Fahrenheit 451
By Ray Bradbury
Simon & Schuster 1953
Michael Moore provoked an enormous outburst of American vitriol in 2004. But despite leaving several messages for the guy, Ray never got a call back. All he wanted was for Moore to say please before running off with his title and winning the Palme d’Or. Fortunately, an infuriated Bradbury was confident that the award itself was meaningless – and he should know, having been presented with the National Medal of Arts by Family Bush that same year – and that everyone would forget about the film anyway.
Fahrenheit 9/11 clearly pays a huge tribute to Bradbury’s book, the most celebrated among his monumental body of work: novels, fantasies, short stories, poetry, plays, films and buildings. Sorry, buildings? Indeed: Bradbury is an architect with a substantial legacy. This, after all, is the same man who has had an asteroid and a crater named in his honour. A force to be reckoned with, then.
Moore’s documentary, for all its contradictions, was a potent stoker of flames and a fitting golden anniversary celebration of the original Fahrenheit. Published in 1953, Bradbury’s relatively short book was tiptoed around by nervous critics in McCarthyist America. Like Moore’s exposé, censorship is the author’s prime target. Bradbury claimed in an interview that his critique was of ‘totalitarians everywhere, either left or right, doesn’t matter where they are, they’re book-burners, all of them’. But the direct parallels with McCarthyist, Stalinist and Nazi regimes (all of which censored and burned literature) sit alongside an explicit call to resist the temptations of the seductive banality, which, as Hannah Arendt has defined it in the case of Nazi Germany, ultimately nourishes evil.
Guy Montag is a fireman. But in the world of the novel, firemen don’t put out fires – they start them. So although all houses in Bradbury’s dystopia are fireproof, the books must be burnt where found. Clearly, this brainwashing regime still has much to accomplish, as Montag and his colleagues have enough work to keep them in regular employment. But the surviving book-hoarders – generally ex-professors and subversive conversational types, given to straying outside, loitering in parks and asking questions – appear to be far outnumbered by blissfully ignorant silicon clones, whose youthful amnesia fuels the progress of the New Way, replacing complexity with sensual gratification at every opportunity.
Montag appears to be a dormant subversive with a steady book-hoarding habit. His full rebellion, however, is eventually provoked by Clarisse McClellan, a local teenage girl who is all lyrical innocence and uncorrupted curiosity. Clarisse unsettles Guy with questions and observations – had he heard the rumour that firemen used to put out fires? Did he notice how people drove faster, saw less and seemed to always be going but never being? Clarisse strikes him as a mirror among the torches, themselves all ‘blazing away until they whiffed out’.
As she probes and observes, shaking the foundations of Guy’s happiness, he ‘felt she was […] emptying his pockets’. Clarisse points out the expanding advertising hoardings (for ease of perception by faster drivers), target-based teaching (‘a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not’) and the ostracising of ‘eccentric’ behaviour. Her curious family actually engages in conversation at home: ‘It’s like being a pedestrian, only rarer’. One description of Clarisse’s face particularly stands out: ‘like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of the night when you waken to see […] a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing […] the night passing swiftly on towards further darknesses but moving also toward a new sun.’
The incumbent dictator and blazing torch-in-chief is Beatty, the head fireman whose intimidating fluency batters doubters into submission. Beatty flaunts style over substance until the people shut up, nod and reach for the pills. As Beatty begins to sense Montag straying, he recounts a recent ‘day-dream’ of his, a fierce debate between the two men:
And you said, quoting, ‘Truth will come to light, murder will not be hid long!’ And I cried in good humour, ‘Oh, God, he speaks only of his horse!’ And ‘The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.’ And you yelled, ‘This age thinks better of a gilded fool, than of a threadbare saint in wisdom’s school!’ And I whispered gently, ‘The dignity of truth is lost with much protesting.’ And you screamed, ‘Carcasses bleed at the sight of the murderer!’ And I said, patting your hand, ‘What, do I give you a trench mouth?’
Lest we should forget the essence of good dictatorship, words are there for the taking, a powerful means of manipulation and coercion, and if we can’t be arsed, someone will make fools of us. An omitted scene from François Truffaut’s 1966 film adaptation has Montag taken to Beatty’s apartment, where he is given a guided tour of his host’s wall-to-wall bookshelves. This was, perhaps, a glimpse too far.
It’s out of our control. The war is waged Somewhere Else. In Fahrenheit 451, the other looming threat is of Bradbury’s time and ours: nuclear. The dehumanised reality of death at war gives way to aimless ‘sedativitelly’ for the wives at home and this is eventually just too much for our hero. Montag’s flight from superimposed reality is that of Truman in The Truman Show, and his real escape is airbrushed by a fictitious televised conclusion: death for ‘Montag’ being watched in bewilderment by Montag, from the relative safety of a disused railroad.
The plot continues, and any more revelations would be a discredit to the essence of Fahrenheit 451. So, ignore the critics, positively laugh at the idea of a digested version and read the thing yourself. I can’t recommend it enough. Quality aside, this is a virtual reading reality adventure. You will cling on to your copy for dear life (see if you can get hold of the 1974 Palgrave edition with the faux-burning cover – impossible to put down). A Frank Darabont film is due in 2007, which, it is hoped (after The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile) will fare better than the Truffaut film, in which Julie Christie was unwisely cast both as Clarisse and Montag’s wife. Truffaut made several other notable omissions, major characters and scenes among them. Bradbury, at eighty-seven, is thankfully still around to give advice to the next contender. Perhaps Darabont should simply ‘rip the pages straight out of [his] book and stuff ‘em in the camera’, as is the advice of fellow director Sam Peckinpah. Could be the only way forward. Whatever you do though, Frank, be sure to ask first.
