Fahrenheit 451: The temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns…

I will freely admit that this well-known tagline was all I knew about this book going into it. I knew it was about book burning (and I was right), and yet even with such few expectations this book managed to surprise me at every turn.

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Fahrenheit 451 follows a fireman, Guy Montag, in a future dystopia where a fireman’s job is to burn any and all books. Inevitably, Montag begins to wonder what makes books worth burning, a question which sets him on a dangerous path. His future is one of censorship, anti-intellectualism, and fast-paced mass media for low attention spans. (Twitter, anyone?)

We’re used to seeing literacy (or lack thereof) used both in real life and in fiction to control and keep in order. I assumed that the mass lack of literature in Fahrenheit 451 would be similar to that in The Handmaid’s Tale, where words and reading altogether are banned in order to keep people in their place. Instead, we have a world where scripts, news bulletins and information sheets are all allowed, but it is books themselves that are not. Not only is the removal of books (and their ideas of imagination, freedom, creativity, politics and empathy) a way of controlling the population, but people have become afraid of books. They are afraid of being made to feel intellectually inferior, or to be moved by another person’s story. I did not expect empathy to be one of the big themes of this book, but it is; the way that books help us understand each other, connect to one another, and live lives outside our own. Montag realises that power is key to his own (and his wife and friends’) happiness and fulfilment in life.

If you enjoyed Nineteen Eighty-Four, definitely pick up Fahrenheit 451. It’s a short book that is carefully crafted and thought-provoking.

I read this for the Back to the Classics challenge: A 20th Century Classic