Sci Fi Audiobooks: Ongoing column reviewing classics of sci fi and fantasy as well as current works available in audio format.
Book Summary:
Ray Bradbury’s classic dystopian novel takes place in the relatively near future (maybe a hundred or so years from the time it was published in 1953) in a world where firemen no longer put out fires (most buildings are fireproof), but instead start them. The firemen of this future are tasked with locating people who have books of any literary merit (technical and instruction books are okay) and burning those banned tomes. Guy Montag is a fireman who has gone about his job without thinking about it too much until a couple of things happen that shake up his sense of reality. First, he meets a neighbor girl who brings a fresh perspective to his life, very much in contrast with his wife, who spends most of her time watching the wall-sized television they have in their house and who has slipped into a state of suicidal depression. Second, he witnesses a woman’s self-immolation when she refuses to leave behind the books that he and the other firemen plan to burn in her house. This drives Montag to want to understand more about these books that firemen have burned for years. And that sets him on a path that finds him on the wrong side of the fire chief and on the verge of becoming a fugitive in this anti-intellectual society.
Book Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars (Highest Rating)
Audiobook Rating: 2 ½ out of 5 Stars
Bottom Line:
Fahrenheit 451 delivers one of the seminal sci-fi dystopian works, addressing the dangers of government overreach and censorship (and, to an extent, political correctness), and its rather chilling message still resonates today. The audiobook is not the best adaptation of the story, in part because of Bradbury’s garbled delivery and also because his poetic prose is better read than listened to.
Historical Context:
Fahrenheit 451 started out as the novella The Fireman, which was published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1951. That story was about half as long and had the roots of the tale that Bradbury would later turn into his flagship dystopian work. In that version, Guy Montag is still a book-burning fireman who begins to question his role, and he has an emotionally distant, media-addicted wife. Montag also ends up hiding books, and he eventually rebels against the system and takes flight.
The original story came out at a time of high tension during the early years of the Cold War and the Red Scare in the United States. Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee were investigating suspected communist influence in government, academia, and Hollywood, and banning books was definitely on their agenda. But while the novel is often described as a warning about government censorship, Bradbury later clarified that he was equally concerned about self-censorship and society willingly suppressing controversial ideas to avoid conflict (more on that below). Ironically, Fahrenheit 451 has drawn plenty of its own controversy over the years and has been the target of censorship many times.
A Closer Look:
I have to confess that this is one of my all-time favorite books and ranks up toward the very top of my list of the best science fiction and fantasy works (among such titles as Dune, 1984, The Lathe of Heaven, and War of the Worlds). Ray Bradbury considered this one of his few true science fiction works (he saw most of his stories as fantasy), and this book definitely presents a speculative fiction tale that engages the mind and offers a cautionary message. But Bradbury sets this book apart from the works of other science fiction authors through the mastery of his craft. He is truly a poet among genre writers, and he brings to life the stagnation and oppressiveness of his future world through his delicate, insightful prose while also illuminating the magic of the world of books that this society has rejected.
But not only is this an important science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451 is also a great work of dystopian literature. Not simply because Bradbury does such a good job of bringing this grim world of the future to life, but because so much of what he predicts rings true. Think of how the wall-sized televisions present the next logical step for the big-screen TVs of today. And while the multi-wall scenario seems less likely, consider how the 3D televisions that were popular for a while attempted something similar. Television may not have gone the interactive route that we see in the novel (yet), but it has become the equally mind-numbing distraction from reality that Bradbury portrays.
More chilling, though, is how books came to be banned in this future. It did not result from some tyrant issuing a decree outlawing books, but from people reading less and less until the government decided that books were a nuisance and served no more purpose. Fire chief Beatty explains to Montag how books had been reduced to smaller, more easily digestible formats that made them more palatable to a mass audience and less offensive. And while in truth books have actually grown in page length over the past few decades (prompted by publishers trying to increase page counts to inflate margins), think of how substantively empty many of these bestseller bloatfests really are. Then think of the other trend we see on the internet as posts are compacted to tailor to the short attention spans of web surfers. In the world of Fahrenheit 451, it was an anti-intellectual, political correctness movement driven by the mass public that ultimately made books anathema.
This is some pretty heady stuff, and the book can get quite intense at times, but it’s a much breezier read than other dystopian classics such as Orwell’s quite grim 1984 (though that one is a must-read as well). Fahrenheit 451 counts as an essential genre work, and it is a book that all sci fi fans should encounter at some point.
Comments on the Audiobook:
Unfortunately, Fahrenheit 451 is not the best candidate for an audiobook because Bradbury’s poetic prose just does not shine through as well when listening to the story. On top of that, Bradbury himself provides the reading, and I’ve said it before that authors should write and leave the narrating to the professionals (with a few exceptions such as Harlan Ellison and Neil Gaiman). His rather garbled delivery further obfuscates his brilliant writing and makes it difficult to enjoy the audio adaptation. Perhaps another narrator would have helped in this case, but I highly recommend that you read this one instead of (or as well as) listening to it. As a plus, the audiobook does include an interesting interview with Bradbury where he discusses the book in detail, and that is certainly worth a listen. Note that there is a newer version of the audiobook read by Penn Badgley, and the samples I have heard of that one make it seem like the better choice if you are going to go with the audio version of the book. That is available from Audible.com and other places you can purchase audiobooks.
