Dystopian
literature shows us how life would be if things went really badly. For any
bibliophile, the worst kind of situation is one in which books are destroyed.
This book is based in one such dystopic universe where Firemen don’t extinguish
fire but cause them. The protagonist is one Guy Montag, who conspicuously
shares his first name with the famous pyromaniac from British history, Guy
Fawkes. Like Fawkes, Montag too is a revolutionary.
In
Montag’s world books are taboo. People are kept busy by always being made to
watch the Telly. Entertainment has been made personalized. When you watch the
Telly, the characters in the soaps and plays say your name to give the show an
illusion of reality. This makes the experience more immersive. The minds of
people can be easily controlled by controlling their entertainment feed. But
books. Oh those can give people ideas, make them think outside the Idiot Box.
So books are banned by the authorities. It is a tragic world to live in, where
people do not, cannot think. And those who dare to question or be imaginative
are eliminated.
The
Firemen’s history has been revised. Where they were once known to put out fire
and save lives, it is now their job to burn down houses where people have been
known to harbor books. All of this is done at night-time when the fires burn
the brightest, so that the fear of fire is more deeply ingrained in the
citizens.
After
years of service as a Fireman, Guy Montag one day meets a girl called Clarisse
McClellan on his walk home from work. She is an unusual sort of girl. People in
her family actually sit around and talk rather than watch the Telly. And she
says things that Guy has never heard anyone say. He comes home to his wife
Mildred, who has a severe addiction to the Telly. The people on the screens are
more real to her that those next door. Day in and day out her eyes are on the
three walls that make up the screen and her ears plugged with earphone like
shells that help her to drown out the outside world. She is disconnected from
reality, depressed and in denial. Compared to the lively Clarisse, Mildred is
as good as dead as she is always ‘plugged in’. Montag and Mildred do not
converse.
Montag
undergoes a change that makes him question the way the world has come to run.
He finds himself unable to do his job, which makes his boss Captain Beatty
suspicious of him. He becomes a liability to his unit. In his desperation to
make sense of the world, Montag makes contact with a man he had once met in a
park, who he had suspected might be a possessor of books. This man, Faber, was
once a Professor of English. But since it became illegal to teach Literature,
History etc, he, and others of his kind, has to live on the down-low. Faber
explains to Montag some of the qualities that books possess and why it is
necessary to keep the written words alive.
Any reader
would want to preach the message in this book, especially in times like these,
when it is necessary to inculcate the ability to see the alternate reality, to
question the system. Other forms of entertainment, most importantly, visual
entertainment is easy to take in. One need only direct their gaze towards a
screen. But books require your participation. The words develop meaning when
you read, process, understand and envision that which is being said. Since most
people find it so arduous to do the latter, books are a dying lot. As the
author himself said,
“There is
more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about
with lit matches.”
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