Enormous TV screens airing game shows all day, a robot with a mind of its own, persecuted academics, banned books, school shootings, communication through earpieces – sound familiar? Written in 1953 during the dark days of McCarthyism, American classic Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is a scarily prescient sci-fi novel that will leave you gobsmacked.
Guy Montag is a fireman whose job it is to burn books. Armed with kerosene torches, Montag and his colleagues seek out houses where sightings of books have been reported. In a dark corner of the fire station lies the Mechanical Hound, an eight legged, robotic, metal creature with ‘green-blue neon light’ eyes, who sniffs out book owners and traitors.
Back home, Montag’s wife Mildred spends her days watching mindless TV and gossiping with her girlfriends. Meanwhile, a war rumbles on in the background but no one seems to worry too much about that.
Montag’s coincidental meeting with 17-year-old Clarisse McClelland changes his life. Clarisse lives in the neighbourhood and is considered deranged as she goes for walks, talks about things and hangs out with adults.
‘I’m afraid of children my own age. They kill each other. Did it always used to be this way? My uncle says no. Six of my friends have been shot in the last year alone.’
Called out to a house one day, Montag and his colleagues are confronted with a defiant old lady whose house is filled to the rafters with books. It doesn’t go well for the old lady and Montag has had enough.
I have lost count of the number of quotable sentences in this book. Bradbury’s prescience is simply astonishing. It is dark, of course, but also has an almost cartoonish quality to it and some inspiring, fearless characters. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that this is a frightening novel with everything that’s going on around us, but at the very least it ends on a hopeful note reminding us: we have been here before.
‘There was a damn silly bird called a Phoenix back before Christ: every few hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over…’
Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is published by Flamingo, 240 pages.
