Fahrenheit 451~ Ray Bradbury

For some reason, this book seems to have the reputation of being a ‘bad-boy’s’ favourite book and I don’t quite understand that. Yes, the book is about rebellion, but it is primarily about how powerful books are and that does not sound like a ‘bad boy’ message to me, but that might be just me.

Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 creates a dystopian world at war that reads like a futuristic horror where technology is almost sentient and the people seem to live cookie-cutter 50s style lives. This retro-futuristic has a rhetoric that sounds like it could be the next Flat Earth Society. It is scarily real and believable.

Guy Montag, the protagonist of Bradbury’s novel is a fireman, a job that is startlingly different from what we know the profession to be. The firemen in this story start fires rather than put them out, and their target is books. Montag starts out as a character that fits into the mould that has been created for him, doesn’t question why and loves his job and duty. Until he meets Clarisse.

Clarisse is an interesting character that strongly reminded me of Luna Lovegood, but at the same time seemed like a figment of Montag’s imagination and her early death in the novel helped to cement that image in my head. Montag’s conservations with Clarisse help to start his rebellious spirit and begin to ask the big question of why? and to think for himself. I thought it was rather poignant that Clarisse was from a younger generation. It seemed very realistic that her way of thinking was different from what the world around her was pushing.

Bradbury has a beautiful way of describing things. Comparing the mechanical to the natural, most notably the Hound to autumn winds, was unique and yet worked beautifully. And by taking the normally homely and beautiful things and writing them with descriptors nowhere near as picturesque and imaginative, fully fit with the rhetoric of the firemen and the society Bradbury created.

The motif of fire as a destructor, a cleanser and as a hearth is burnt through every page od this book and made me as a reader both fear and love fire, how it can seem tame and yet never will be, much like the minds of humans.

Seems weird to get this far into the review and not really mention the books. There are many passages throughout the novel that make books seem simultaneously like the most powerful tool in raising a rebellion and also the most useless. There are moments where Bradbury empowers you for reading and absorbing all these different opinions and then makes you feel so insignificant because those books won’t actually help you.

It’s safe to say I absolutely loved this book and the way it encourages you to expand your horizons and learn from the mistakes of the past through books and to make your own mind and decisions. Thank you, Millie, for buying this for my birthday.

I give Fahrenheit 451 five stars and will be definitely rereading it at some point!

C🌙