Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is the one of those books that, on coming into 2022, I felt I ought to have read by now. It’s another title, like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (which I finally read in January) that’s reputation as a classic dystopia precedes it.

What surprised me most was that it wasn’t the book I thought it was based on its mention in many cultural references. It’s well documented moments of book banning and burning were less the point of the book than a means to drive its plot.

Guy Montag is ‘a fireman’, one of many whose job is to burn any book that is found, who one day begins to question his role. Why are they destroying knowledge? What wisdom has been lost in this cultural barbarism? With such questions his disillusionment with the system leads to his drive to preserve and restore what’s left.

Aside from the obvious dangers of censorship, the real point of the novel is actually the dumbing down of society. In this it’s a prescient work, predicting falling readership, a drug-subdued populace, and reality television, as well as smaller tech ideas that seem normal now.

As much as I enjoyed its ideas, I didn’t really gel with the overall story itself. It felt a bit thin with Bradbury throwing a whole lot of words down to capture little (ie padding) and with loosely-drawn characters similarly verbose. Perhaps a result of merging earlier short stories into a longer work.

In its historical context of post-war Nazi book burning and McCarthyism, Bradbury finds potent fuel to feed this work, and while it’s not dated (arguably the opposite) it feels like it runs low early on. More warning than warming.