Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, part 2

This is about a time in the future when people don't read books any more. Books are too long; they try to make you think; only strange, superior people read books, instead of watching short soaps on Tv or listening to the chatty voices on the radio (which people fix in their ears and the little ear-buds chatter away to them.) And so it seems right to burn all the books. This story is about a fireman (Montag) whose job it is to destroy books, but who becomes curious as to what might be in the books he destroys.

Guy Montag's wife has three walls covered in screens so that she can pretend she is really involved in the TV shows. She loves these but Montag doesn't: and one day he meets a young girl who likes leaves and flowers and conversation more than artificial amusements, and then his troubles and doubts, which already existed, become an issue. 

In this future, life is cheap and destruction is an entertainment. People love watching a real live cop chase on TV. and seeing an oddball getting his just deserts. "Their indifference and fear feeds into every aspect of their lives." Being unhappy about the way his life is, and wanting to know what is in the books, Montag starts to put himself and his wife in danger. 

The writing is gorgeous for the first part, vivid and magical and energetic. The book doesn't hang together very well as a story and there are ideas that go nowhere; but this is a fascinating book about the way wise books (not all books) humanise people and how we will all go to the bad if we don't make any effort to take on the difficult heritage that teaches us to be wise.

From the handout at the Southbank Centre:

Bradbury's bookless world is a stultified, conformist place entirely free from independent thought, knowledge, self-knowledge and imagination. It's extreme, of course, dystopias always are. And we today don't live in a society without words, books or stories: you could argue in fact we have too many of them. Novels still sell in their millions. The internet is one vast, sucking, swamping mass of words and opinions. Some people even still read proper old-fashioned newspapers. Yet Bradbury's novel is a terrific (and gorgeously written) warning against neglecting the importance of reading and writing properly, of not treating written language with care, consideration and love. When we stop bothering to read difficult books and instead opt to graze on a Facebook post; when we ignore a newpaper article for a news tweet; when we dismiss reading novels or poems because we just don't have time, what we are really saying is that we no longer want to listen."

The Library of Unrequited Love by Sophie Divry and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, part 1

Reading Ray Bradbury's book (published in 1954) made me feel as though I was falling in love, sliding into a situation in which I had no control. It's such a mixed feeling that I kept putting the book aside and reading other books and papers instead. And as soon as I had finished it I read this new book by a French writer, Sophie Divry, and it seemed to be on the same theme. Bradbury's book is 60 years old and this new one seems to share his concerns. Bradbury was so prescient.

Let me start with the Library one. First, it has only 90 pages, and it's all one soliloquy. The librarian is middle-aged, plain-spoken and impatient. She is angry about her snobbish senior colleagues, the ignorant, public that doesn't value books, and how she is ignored. She rather loves the Dewey Decimal System, she loves Maupassant and most of all she loves a young researcher named Martin, who works diligently in her section and once exchanged a few words with her. She loves the back of his neck. Going to work is great because he might come in. He might notice her.

But this is not her only story! She also loves Eugene Morel, who in 1908 published a survey of libraries and suggested that libraries should make it easier for the people to read. Secretly, she is an enthusiast for reading who believes that people can be seduced into reading literature. She is a cultural snob who hates trashy books.

"All the hundreds of books pouring off the presses, ninety-nine percent of them they'd do better to use the paper for wrapping take-aways. And for libraries, it's a disaster. The worst ones are the books on instant history, current affairs: no sooner commissioned than written, printed, televised, bought, remaindered, then taken off the shelves and pulped. The publishers ought to put a sell-by date on them, because they're just consumer goods."

"when you come into this library, what's the first thing you see? Kids wet behind the ears in front of the comic book shelves. And alongside them, Music. Just behind that, DVD's, that's where cultural democracy has got us. It's not a library any more, with silence reigning over shelves full of intelligence, it's a leisure centre where people come to amuse themselves. ... but it's all phoney, it's a lie ... Because culture isn't the same thing as pleasure. Culture calls for a permanent effort by the individual to escape the vile condition of an under-civilized primate."

She is concerned that young people are always wearing ear-phones:

"Noise, noise, noise, never the silence of the book. We ought to react, do something, the minister is deceiving you, you young folk, he knows perfectly well that people don't begin to foster thoughts of revolution when their ears are bombarded by noise, but in the murmuring silence of reading to oneself. "

So you see, the love of the book is not all about Martin, it's also about the love that the civic idealists - whose ideas were once revolutionary! - showed for the public, the love that involved making a quiet space for the public to read. To read great books, or newspapers; but the public didn't want those things; they spurned the love of the civic benefactors. That is the sad story, and Ray Bradbury's book sees this trend coming and does something else with it..., more next time.

Valentine's ball tonight, and nothing to wear...