Overall: 9.3
Bradbury's warning still applies.
Plot Synopsis:
"Guy Montag was a fireman whose job it was to start fires...
The system was simple. Everyone understood it. Books were for burning... along with the houses in which they were hidden.
Guy Montag enjoyed his job. He had been a fireman for ten years, and he had never questioned the pleasure of the midnight runs nor the joy of watching pages consumed by flames... never questioned annything until he met a seventeen-year-old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid.
Then he met a professor who told him of a future in which people could think... and Guy Montag suddenly realized what he had to do!" - from the recent Del Ray edition.
The Skinny:
This is a science fiction novel that has successfully "crossed over". By that, I mean that Fahrenheit 451 has made it onto school reading lists. Here in Northern Virginia, it is part of the tenth grade literature curriculum. I imagine this is in part because the folks who make these kind of decisions like the anti-censorship message. They like to entertain the idea that they are Bradbury's good guys -- the noble intellectual vanguard fighting to preserve the literary canon and, consequently, the public capacity to think.
Now, I do believe that this novel deserves to be a part of any high school literature curriculum. I think teens - provided they have teachers who are willing to guide them through a close reading of the relatively challenging text - will get a lot out of it. But as for the self-flatterers, I think they've missed Bradbury's primary point.
On page 57 of my edition, Fire Captain Beatty, while explaining how the present job of the fireman came to be, has the following to say:
"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..."
What Bradbury is talking about here is political correctness -- and these days, the PC enforcers are primarily leftwing academics. Sure -- on occasion, a fundamentalist Christian group will raise a fuss over the magic in Harry Potter or the sexual themes in other YA novels, but that's nothing compared to the holy hell that will rain down on any magazine or anthology editor who fails to achieve 50/50 gender parity in his selections -- or who fails to include authors who happen to be "people of color." From my position on the sidelines of science fiction fandom, I have personally witnessed the public shaming campaigns - the "s*** lists" - that kick into gear the moment anyone fails to follow the anti-ists' stringent set of rules. And while such activity is not technically censorship in the legal sense, its effect is pretty much the same. Speech is chilled. People become hesitant to challenge the anti-ist orthodoxy.
Those parents who humbly ask that their children not be exposed to vulgarity or sex are not the true threat. Such people are virtually powerless -- and at any rate, asking for age appropriateness is not even close to demanding that porn producers and the like close up shop. On the other hand, the anti-ists have a great deal of power, and their demands have led to a change in the creative class' behavior. Does a particular Tom Clancy novel feature Muslim terrorists as the principal antagonists? Not to worry! When we adapt it to the movie screen, we'll just make the bad guys neo-Nazis. Does a particular episode of South Park mock the Prophet Muhammad? That's okay! We'll just black out those parts in order to avoid offending the Muslims' tender sensibilities (which, by the way, is something we would never do for the Christians in the majority). Those who champion themselves as protectors of "free expression" simply because they defend what is debased and vulgar are often the very same people who clamor for a kind of literary affirmative action.
But I'm digressing. Suffice it to say that I think Bradbury's classic is still profoundly relevant to our own times. Not only does Bradbury possess a keen understanding of the censor's impulse (and a refreshing old-style liberal outrage regarding the same), but his critique of the side-effects of a media-saturated mass culture are appropriately devastating. You really can't think - you really can't exercise your imagination, moral or otherwise - when the pop culture is screaming at you 24/7. I love my students - I think they're great kids - but they definitely struggle with impairments brought on by too much "screen time."
Characterization: 9.0
You're not going to find exquisitely realistic characters here, as this is, in truth, a morality play in novel form. Still, what Bradbury does offer certaintly works extremely well.
Plot/Pacing: 9.0
It takes a patient and attentive reader to really appreciate Bradbury's plot, but I don't think there's anything wrong with that. As a matter of fact, it is this feature that makes Fahrenheit 451 a perfect fit for a literature class.
Concepts/Themes: 10.0
There's something to be said for a science fiction novel that takes a societal trend (political correctness) and pushes it to its extreme conclusion. It's unlikely that we will literally spark up book barbecues any time soon, but there are anti-ist bullies out there, and we need to be ready and willing to stop them in their tracks.
No comments:
Post a Comment