Ray Bradbury - Farenheit 451

Kingsley Amis called Farenheit 451 'the most skillfully drawn of all science fiction's conformist hells', and having read it hot on the heels of Brave New World (which I couldn't find enough coherence about to properly review, at the time), I was doing a lot of comparisons in my head while I read it. So there'll probably be some comparisons in this review, as well, and I can pretend that this discharges my obligation to say things about Huxley's work.

But starting with this one. I have had a niggling desire to read this book since the age of twelve, when my Tournament of Minds team -- I think this is an Australian thing -- had to write a skit based on its idea of secret oral tradition, of families passing down the classics through the generations to preserve them even though books were banned.

(The skit had to show how two classics had accidentally become merged into a single story along the way: we picked Macbeth and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lady Macbeth and the White Witch were SISTERS and there was RAPPING, and I played a version of Lucy who had a tea fixation. It was epic. We were the state champions.)

Farenheit 451 gives us a world where books are forbidden; burned, along with the houses in which they're found, by the Firemen. The justification is that they lead to confusion of ideas: that truth cannot be known (and neither, of course, can it be controlled) in the cacophony of words and opinions that exist in books. The protagonist is Guy Montag, a Fireman, who begins -- of course -- to question the beliefs that his job is based on, and finds himself destroying his life in an effort to seek out greater meaning.

First and foremost, I am head-over-heels in love with Bradbury's ability to manipulate language, to tell a good story and to deliver it wrapped in sharp, fresh imagery. Particularly striking is the extremely creepy invention and description of the Mechanical Hound, and also a scene where Montag is frantically trying to remember a quote from the Bible while advertising blasts through the train in which he's riding. And this quote, which I read five times in a row, marvelling at how effective the rhythm is:

We are bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ, it's here. And the hour is late. And the war's begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colours.

The vividness and the gorgeous urgency of Bradbury's prose creates that skillful drawing that Amis picked up on, and along with it comes a sense of humanity that is striking when you consider some of the other moral fables of science fiction. Putting it next to Brave New World, as I said: while both of them are books about particular ideas, particular ways in which society might become restricted in the name of increasing its members' happiness, I think Farenheit 451 successfully manages to be, over and above this, a book about people. Or at least a person. Montag's inner life is what drives the book, what's lingered on, and what delivers the message. It means that the narrative is smaller, tighter, than the explicit and wide-ranging world-building delivered in Brave New World (which has its own charms, albeit more intellectual ones).

As with a lot of older sci fi (yes, Brave New World had this problem too) there are some serious issues related to the portrayal of women. Montag's wife Mildred isn't quite one-dimensional, but she's never sympathetic; just shrill, pathetic and pitiable. And as the catalyst for Montag's changing views on his occupation, the character of Clarisse just might be the prototypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl: she turns up out of the blue and talks about whimsical things! She tries to get him to expand his horizons and enjoy life! And, tellingly:

...Clarisse's favourite subject wasn't herself. It was everyone else, and me.

Ah, the dream of repressed and empty-souled men everywhere: a pretty young thing whose existence is all about you.

Anyway.

I have to love this novel, because at heart it's about the words with which we choose to fill our lives. Bradbury is telling us his opinion of the importance of books.

Some day the load we're carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out int he long run. And some day we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddam steam-shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we're going to go build a mirror-factory first and put out nothing but mirros for the next year and take a long look in them.

The importance, then, seems to be a direct echo of Santayana: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. It's an adventure story that's telling us to honour our stories, because they're how we learn about where we've been, and what we look like now, and where we might be heading.

Take a long look in them.

Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon

Recently I opened one of my notebooks and was momentarily puzzled by a list of book titles on one page. Then I remembered that some expat friends of mine living in Brussels had taken me out for a night on the town while I was visiting them. By the book-list stage of the evening I was already down a bottle of raspberry beer (ah, Belgium) and two gin-based cocktails, and would be consuming more alcohol before the end of the night, so perhaps it's not surprising that the intense hour-long conversation about books in which I loudly insisted that everyone! at the table! tell me their favourite book! so I could borrow them all from the library! became a memory with a hint of fuzziness to it.

Nevertheless.

Flowers for Algernon. I'd heard the name before, and the title sounded suspiciously like something that might have oozed from the pen of Mitch 'Cloying Sentimentality And Cheap Fucking Pathos' Albom. Then I found out about the Hugo and Nebula awards.

(Booklogging by Faye: fifty years behind the times! Next up: the Iliad.)

For those of you who, like me, didn't study this book at school, the premise is this: an intellectually disabled man called Charlie volunteers to be the first human subject of an experimental procedure which proposes to increase intelligence, and has been shown to do so in a mouse called Algernon. The book is made up of Charlie's progress reports, a diary which shows the gradual improvement of his intellectual power, and the consequences that this has for his life and happiness. As far as literary achievement goes, I think Daniel Keyes did an excellent job with the portrayal of a personality and a mind constantly in flux. One of the most important things it tries to convey is how the people around Charlie think about him, act around him, and relate to him, and how these things change as he does; assuming you-the-reader to be someone of average intelligence, the journey that you go through mirrors that of these people in a way that borders on the uncomfortable at times.

I am nowhere near as conversant in social justice and discrimination theory as it pertains to disability as I should be, I expect, but this book does a very good job of whacking you pointedly around the face with its Major Themes (which is, as with a lot of sci-fi, not necessarily to its detriment). It's even more interesting when reading it now, in the twenty-first century, to think about the particular Slippery Slope Of Humanity that this book is addressing: the drive to fix. The balance between lauding medical advances that can improve someone's quality of life, and adequate acknowledgment that perhaps a person's life is just fine without an external standard of normality being imposed upon it. But then, as someone whose medical school shoves a lot of ethics tutorials in her direction, I was interested by the detail that one of his family members had to sign off on the procedure because Charlie was not considered to have Capacity To Consent, even though Charlie's commentary shows you that he did indeed understand both the benefits and the risks as they were communicated to him.

A clear distinction is drawn between academic intelligence and emotional intelligence which is certainly not neurologically arbitrary, but comes across as...narratively so, I suppose? The fact that smart-Charlie is still devoid of well-developed social skills becomes more and more apparent, and more and more important, as does the fact that his personality becomes a lot less pleasant as a result. I wasn't entirely sure what I was meant to be learning from this -- it's better to be extremely nice than extremely clever? It's impossible to be both? Does extreme intelligence automatically lead to a disdain for the rest of humanity? This was the only point on which I was unwilling to be happily swept along in the story, because I didn't feel that was communicated with the clarity that illuminates the rest of the book.

I don't have much more to say about this one, really. It's clever and thought-provoking and I'm glad I read it. And unlike a high school essay, I can stop this review at any point I please, so let's leave it at that.