My husband is an enormous fan of science fiction, an~ I have to say that I have never been one. So it has taken me through high school, through college, and well into middle age before I ever picked up a Ray Bradbury novel. But seeing that my children will have to be reading it soon for school, I thought I'd check this science fiction classic "Fahrenheit 451" out at last.
Let me say, that it is not the easiest book I've ever tried to read. When my 12-year-old told me
he was having a hard time with it, I gave HIM a hard time about not reading it, but there are times
when the verbage is so thick you have to cut through it with a machete. I know it will make my
English teachers weep when I say that I wish I had a Reader's Digest version of this, because
there is a lot in here (RIP Ray Bradbury, no offense meant. .. ) that could have been edited out to
make it easier to read.
That said, however, I DO like the plot. It is an old-fashioned one, like we used to read when I
was in school in the '70s. You have characters, and they have names that MEAN things. The hero
in this book, who starts out as a villain, is named Guy Montag. To me, that means that Bradbury
wanted his lead character to represent just a guy, an everyman, trying to survive in this dystopian
world. It was not a name picked out of a hat, and I like that about the author. He has a reverence
for books, and for the words within them.
But back to the plot. .. Our everyman, Guy, is married to a woman named Mildred (baby name
book says that means "Mild Counselor" or "Mild Power") who does in fact exert a little influence on
her husband. It is her drug overdose, along with several other events, that turns Guy from a
working stiff to a rebel of the first order. Another influence on him is his young neighbor, "Clarisse,"
which my book says means "little brilliant one." She expands his world by making him slow down
and look at the world around him, trying to get him to smell the flowers, as the cliche says. But his
life begins to truly change one day at work, when he sees a woman who would rather die than live
without her books.
And that is at the heart of the story - that "firemen" in this future world start fires, instead of
stopping them, and they start them because their job is to bum books, along with the homes of the
people who dare to keep them. Books have been pretty much outlawed in that time, and we realize
the path that Guy is on when he starts reading from a book during a party his wife is having at his
house. Of course, her friends turn him in, and his fate is sealed at that point. The fire brigade arrive
at his house to bum the place down, but Guy goes rogue, and instead sets fire to Captain Beatty,
his chief antagonist at the station, and the man who knows he has been stealing books from the
houses they bum down. Then the evil death machine, the Mechanical Hound, has to chase Guy
through town, but Guy cleverly jumps into the river and escapes from "the city" itself, leaving his old
life, wife and job far behind.
In an ironic twist, the city itself is soon liquefied in a bombing, as the country has recently gone
to war, so Guy is actually lucky to escape the city when he does. But he finds a band of like
minded individuals along the railroad tracks who have all memorized parts of books, so that the
knowledge found in books will never be lost. Guy finds that he has memorized a part of the Bible,
Ecclesiastes, and so he is accepted as part of the group.
As Bradbury's introduction to the novel shows, "Fahrenheit 451" is a function of its time, a time
when books (ideas, political views, etc.) were being surpressed, and taken out of libraries across
the world. But it still has relevance today, with the constant need to conform that we see most
recently in the scandal over Chick-Fil-A.
Submitted by Gerti
