The new barbarians.

Posted by Pointman on July 16, 2018 · 25 Comments 

As an ever so clued up young adult, there was this “what if” game we used to play. It had lots of variations; the most common being if you were holding a dinner party, which five other people you could pick out of history would you like around the dinner table? It was always an odd number for obvious reasons. Another one of those what if games was what’re the fifty must read books in your opinion? You also got snagged into the ten best movies you’d ever seen.

What I did find was my tastes evolved over the years. My interest was always in the must read books, because books are very portable and they don’t run out of batteries. The must read selection always changed as I grew up; Turgenev’s intellectuality was replaced with the humanity of Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure fell before the more modern lyric poetry of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, but one or two books never fell out of the rankings.

One book has been there since I first read it as a teenager. It’s called Fahrenheit 451 and was written by Ray Bradbury. For me, it has everything a good book should have. Imaginative, clear insight, a totally strong narrative, non cardboard characters, a slightly dangerous and edgy feel most of the way through, and it’s beautifully written, bloody gorgeously beautifully written actually. Bradbury, with a profligacy beyond all generosity, is just throwing unforgettable images at you. One after another.

If you have any aspirations to write decent prose, don’t go anywhere near that book, because from then on you’re going to be looking at the North face of the Eiger, and everybody knows most climbers who tried that side of the mountain died. They’re still picking bodies out of the moraines at the bottom of it and some of them still have those razor-sharp precious shards of finely knapped flint on them. Not much changes – once the monkey is on your back, it becomes inevitable that you’ll have to make that try at the mountain because you’re a man and have to test yourself against something like that. The personal shame of not giving it a go becomes too big.

The basic premise of the book is simple. It’s set in a not too distant future. Books have not only been banned, but declared illegal, because they upset people too much. Because of advances in building materials, it’s practically impossible for a building to burn down. The job fire fighters originally did is gone, but they get reassigned to a new job. They now get called out to burn stashes of illicitly held books.

The central character is Guy Montag. In the first chapter, he’s walking home in an autumn evening and meets a child called Clarisse. She’s young, probably around twelve, very innocent and a delight to meet. She fires questions and ideas at him which put him on the back foot, but the last one is unintentionally devastating.

“Are you happy?”

Of course I am he thinks, what a stupid question, but it’s the start of his undoing. He’s stuck in a desolate marriage with a woman who only wants to have a fourth TV screen. They’re so big, they’re called walls. She’s drenched in a tawdry reality TV epic, barely gives him the time of day and is prone to suicidal tendencies passed off as accidental prescription overdoses. She spends her life in that version of reality.

By the time you get to the end of chapter one, he’s got you by the bloody throat. You’re not reading a book, you’re in it. You’ve left the reading zone. As with all decent writers, it’s a finely nuanced act of seduction rather than a book. You’re in a culture that’s on a downward spiral, spinning out of control and Montag is just now starting to become conscious of that reality.

At one point in the book, an elderly woman gets ratted out and they uncover her stash of books. They heap them up in the centre of the room, enthusiastically douse them in kerosene and get ready to ignite the lot. Montag tells her to stand back, but she quotes the protestant martyr Hugh Latimer’s last words to his friend Ridley before they were burnt alive. “Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.” She, like Latimer, gets burnt alive.

Montag is appalled. There has to be something special about these books that could make a person prepared to go up in flames with them rather than be separated from them. It becomes a matter of time until he tries to find out. Eventually, he slips a book from out of a pile to be burnt inside his fireman’s jacket. His boss, Captain Beatty, suspects what he’s done.

We’ve all been tempted, he tells Montag, but then he starts pushing him hard. The truth is, he’s in as much despair as Montag’s suicidal wife but won’t try to jump off a pill box like her because that would be somehow unmanly. The deeper truth, and the one to be seen, is that he’s goading Montag to kill him; that’s why he’s pushing him so hard. In a way, it’s a patricidal act, but in the end Montag sees his need and pulls the trigger on him. Yes, it’s murder but it’s a mercy killing; Montag is just putting Beatty out of his misery.

There’s a lot more to the book, but in the end, Montag joins a camp of hobos living on the ignored margins of civilisation. Each of them has completely memorised a book. All the books that are being burnt, have found a home between their ears. They all know a storm is coming and after it’s shaved clean the Earth of a debased, infantile and thumb sucking culture, they’ll be there to disgorge the books.

The book was written in 1953 and would fit into the distopian future category of literature, but in a horrible way, aspects of it are starting to come true. SJW librarians are throwing out books because those books could possibly offend. Mark Twain is gone because he used the word nigger in a book written nearly two hundred years ago. Enid Blyton has got the boot because apparently her books for girls are too sexist for modern tastes. Who’s next? Perhaps Shakespeare. After all, he did refer to Othello in the play of the same name as “the thick-lipped Moor”. Definitely racist.

Just burn the books, just burn the lot of them, and if you can’t do that, then just distort their true meaning into something more acceptable to modern sensitivities.

I’ve just watched Hollywood’s take on 451. Clarisse, rather than being a delightful child, has now become a street prostitute and therefore claims the victimhood trophy in the movie. Captain Beatty has become an outright fascist. Montag isn’t even married and after ten minutes watching him, you realise this guy (pun intended) couldn’t act his way from the living room to the dining room, but he’s black, so that means it’s all fine. It’s Hollywood tokenism at its very worst.

I seriously doubt that any of the script writing team responsible for the atrocity ever even read the book – they nipped into Wikipedia to get the three minute skinny on it and then proceeded to butcher the whole story. If there was ever a book whose imagery was so strong, 451 would be it. All you have to do is shoot the damn book, and yet they managed to cock it up royally. It’s no wonder Hollywood takings are going through the floor.

When you see librarians emptying shelves of books and other books being “re-imagined”, it’s time to start hiding your books, or failing that, memorising them and joining the hobos beside the railway track outside city limits.

©Pointman

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