Once again, thank heavens for e-books. I was in the midst of reading The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony when I left for Canada. I was finding the book fascinating and thought for sure I'd be able to finish the book while waiting at the airport for my flight and then on the flight. Again WRONG. In fact, the book expired when I was only about one third of the way through with it. Thank goodness, the day before that expired, Fahrenheit 451 was available for download. While The Giver by Lois Lowry was my Books and Beer Club selection for July, it was also recommended that we read Fahrenheit 451 for comparison, because it's a book that everyone must read. Yes, I'd never read Fahrenheit 451. I remember it being a favorite of a good friend from high school. Somehow, I'd never been persuaded to read it. Another classic I can check off on my list of books I never read but probably should have. If you haven't read it, you probably should!
Wow! What a book. Like The Giver, Ray Bradbury's award winning novel is a dystopian novel. The government controls the lives of the people. The majority of the people seem content. But that's really where the similarity ends. In The Giver, the "purpose" of the control is to eliminate pain. That didn't seem to be the case at all in Fahrenheit 451. There were far too many miserable people in this book.
The overall premise is that books are bad. Firemen no longer fight fires, they start and control fires, in the quest to eliminate all books. 451 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale is the temperature at which paper combusts into flames. The book was written during the early days of people having televisions in their homes. Bradbury's plot, speculative fiction, wonders what life would be like if people no longer read books but got anesthetized by television. Reading this book in 2016, I needed to repeatedly remind myself that this book was published in 1953 and was the future as Ray Bradbury imagined it. So much of what he imagined is our reality today.
The world of Guy Montag, the protagonist in the novel, is not a nice place. It's a world full of war and darkness. The citizens seem even less connected to each other than in The Giver. It's a world where stomach pumping is a completely run-of-the-mill occurrence. It's a world where people found with books might be burned with their homes and their libraries, no matter how large or small.
To keep this post (and blog) non-political, I won't expound at all on my connections between the novel and the current situations, I just want to point out that there are many comparisons that can be made.
I can't imagine a world without books, where people sit numbed out in their living rooms watching larger than life television sets. Where "the family" refers to characters view on television rather than the loving people in one's life. But now... I'm off to search for the movie online...
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