to the novel: introductions, foreword, afterword... The print (translation) I read unfortunately didn't come with any of them. I would've liked reading those.

Aug 25th Addendum

Even though I wrote this blog post shortly after reading the novel, I had already forgotten one thing I was going to mention: I really liked how Montag argued the importance of books. An author having recorded their thoughts, experiences, and knowledge into written form, sometimes taking a whole lifetime to do it, has undeniable value.

I was reminded of that when reading an essay on today's newspaper. Mikael Jungner, a former social democrat party member in the Finnish parliament and former managing director of the national broadcaster YLE, has in the recent years taken a habit of tweeting out provoking, dumb opinions. The latest debacle he caused was about belittling the importance of literacy, that reading and books are merely a small interlude in humankind's history, that youths are in the right for reading less and less.

The newspaper essay wasn't countering Jungner's silly arguments though as others had already done it by now. Instead it was asking if Jungner was really seriously thinking that TV shows could replace books. The essayist, Pauli Tapio, said that of all the new shows turning up he only notes their amount, budget sizes, and lack of personality. Them being about vikings, vampires, or future USA has become irrelevant.

And even excluding short-lived ecstasy and the following numbness (as Tapio put it) caused by the masses of TV shows, books are just so much better at being (at least usually) coherent representations of ideas. It would be a shame if they didn't exist.