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Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
Author Ray Bradbury envisions a bleak futuristic world in which books are banned and people live solely for pleasure and material gain.
Guy Montag inhabits a world where a love of reading is punishable by law. Firefighters are no longer summoned to extinguish fires, but to start them. People live merely to acquire material possessions and have a good time. The future, author Ray Bradbury envisions for a society that has abandoned literature, is a bleak one. He imagines a world gone mad, where censorship has obliterated all that is good in mankind, leaving only violence and decadence in its place. The only human decency left is to be found in those who are labeled criminals: book owners. Bradbury takes his readers through a worst-case scenario where censorship has been allowed free rein. Inhabitants of this grim world have ceased to think about anything beyond where their next pleasure will come from. Bradbury’s views on censorship could pretty easily be interpreted as extreme, yet he makes some chilling points that resonate with readers. His vision of a world without books seems all-too-possible at times. Though the book is from the 1950s, it still bears relevance today.
The story’s action gets bogged down in spots, but these sections are worth struggling through. Also, the book is over fifty years old, and some of the imagery is outdated and ineffective, such as the Hound, which is supposed to be terrifying, though I would definitely choose the book’s version over the 1966 movie’s version. What bothered me the most, even though it’s trivial, were the many grammatical errors in the text. They were very distracting, and I can only assume that Bradbury’s hatred of censorship bordered on paranoia, preventing proper editing for his own writing. In the end, the elements that don’t work in the story are outweighed by those that do, ensuring that this novel will still resonate with readers for decades to come.
Title: Fahrenheit 451
Author: Ray Bradbury
Publisher: Del Rey
ISBN: 0345342968
Review written by: Jess Boettger
Reviewer's Rating:6.5
Reader's Rating: 10.00
Reader's Votes: 1
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