Fahrenheit 451

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There’s an unrelenting –albeit morbid- fascination with the dystopian novel. A common thread that they run along is that they seem actually quite boring and simple on the surface, but as you probe deeper you discover that they are so much more. Studies in humanity, identity, and the inner workings of their central characters dystopian novels are something to be thankful for even if you need to be in the right mood for them.

Fahrenheit 451 tells the short but poignant story of Guy Montag, a fireman who’s job is to start fires and burn up the cause of all unhappiness: the printed book. Guy lives with his wife during the day and sets fires during the night and he never questions the routine or dullness of his life. That is until he meets an observant teenager named Clarisse. Awakened from his stupor by Clarisse’s observations of his unhappiness, Guy begins hiding books in his home in the hope that he may be able to recover his feelings through them. But soon Guy’s unquenchable need for answers begins to take over and his hidden books have him running for his life.

Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation and recently adapted into a feature film by HBO, Fahrenheit 451 is an eerily prophetic novel that seems to just gain more and more relevance. The post-literate world of Montag and his City is alien, but at the same time strangely familiar: overrun with technology, television, and a depleted sense of sociality. As his wife binge-watches programs on three wall-sized TVs the protagonist awakens to the state of the world and laments the loss of a bygone era where people thought and felt for themselves. Similar to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, this book chronicles the seemingly mundane actions of the protagonist and leads the reader on a wondrous trail of suspense, which culminates in held breathe beyond the final page. The true beauty of the dystopian genre is illustrated in the story’s lack of traditional closure, which leaves the door open to hope.

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Guy Montag as a protagonist is not necessarily exciting, rather he works as a vessel for exciting thoughts and concepts to pass through and filter out into the world. A man acting on impulses, but still in a state of semi-senselessness that comes for being a member of the repressed majority –oh the delicious irony- he sort of blunders through the novel thick-headed with sleep and only begins properly waking up at the end.

While it seems that not a lot happens in Fahrenheit 451 there’s enough to unnerve, startle, and even terrify the reader and as dystopias go it’s not 1984, but it could be a stone’s throw away from there we are now…

Fahrenheit 451 was written by Ray Bradbury in 1953 and first published by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd in 1954.