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.