Imagine a
world where cultural diversity demands watering down one’s
written and spoken opinions in order to avoid offending minorities,
where religion is sugar-coated to make it palatable to all and sundry,
where television screens are wall-size, and people prefer watching
those screens to conversation, thought, or reading. That, Captain
Beatty tells
fireman Guy Montag, is the situation that gave rise to the
society portrayed in Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’.
Montag lives in a world where
books are absolutely forbidden. As
a fireman, it is his duty to destroy books by fire, and sometimes the
houses and people who hold them. In that job, he and his fellow
firemen are assisted by the Mechanical Hound, a powerful machine that
looks like a dog and is
able to track down fugitives, then kill them
with a massive injection of narcotics. The Hound doesn’t like
Montag.
Life in Montag’s world is difficult. Even his vacuous,
socially-correct wife Mildred tries to commit suicide, bored beyond all
endurance. The neighbouring McLellan family, though, are
different; Montag is attracted to their hearty laughter and would like
nothing more than to be able to eavesdrop on their conversation.
It is no surprise, then, to learn that their house is full of books.
Montag wants more from life than television “relatives” and endless
babbling - and that is very, very dangerous. It is such a
yearning that leads a fireman to purloin the books he should be
burning, hide them in his home, and one day open the cover.
When Ray Bradbury wrote this
Book in 1953, he had never heard of
political correctness, but he watched it being born and foresaw the
dangers of a world intent on endless entertainment and terrified of
non-conformity. ‘Fahrenheit 451’ is the portrayal of a society
where political correctness reduced culture to blandness and made
thinking a crime. The journey of Montag from a pillar of law and
order to a book-reading criminal began with a single thought – I’m
unhappy. It chased him away from his wife and home, out of the
city, to the hobo camps along the abandoned railways.
More than fifty years after its publication, ‘Fahrenheit 451’ may be
more relevant today than when it was written. On the story level,
it is certainly still as exciting.
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