Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451
By Ray Bradbury
My Rating: 3.5/5
Genre: Dystopi, Sci Fi
Finished on: 27th Jan 2022
I started this book in the month of January '22, and writing this review on the last day of '22.
I'm not sure how much I can recall at this point, or whether this review will do any justice to how I actually felt while reading..
But, here we go.
So this was one of those MUST READ books I've been putting off for so long. I finally read it.
The first time I ever heard of the title, I didn't really think the genre of this book was going to be a dystopian one.
I'm not sure how much I can recall at this point, or whether this review will do any justice to how I actually felt while reading..
But, here we go.
So this was one of those MUST READ books I've been putting off for so long. I finally read it.
The first time I ever heard of the title, I didn't really think the genre of this book was going to be a dystopian one.
Fahrenheit 451, what did it even mean? Temperature? Global warming?
The meaning was explained soon enough.
Coming to the book, there are three parts to it. The first one being...
PART ONE: IT WAS A PLEASURE TO BURN:
The meaning was explained soon enough.
Coming to the book, there are three parts to it. The first one being...
PART ONE: IT WAS A PLEASURE TO BURN:
This was the part where the plot was being introduced to us. Initially into the story, Guy Montag, the protagonist, meets the neighbour.
Then he goes to the place he works? His team is firemen? He is a fireman?
But they were no ordinary firemen. The moment I said firemen, you might think of a scenario in which a fire has been started somewhere and these folks rush to the spot to defuse it.
But here, they don't quite do that. They start the fire instead.
Wait, what? What did it even mean?
We soon find out they don't just go start fires for fun. They go to burn things. They burn books.
So the story here is, books are forbidden for the people where the protagonist lives. And if anybody is spotted with them, these firemen are tipped off about it and are supposed to go and burn them all. The owner of the books is given a chance to stay or leave. If they choose to stay with the books, then.. well, you might as well guess it.
Read the Part One title again, "It was a 'Pleasure' to burn". And the title, "Fahrenheit 451"? It's the temperature at which the paper burns.
Yep, dystopian right there.
And besides this, we find out more about the dystopian life there.
Apparently cars aren't supposed to be driven slowly at all. They must be driven very fast, and the reason for that is they shouldn't be given any chance to observe the nature around them. And the billboards there for advertisements are about 20ft to 200ft high, so the drivers can easily see whatever is being advertised in the speed they are driving.
AND, since you are not supposed to observe the nature around, you shouldn't be a pedestrian too. No walking on roads. It's forbidden. You'll be arrested for it. And likewise, you'll be arrested if you drive slowly too.
And in one case which weirded me out a lot, to be honest, was when this protagonist (Guy's) wife accidentally ate a lot of sleeping pills (she's forgetful), so the paramedics approached and.. instead of the normal routine where they would take her to the hospital and get her treated.. they plugged her to a machine which pumped all of the blood from her body and replaced it with fresh blood and serum.
Yes.
Fresh blood and serum. Wow.
Is that how they are treating every ailment there?
Looking at how his wife got treated, he wondered they might as well have taken her mind to dry cleaners! 🤣
And to have some more info now of how people here really were..
"There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that's too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood. Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life!"
"All of those chemical balances and percentages on all of us here in the house are recorded in the master file downstairs."
There is also a hound in this book, you can consider it to be like a robot dog which spies and sniffs the rebel. He keeps growling at Guy, and he is bothered by it too. Is the hound sensing something here?
Guy connects with Clarisse (his neighbour?) and we learn more information about their life through their conversation.
In their world, there is a Window Smasher Place, Car Wrecker Place, and a place where Children kill each other. I suppose I need not explain what all those places mean here.
Here nobody talks anything new. The people even repeat the jokes. The paintings displayed are all abstract, nothing which explains of life and people.
They don't speak of the past.
Days pass by, until Clarisse was nowhere to be seen. A road accident, they say.
We might as well had just waited for this moment to happen. Learning so much of present life while it's forbidden to speak or even think of the life they have? Surviving post that is a hard pass.
Now since this book is based on the temperature of burning books, lets talk about it.
There was one incident where these firemen, including Guy Montag (he's a fireman, remember?) had to visit yet another house to burn books, and in this one he sees how the police has reached before them, and are doing their job of taking the people out of their house, and cleaning up the mess (the books) inside the house like janitors.
But the woman who owned those books refused to leave. And Guy witnessed how she took the matchstick herself to blow up the place rather than waiting for them to do it.
Ever since that happened, Guy pondered over the incident..
"There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing."
"And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before.”
This is too much for Guy Montag to bear. His mind is processing too many sensible things at once, and he needs some time off.
He asks his wife to make a call at his workplace and inform he'll be skipping work. But before that happens, Beatty visits his place.
Beatty is his colleague.
And in this meeting, Beatty.. tells him about everything. Explains why things are, the way they are.
"You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead.”
The poor girl --> Clarisse.
Tyranny much?
After some more small talk, Beatty leaves.
But Montag recalls more of Clarisse talks, how she mentioned houses having porch too, but they have now been removed. Possibly to avoid people having no social life.
And what's more, with the absence of social life, there has to be something replacing it to consume the time of every citizen now, right?
What's better than their own brainwashing TV?
The converter attachment, which had cost them one hundred dollars, automatically supplied her name whenever the announcer addressed his anonymous audience.
Amidst the growing rebellion and understanding of their life in Montag's mind, he reveals us a secret.
A secret which he has.
Apparently even he has hidden not one but 20 books behind the ventilator at his home. And now he wants to read them all.
Buut, someone was at the door.
He doesn't answer.
End of Part 1.
PART TWO: THE SIEVE AND THE SAND
Now that the introduction of the dystopian book is done, it is time for some action.
Introducing Faber, he's a professor, or at least was. Now a professor are bound to know about books and know what happened to them right?
So Montag calls Faber. He initially assumed it's a trap and hangs up the phone.
But Montag isn't the one to easily give up. So he goes to Faber's home and asks about it.
Faber admits about knowing and caring for books. He mentions how he's a coward for not speaking up when he had the time, and now it's too late.
Faber says, in today's time and world, three things are missing:
1) Quality of information
2) Leisure to digest it
3) Right to carry out the actions based on what we learn from the two.
Montag wants to do something about this. He asks for Faber's help, and they plot a plan.
Faber gives him an earpiece he created, which can help them in communicating.
Now that Montag is so focused on his new goal, the existing behavior which he had been witnessing for so long is unbearable to him now.
At his home, his wife's girl friends come over, and they gossip and complain about things.
Guy lashes out.
"Did you hear them, did you hear these monsters talking about monsters? Oh God, the way they jabber about people and their own children and themselves and the way they talk about their husbands and the way they talk about war, dammit, I stand here and I can't believe it!”
Faber is at first angry to see him lashing out like this, but ends up consoling him.
And this is just the start of his mistakes.
Later when he goes to his firehouse, initially Beatty tries to make Guy slip and spill the beans, he almost even does, but then controls himself.
Then they suddenly get an assignment, Beatty looks at the address and gets going with the team.
Montag was so focused on thinking how he can stop himself from doing his job this time that he fails to notice the address..
They were heading to his house.
PART THREE: BURNING BRIGHT:
Before we get to the burning scene, I would like to highlight how the vehicles in this book mentioned are Beetle, Salamander, Dragon.. creative much? :P
So Part One was the introduction, Part two was taking places and positioning themselves to execute the action
And Part three? The execution.
In the end of Part Two, the firemen were heading towards Guy Montag's house.
In the beginning of Part 3, Montag is made to burn his own house. Yes, he does.
And Mildred, his wife, simply walks away.
As if this wasn't enough, we see that Beatty has realized about the ear piece Guy is carrying to communicate with Faber.
Now there is really nowhere Guy could run now, so he does the inevitable..
He fights and kill Beatty. Yes.
And not just him, but the other two firemen too who stood there witnessing the murder happening. But weirdly before their murder, we see the firemen didn't react at all.
How robotic are all these people, really?
So with the declaration to the world that yet another rebellion has taken birth, Montag doesn't really have much choice but to run.
So he runs, hides his books in Mrs Black House, rings the alarm, and runs again.
The police is searching for him. He is being telecasted everywhere. They even set off a very talented hound to snuff him out.
"What could he say in a single word, a few words, that would sear all their faces and wake them up?"
What could he even do? He is on the run.
Since he had visited Faber as well before his declaration of rebellion, he suggests Faber to clear his trail in his house. And also manages to divert the trail by dumping his clothes in the river and wearing old clothes of Faber.
But honestly, every step he took to run, every alley he took a turn towards, and every step which the hound took being telecasted, I held my breathe.
Really.
And I exhaled my breathe only when we were sure his trail has been successfully diverted and it's a bit more difficult for them to track him down.
Montag goes and sleeps in a barn. And more to that, he finds fruits for himself - milk, apples and pears.
Lucky day for him.
And in the morning, he finds a group. And looks like this is the kind of group he was searching for, as they seemed sane like him.
Montag is worried, as the police might still be searching for him. But one person from the group, Granger reassures that they cannot take the risk of disappointing people that you won after all. For them to be happy, you need to die.
And so..
"Search is over, Montag is dead; a crime against society has been avenged.”
And this group is just what he needed, the people who have not forgotten books. But how did they survive carrying books for so long?
"We read the books and burnt them, afraid they'd be found."
Wow. :|
“If not, we'll just have to wait. We'll pass the books on to our children, by word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on the other people. A lot will be lost that way, of course. But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can't last.”
They notice that the city is getting bombed now. Montag is devastated as he recalls how he met his wife, Millie/Mildred, and now doesn't want her to die. Doesn't want Faber to die.
But Granger tells a beautiful thing, about the life we must live and the legacy we must leave behind.
"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies,A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
It doesn't matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
This quote has my heart 💓
And that is how, they hope to keep the words of all the books alive.
They want to survive, to carry it forward, so that hopefully, one day in the future, they'll be allowed to write it down and permanently mark its presence for the world.
The End.
-----------------------------
Whenever I read a dystopian book, I secretly wish the ending to be a fairytale one, everything undone, bad becomes good, insane becomes sane, all is well and happy ending?
But of course it is too much to expect.
This book was a good portrayal of how life can turn out to be when rules are dictated a bit too much.
How monotonous, emotionless and almost soulless the people can become.
And to top it off, the significance of books and knowledge in our lives and how they shape our minds to think the way we do.
Excluding the moments when I was totally lost while reading (which I totally blame my dynamic attention span), and I had no idea what was going on, this book was a good read.
Quote from the Book:
Then he goes to the place he works? His team is firemen? He is a fireman?
But they were no ordinary firemen. The moment I said firemen, you might think of a scenario in which a fire has been started somewhere and these folks rush to the spot to defuse it.
But here, they don't quite do that. They start the fire instead.
Wait, what? What did it even mean?
We soon find out they don't just go start fires for fun. They go to burn things. They burn books.
So the story here is, books are forbidden for the people where the protagonist lives. And if anybody is spotted with them, these firemen are tipped off about it and are supposed to go and burn them all. The owner of the books is given a chance to stay or leave. If they choose to stay with the books, then.. well, you might as well guess it.
Read the Part One title again, "It was a 'Pleasure' to burn". And the title, "Fahrenheit 451"? It's the temperature at which the paper burns.
Yep, dystopian right there.
And besides this, we find out more about the dystopian life there.
Apparently cars aren't supposed to be driven slowly at all. They must be driven very fast, and the reason for that is they shouldn't be given any chance to observe the nature around them. And the billboards there for advertisements are about 20ft to 200ft high, so the drivers can easily see whatever is being advertised in the speed they are driving.
AND, since you are not supposed to observe the nature around, you shouldn't be a pedestrian too. No walking on roads. It's forbidden. You'll be arrested for it. And likewise, you'll be arrested if you drive slowly too.
And in one case which weirded me out a lot, to be honest, was when this protagonist (Guy's) wife accidentally ate a lot of sleeping pills (she's forgetful), so the paramedics approached and.. instead of the normal routine where they would take her to the hospital and get her treated.. they plugged her to a machine which pumped all of the blood from her body and replaced it with fresh blood and serum.
Yes.
Fresh blood and serum. Wow.
Is that how they are treating every ailment there?
Looking at how his wife got treated, he wondered they might as well have taken her mind to dry cleaners! 🤣
And to have some more info now of how people here really were..
"There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that's too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood. Good God, who were those men? I never saw them before in my life!"
"All of those chemical balances and percentages on all of us here in the house are recorded in the master file downstairs."
There is also a hound in this book, you can consider it to be like a robot dog which spies and sniffs the rebel. He keeps growling at Guy, and he is bothered by it too. Is the hound sensing something here?
Guy connects with Clarisse (his neighbour?) and we learn more information about their life through their conversation.
In their world, there is a Window Smasher Place, Car Wrecker Place, and a place where Children kill each other. I suppose I need not explain what all those places mean here.
Here nobody talks anything new. The people even repeat the jokes. The paintings displayed are all abstract, nothing which explains of life and people.
They don't speak of the past.
Days pass by, until Clarisse was nowhere to be seen. A road accident, they say.
We might as well had just waited for this moment to happen. Learning so much of present life while it's forbidden to speak or even think of the life they have? Surviving post that is a hard pass.
Now since this book is based on the temperature of burning books, lets talk about it.
There was one incident where these firemen, including Guy Montag (he's a fireman, remember?) had to visit yet another house to burn books, and in this one he sees how the police has reached before them, and are doing their job of taking the people out of their house, and cleaning up the mess (the books) inside the house like janitors.
But the woman who owned those books refused to leave. And Guy witnessed how she took the matchstick herself to blow up the place rather than waiting for them to do it.
Ever since that happened, Guy pondered over the incident..
"There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing."
"And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before.”
This is too much for Guy Montag to bear. His mind is processing too many sensible things at once, and he needs some time off.
He asks his wife to make a call at his workplace and inform he'll be skipping work. But before that happens, Beatty visits his place.
Beatty is his colleague.
And in this meeting, Beatty.. tells him about everything. Explains why things are, the way they are.
"You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead.”
The poor girl --> Clarisse.
Tyranny much?
After some more small talk, Beatty leaves.
But Montag recalls more of Clarisse talks, how she mentioned houses having porch too, but they have now been removed. Possibly to avoid people having no social life.
And what's more, with the absence of social life, there has to be something replacing it to consume the time of every citizen now, right?
What's better than their own brainwashing TV?
The converter attachment, which had cost them one hundred dollars, automatically supplied her name whenever the announcer addressed his anonymous audience.
Amidst the growing rebellion and understanding of their life in Montag's mind, he reveals us a secret.
A secret which he has.
Apparently even he has hidden not one but 20 books behind the ventilator at his home. And now he wants to read them all.
Buut, someone was at the door.
He doesn't answer.
End of Part 1.
PART TWO: THE SIEVE AND THE SAND
Now that the introduction of the dystopian book is done, it is time for some action.
Introducing Faber, he's a professor, or at least was. Now a professor are bound to know about books and know what happened to them right?
So Montag calls Faber. He initially assumed it's a trap and hangs up the phone.
But Montag isn't the one to easily give up. So he goes to Faber's home and asks about it.
Faber admits about knowing and caring for books. He mentions how he's a coward for not speaking up when he had the time, and now it's too late.
Faber says, in today's time and world, three things are missing:
1) Quality of information
2) Leisure to digest it
3) Right to carry out the actions based on what we learn from the two.
Montag wants to do something about this. He asks for Faber's help, and they plot a plan.
Faber gives him an earpiece he created, which can help them in communicating.
Now that Montag is so focused on his new goal, the existing behavior which he had been witnessing for so long is unbearable to him now.
At his home, his wife's girl friends come over, and they gossip and complain about things.
Guy lashes out.
"Did you hear them, did you hear these monsters talking about monsters? Oh God, the way they jabber about people and their own children and themselves and the way they talk about their husbands and the way they talk about war, dammit, I stand here and I can't believe it!”
Faber is at first angry to see him lashing out like this, but ends up consoling him.
And this is just the start of his mistakes.
Later when he goes to his firehouse, initially Beatty tries to make Guy slip and spill the beans, he almost even does, but then controls himself.
Then they suddenly get an assignment, Beatty looks at the address and gets going with the team.
Montag was so focused on thinking how he can stop himself from doing his job this time that he fails to notice the address..
They were heading to his house.
PART THREE: BURNING BRIGHT:
Before we get to the burning scene, I would like to highlight how the vehicles in this book mentioned are Beetle, Salamander, Dragon.. creative much? :P
So Part One was the introduction, Part two was taking places and positioning themselves to execute the action
And Part three? The execution.
In the end of Part Two, the firemen were heading towards Guy Montag's house.
In the beginning of Part 3, Montag is made to burn his own house. Yes, he does.
And Mildred, his wife, simply walks away.
As if this wasn't enough, we see that Beatty has realized about the ear piece Guy is carrying to communicate with Faber.
Now there is really nowhere Guy could run now, so he does the inevitable..
He fights and kill Beatty. Yes.
And not just him, but the other two firemen too who stood there witnessing the murder happening. But weirdly before their murder, we see the firemen didn't react at all.
How robotic are all these people, really?
So with the declaration to the world that yet another rebellion has taken birth, Montag doesn't really have much choice but to run.
So he runs, hides his books in Mrs Black House, rings the alarm, and runs again.
The police is searching for him. He is being telecasted everywhere. They even set off a very talented hound to snuff him out.
"What could he say in a single word, a few words, that would sear all their faces and wake them up?"
What could he even do? He is on the run.
Since he had visited Faber as well before his declaration of rebellion, he suggests Faber to clear his trail in his house. And also manages to divert the trail by dumping his clothes in the river and wearing old clothes of Faber.
But honestly, every step he took to run, every alley he took a turn towards, and every step which the hound took being telecasted, I held my breathe.
Really.
And I exhaled my breathe only when we were sure his trail has been successfully diverted and it's a bit more difficult for them to track him down.
Montag goes and sleeps in a barn. And more to that, he finds fruits for himself - milk, apples and pears.
Lucky day for him.
And in the morning, he finds a group. And looks like this is the kind of group he was searching for, as they seemed sane like him.
Montag is worried, as the police might still be searching for him. But one person from the group, Granger reassures that they cannot take the risk of disappointing people that you won after all. For them to be happy, you need to die.
And so..
"Search is over, Montag is dead; a crime against society has been avenged.”
And this group is just what he needed, the people who have not forgotten books. But how did they survive carrying books for so long?
"We read the books and burnt them, afraid they'd be found."
Wow. :|
“If not, we'll just have to wait. We'll pass the books on to our children, by word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on the other people. A lot will be lost that way, of course. But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can't last.”
They notice that the city is getting bombed now. Montag is devastated as he recalls how he met his wife, Millie/Mildred, and now doesn't want her to die. Doesn't want Faber to die.
But Granger tells a beautiful thing, about the life we must live and the legacy we must leave behind.
"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies,A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
It doesn't matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
This quote has my heart 💓
And that is how, they hope to keep the words of all the books alive.
They want to survive, to carry it forward, so that hopefully, one day in the future, they'll be allowed to write it down and permanently mark its presence for the world.
The End.
-----------------------------
Whenever I read a dystopian book, I secretly wish the ending to be a fairytale one, everything undone, bad becomes good, insane becomes sane, all is well and happy ending?
But of course it is too much to expect.
This book was a good portrayal of how life can turn out to be when rules are dictated a bit too much.
How monotonous, emotionless and almost soulless the people can become.
And to top it off, the significance of books and knowledge in our lives and how they shape our minds to think the way we do.
Excluding the moments when I was totally lost while reading (which I totally blame my dynamic attention span), and I had no idea what was going on, this book was a good read.
Quote from the Book:
We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?
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Chars: 14049
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