I would have given the book three and a half stars, but Goodreads does not provide me with the opportunity of awarding half stars. Therefore I gave it four because three seemed too low to give such a classic. The story is great and some of the mind-numbing technology Bradbury describes in the book is eerily similar to what we have achieved in the last fifteen years as a modern society. The story itself obviously stands alone on its own merits, but what I found most fascinating was the blurbs at the end where Bradbury discusses the work in his afterword and coda.
I found the book a bit boring in the beginning. It wasn't until Beatty showed up at Montag's house that I started to really enjoy the book and get into it.
When the fire chief Beatty and Montag were conversing about the dangers of society I found myself amazed at some of the things Beatty said. For instance, "'Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily let the comic books survive" (Bradbury, 57). The magazines have become a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Who reads nowadays? Society is keen on the entertainment focus. Just look at the news. A couple seconds of important stuff. A couple seconds of shit that's going on somewhere far far away. The rest of the program is mindless hollywood things and advertising.
The stamping out of individuality is the scariest thing I saw reflected in the first part of the book. Again, Beatty is talking to Montag about the best things that a homogenized society brings us. "We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of the other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against" (Bradbury, 58). We are bombarded with a new equality movement. Let us recreate America in a new image where individuality is paramount as long as your individuality conforms to the new societal norms we are imposing.
Most of what is good in Bradbury's book is his overall story and his scarily accurate dystopian take on the future. Occasionally though his actual writing caught my eye. Usually with something short, crisp and staccato. Again, from Beatty and Montag's conversation. "Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean" (Bradbury, 60). Clean. Bright. Concise. Cutting.
In a sense Bradbury echoes French existentialists. He sees life as it is. The struggle. He takes pride in the struggle. His heroes, the walking libraries explain to Montag towards the end, "Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away" (Bradbury, 157). But, Bradbury is not Camus. Camus is French. Camus extols the virtuousness of Prometheus as he strides down defiantly, proudly after the rock has rolled down the hill. In Camus, life is pointless, repetitive and struggle. The glory is in the doing regardless of the worth. Bradbury is American. Americans, at least for most of our history, are more optimistic (for better or worse). Bradbury also has his walking libraries claim, "But that's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and worth the doing" (Bradbury, 153). It's not Prometheus pushing the boulder up the hill for all eternity and then taking pride in walking down after the rock to do it again ad infinitum. It's Prometheus pushing that stupid rock up that stupid hill over and over for what seems like ad infinitum because eventually he'll get it right. He'll push that boulder over the top and it'll roll down the other way.
Bradbury wrote in his afterword about his book on censorship being ironically censored. That coda and afterword were fascinating but his final response to it I found most telling. "For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear head or water conversationalist, pro-computerologists or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mush milk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall" (Bradbury, 178). Bradbury's dystopian future is eerie because of some of the technology he describes and the effect it had on man. We have become somewhat enslaved to the lives of Hollywood. They are our families coming into our parlors. His book is scary because of how right he is on how censorship is creeping into our society. We don't run the risk of a dictator coming out and banning the books by fiat. Our society is much to fractured for that. One group would ban a book and everyone from the other side would pick it up and hail it as the next classic. Our society is fractured because of segmentation. We have been segmented by the advertisers. Anything that will upset one group, however minor the minority may be, must be censored through cultural reprogramming and shaming. Censorship will come in slowly and then we will no longer need books because books are offensive. The ideas in them are too dangerous and therefore we will seek safer options. Bradbury was right. We have embraced the comic books recently. They're safe. We have embraced the magazines. (Yahoo! Facebook. Hellogiggles. Daily updates about the Kardashian-Swift feud, etc. etc.) This stuff is safe. This stuff is neat. Clean. Everything else. Burn it.
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