This 1951 piece of dystopian literature is a brilliant classic in which roles as we know them today are completely reversed. Firemen, who in our society we associate with putting out fires, and saving persons and property, instead burn the books that have been outlawed, and for this reason is most clearly associated with the tensions that come with book burning (with relations to historical context such as Nazi Germany). We're never told why these books are banned but there are some factors that Bradbury suggests: a general decreased interest in reading (due to increased access to media) and factors contributing to hostility towards books (from envying those who possess more books, holding more knowledge). The afterword tells us of Bradbury's sensitivity towards any attempt to restrict his freedom of speech and the mind (a view I hold close to my heart also, personally I see oppression of the mind as one of the worst forms) and he sees it as hostile and intolerant.
If ever there was a brilliant first sentence of a text Bradbury masters it with this novel, "it was a pleasure to burn". He creates the tone of firemen's attitude from the start of the cliche 'ignorance is bliss', the fireman live a simple existence leaving them no need to be challenged, a simply black and white world - burn them, purge them, purify society. There role is intoxicating, they essentially have the hands of God creating purity by banishing these books.
One of my favourite narrative methods Bradbury uses is his imagery, using animals, insects and birds. The most famous of this imagery is that of the phoenix, however personally I prefer the more subtle images such as the firemen driving a beetle, "yellow flame coloured beetle". The beetle (insect) connotes progress, simplicity, solidarity and protection, all factors which we can see in the regime:
- Progress - the general theme within dystopian literature is the journey towards a utopia. This regime is occurring because they saw previous life (with freedom to literature) as failing and so a need to progress towards a better future (without books).
- Simplicity - the nature of this regime is somewhat simple: burn books, purify world.
- Solidarity - the dependance on all the firemen working together in order to reach the 'end goal' and the way the story of burning books seems to stop after we discover Montag's secrets.
- Protection - protecting the world from the 'evil' nature of literature (as the society is meant to perceive it).
A traditional method of characterising a group of people as evil is dressing them in black (as can be seen in other texts like The Handmaids Tale, or even the Death Eaters in Harry Potter), Bradbury extends this method to making everything around them black too, "external burning black pipes ... charcoal hair ... soot-coloured brow", this blackness is essentially all firemen being coated in the same corruption.
Bradbury's poetic prose creates a powerful text that has gone down as a dystopian classic, alongside others such as Orwell's 1984, that still provides a shocking message of the potential threat technology contains even over 60 years after it's first publication. Bradbury manages to create tremendous imagery on every page which led to the book taking me longer than it probably should have because I had to digest all Bradbury's ideas. I strongly recommend this book to anyone if it's just a simple summer read or a more indepth study (eg. I'm using it for A-level coursework), it can work either way and in a studying circumstance there is so much to write about it makes essays easy. In my eyes Bradbury is a literary master and I look forward to reading many more of his works, for this specific text I give it a 9/10.
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