Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.
The classic dystopian novel of a post-literate future, Fahrenheit 451 stands alongside Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World as a prophetic account of Western civilization's enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity. Bradbury's powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the potential of technology to create a novel which, decades on from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.
Barb takes care of the web orders here at Boffins, and is your contact for book club enquiries. She spends all her spare time curled up on the couch reading and for the last several years has reviewed books on the Afternoon Program on ABC radio Perth.
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is as relevant today as it was on publication 65 years ago. A future where historical truth is eradicated, the population is discouraged from thinking for themselves and pacified with endless TV programming? Hmmm, who would’ve thought? When Bradbury wrote his dystopian classic about a Giles Montage, the fireman whose job it is to burn houses where books are discovered, the disaster he foresaw was not the end of the book per se, but rather the loss of the knowledge that books hold. It is hard to read the novel without wondering what he would of thought of today’s fake news, reality TV and digital manipulation.
