Burn Baby Burn

Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
p. 1953

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”

The world lost one of the greats when we lost Ray Bradbury last year. His ability to conceive of ideas that are beyond his time and transform them into relevancy was astonishing, and none more so than in what is arguably his most famous novel, Fahrenheit 451, which I somehow managed to not read in the first 26 years of my life.

For those who are still uninitiated, Fahrenheit 451 is the story of Guy Montag, a ‘fireman’ in a dystopian future whose job it is to start fires, not put them out. Montag and his fellow firemen don’t even remember a time when putting out fires was the purpose behind those in their profession, as all they’ve ever known is how to burn and what they’re burning is books.

 

Montag doesn’t give much thought to his job until he meets Clarisse, the guileless teenage neighbor who doesn’t seem to be afraid of Montag, and her sincerity moves Montag to question his line of work for the first time. After witnessing a woman burn her house down (and herself with it) in lieu of surrendering her library, it is the final straw for Montag. He takes one souvenir—one teeny, tiny little book—and finds his world turned on its head. This new-found curiosity, this need to question things and figure them out for himself, leads Montag to turn one-time acquaintances into friendships, and the seemingly solid relationships he has known in turn crumble into dust.

Bradbury’s characters are complex and layered—the follower who finds the courage to step out of line, even if it means standing on his own, the world-weary scholar who still feels guilty for letting it all happen, the wife who is so empty inside she tries to kill herself and doesn’t even remember why. But none, in my opinion, are more striking than Fahrenheit’s chief antagonist, 451’s Captain Beatty, who attempts to counsel Montag, to sway him in the ‘right’ direction, only to betray him in the end. It’s hard to despise Beatty. He is a remarkable villain—whip smart and intuitive as he is. His reasoning for burning books may be flawed, but it is a very human flaw—to decide to hate something because you feel betrayed by it. And Beatty, like Montag, is just a product of his environment. Beatty didn’t start the crusade to burn books, he just fueled the fire; the flame would have died if the world hadn’t been feeding it all along. It’s not just exposition to explain the world of Fahrenheit, it’s a warning to Bradbury’s audience not to let the same thing happen in the real world, in any hypothetical manner.

My copy of the book is the 50^th anniversary edition, and in the end is an addendum that any fan of Bradbury has probably heard already. Years after publication, Bradbury wrote an additional scene between Montag and Beatty wherein Beatty shows Montag his vast untouched library of books he has saved from fires but never touched and let sit in a room to rot, unread and unheeded. It’s almost like seeing a horrifying display of a serial killer’s victims, and the scene cemented Beatty for me as not only one of the best literary villains, but as a fascinating character in general.

As always, Bradbury has a way with words that transforms a simple story into something much more. In this novel, his words are about words, and it is very clear the topic was near and dear to Bradbury’s heart. Books are almost a character in and of themselves; they represent so much more than what they are believed to be on the surface, just like the players themselves. In the era of McCarthyism, this was a bold topic and I can see why this book had such a lasting effect on literary culture. 

My only concern with this book is that it sort of derails near the end. The question of how one man can change the collective attitude of a world choosing ignorance looms over the entire novel, suggests an insurmountable problem for our hero. But Montag doesn’t do anything to change the world; it is only forced upon the world through nuclear exchange that wipes out major cities. The surprise-apocalypse-conclusion to this book probably shouldn’t have shocked me as much as it did—impending war and people’s general obliviousness towards it was hinted at throughout the novel—but it struck me as a bit of a cheap way to effect lasting change. A nuclear deus ex machina. A bit depressing to be told that the only way to save the world is by wiping it out and starting over again, but then Fahrenheit 451 is no stranger to biblical tropes, and I suppose it is rather ironic that the solution to the problem of burning books indiscriminately is to burn the people indiscriminately.

Take the Money and Run... But It's Not Going to Help

No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
p. 2005

No Country for Old Men is my second foray into the work of Cormac McCarthy, the first being the apocalyptic father-son drama, The Road, a few years back. Compared to The Road, No Country for Old Men is like My Little Pony, but I do not say that to disparage the latter; it’s still a very serious and contemplative book in its own right, I only mention this to give some insight on my expectations of the book prior to reading it.

No Country for Old Men is what happens when an average joe stumbles upon an incomprehensible fortune and suddenly becomes the most wanted man in Texas. Llewelyn Moss knows he’s asking for trouble when he stumbles upon the aftermath of a deadly shootout between drug dealers on the Mexican border and a suitcase full of millions left unattended, but he decides to play his luck and take the money home, prompting a whole menagerie of people it’s best not to mess with to give chase. Hot on Moss’s trail are a tormented old sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, who only wants to see Moss home safe to his loyal young wife, Mexican cartel members, and two rival hitmen, mouthy former military man Carson Wells and laconic and exotic Anton Chigurh, who is probably meant to be mysterious and fearsome, but comes off more as an inhumanly evil caricature.

As in The Road, I have to commend McCarthy for his economy with words. He has a way of saying very much with very little and possesses a sort of southern sagacity that is very effective. The monologues given by various characters are chock full of quotables, though they are not very realistic depictions of dialogue.

Some times, though, I feel as though McCarthy is too judicious with his vocabulary, as he has chosen here to leave out all forms of punctuation distinguishing dialogue exchanges. Without quotation marks, it’s often hard to tell when someone stops talking and starts thinking, and in long exchanges between two characters, I sometimes had to go back a few paragraphs, to the last time an indicator was used, to remember who was saying what. This gets a bit tedious after awhile, and emphasizes the exact reason why we traditionally employ transitional phrases in writing.

My other, lesser issue with No Country for Old Men is that there doesn’t seem to be a point to it all. Lots of stuff happens off screen, so to speak—important stuff, and there are too many threads full of sparsely developed characters. The style in which it is written suggests that maybe all of these threads will converge at the climax and we’ll see what it all means... but they don’t. They never come together, the bad guy wins, the ‘good guy’ learns nothing he didn’t already know, and you get the feeling that everything that made these characters potentially intriguing happened long before we met them.

And maybe this is one of those stories where you’re not supposed to learn anything, where there’s not supposed to be a point, where life is random and unfair and doesn’t mean anything (now that I think about it, the Coen brothers were the perfect people to adapt this novel to film), but, well, those kinds of stories have always been hit or miss with me anyway.

I do recommend this book though, on the whole. It makes for an engaging leisurely summer read, which sounds contradictory, but is really just my way of saying you'll be on the edge of your seat while reading it, but when you are done, you'll put the book down and probably not think about it much after that. As I’d said before, even if there is nothing else to sort through, the dialogue is rich enough to keep you rooted to the page... even if half of that is spent just trying to figure out what is going on.

The World is Over; Now What?

Alas, Babylon
by Pat Frank
p. 1959

Without really intending to, June sort of became ‘Apocalypse Month’ for me, as all three novels I read that month dealt heavily with the end of the world, and all in vastly different ways. But whereas Good Omens and The Devil’s Cat were worlds on the brink of apocalypse, thwarted at the last moment, Alas, Babylon is one of those postwar apocalyptic novels that explores what happens after the world has suffered a nuclear holocaust. The last one I read like this was Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7, and any comparisons between the two are apt.

It’s an interesting thing, the mentality that existed in Cold War era fiction. Whereas post-apocalyptic fiction was nothing new, the threat of nuclear holocaust added a new dimension to the genre with the implication that—at least in this instance—humanity is directly responsible for its own downfall and have no one to blame but themselves for the bleak world they left for the future, if indeed there is even a future left.

Alas, Babylon centers on the day to day trials of Randy Bragg and his town of Fort Repose, Florida, in the direct aftermath of a nuclear exchange that devastated the United States to the point where it became a third world nation in a matter of minutes.

Randy was a largely directionless but amiable young man who only thrived in his postwar world because he was warned by his older brother, a military man who saw the incident coming in time to send his family to Randy for protection. Suddenly saddled with numerous responsibilities, Randy does what he can to protect those closest to him—his sister in law and their two young children (who are remarkably well composed, given the circumstances; perhaps a bit more composed than what is natural), Randy’s girlfriend and her father, the town doctor, a couple of elderly female neighbors. Randy also warns the black neighbors who worked for him prior to the nuclear exchange (referred to in the novel as ‘The Day’) and a relationship of mutual assistance forms, which is crucial to the town’s survival. There are moments when the way the black characters are depicted feels a bit uncomfortable, but I have to say that—given the time frame in which it was written (1959)—Pat Frank is relatively politically correct, all things considered. Randy is a forward-thinking and fair-minded man, and it helps spur him on in his newfound ability to lead, a role previously alien to him.

Another thing I was mostly impressed by was Pat Frank’s depiction of women. I have been saying for years now—ever since I got into early science fiction—that it was my goal to find a male author who wrote positive roles for women prior to the seventies. Thus far, Alas, Babylon is the closest I’ve come to meeting this goal. There are still times when Frank slips into cringe-worthy clichés—such as Randy’s sister-in-law, Helen, momentarily becoming obsessed with Randy as a replacement for her husband, and Randy’s later appraisal that women cannot be relied upon to think for themselves some times,

“The more he learned about women the more there was to learn except that he had learned this: they needed a man around.”

but prior to this incident, Helen Bragg was a remarkably outstanding pillar of control and support. Randy’s girlfriend is portrayed as independent and free-thinking. The elderly female neighbors are hardy and independent as well, and even Randy’s eleven-year-old niece has a moment of determined brilliance when she takes the initiative to provide for her new community, comptently, I might add. But it was the most jarring revelation—that, as a result of The Day, the only remaining official left to hold the office of President is a woman, and Fort Repose accepts this with little argument—that made me question whether Pat Frank was a pseudonym for Patricia. (It’s not, remarkably.)

One of the aspects of fifties and sixties science fiction that I have come to realize, regrettably, is that there are few characters with standout personalities. The same can be said here, as Alas, Babylon, was a very perfunctory story, without much zest in the characterization department. That said, I did like Frank’s style of writing, particularly when he ramped it up for the end of chapters. This was not a book I read in one sitting, but I was okay with that, because the way every chapter ended was so poised that it left me with something to think about for hours afterwards, until I had the opportunity to resume reading.

It’s fitting that I concluded my ‘Apocalypse Month’ with a book that actually went to the brink, with finality and solemnity. It felt like a good way to cap off my month of living on the verge of destruction, and I already can’t wait to see what the next one will be like.