Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (Voyager)

Probably the best thing about this book is the very end. I’m not being sarcastic. I don’t at all mean that you can’t wait for the end to come. It’s a fantastic read, front to back. You’ll wish it were longer.

No, what I mean is that the end offers a great solution to the problem of dystopian fiction – which is what Fahrenheit 451 is, when it isn’t straight prophecy.

But one of my cult column rules is never give away the ending.

Oh dear.

I suppose I’ll just have to amend that to ‘never give away the ending without warning people that you’re about to give away the ending’.

Count yourself warned.

However, to understand Fahrenheit 451’s end, you’ll need to know a bit about what leads up to it.

The main character in the book is a fireman called Montag. Bradbury constantly plays on reversals and opposites. And the job of the firemen in Fahrenheit 451 is not to extinguish fires but to instigate them. Specifically, to burn books. Hence the novel’s title, 451 degrees fahrenheit being ‘the temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns’. The books are burnt to stop citizens thinking for themselves. Instead, they watch Bradbury’s astonishingly foresightful version of interactive TV.

Montag’s wife, Mildred, is a TV-addict, like all good citizens. She explains what she gets up to all day:

‘..this is a play comes on the wall-to-wall circuit in ten minutes. They mailed me my part this morning. I sent in some box-tops. They write the script with one part missing. It’s a new idea. The home-maker, that’s me, is the missing part. When it comes time for the missing lines, they all look at me out of the three walls and I say the lines…’

In opposition to Mildred is Clarisse, a young girl Montag bumps into on his street. Instead of submissive interactivity, she offers him sensuous particular (‘dew on the grass’) and a question: ‘Are you happy?’

Like Winston Smith in 1984, Montag is a secret doubter of the system he works to uphold. Clarisse’s few words precipiate his crisis of faith. He becomes involved not with her but with the printed page.

‘Last night I thought about all the kerosene I’ve used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take time to put them down on paper. And I’d never even thought that thought before.’

Taking the position of spokesperson for the regime (like O’Brien in 1984) is Montag’s boss, Captain Beatty. He reminds Montag that the firemen ‘stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought’.

When Montag joins the small tide, he becomes an outlaw. Like all outlaws, he is hunted down. Cue chase-sequence.

Which brings us to the end. The city in which the novel takes place, Chicago, is utterly destroyed.

‘”Look!’ cried Montag.
And the war began and ended in that instant.’

With a few other oppositional, book-loving escapees, Montag makes it out of the flattened city.

‘Montag looked at the river. We’ll go on the river. He looked at the old railroad tracks. Or we’ll go that way. Or we’ll walk on the highways now, and we’ll have time to put things into ourselves. And some day, after it sets in us a long time, it’ll come out of our hands and our mouths. And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will be right. We’ll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walks around and talks, the way it really looks. I want to see everything now. And while none of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it’ll all gather together inside and it’ll be me.’

And this is where we expect it to end. America providing an available wilderness, just as it always has. A place for guilty eyes to refresh themselves. As Susan Sontag once said in one of her last interviews, ‘Americans are always talking about losing their innocence, but then they always get it back again.’ But Bradbury goes beyond this:

‘Montag began walking and after a moment found that the others had fallen in behind him, going north. He was surprised… He looked back at the river and the sky and the rusting track going back down to where the farms lay, where barns stood full of hay, where a lot of people had walked by in the night on their way from the city. Later, in a month or six months, and certainly not more than a year, he would walk along here again, alone, and keep right on going until he caught up with the people.

‘But now there was a long morning’s walk until noon…’

And that walk is back to the city - back to the mess that he as much as anyone helped create and which he must help clear up.

Bradbury, here, is a very mature writer, sober and sobering. He is aware that, in the end, you run out of wildernesses, just as you cannot get back your innocence once it is spent.

What you can do instead, and it is a far more taxing thing than merely finding a new paradise to pollute, is return to your mess, accept your guilt, and strive to create something worth calling civilisation.