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[/amazon_link]Title : Fahrenheit 451
Author : Ray Bradbury
Genre : Dystopian
Narrators : Stephen Hoye
Publisher : Tantor Audio
Listening Length : 5 hrs 37 min
Source : Library
Rating : 2.5/5
Guy Montag is a fireman. In this future, firemen don’t extinguish fires, they start them. Books are banned. If they are found they are burnt along with the home they are found in. Society is placid and pleasure-seeking and discouraged from thinking too hard – fast cars, video walls and entertainment parlors are the rage these days. Montag finds himself rebelling against this dumbing-down after a conversation with his young, perceptive and questioning neighbor Clarisse, but has his awakening come too late?
This is one of the rare cases where I disliked the book and the narrator. I’d been wanting to read this book for so long, it being hailed as a classic and all, that I probably was expecting a bit too much from it. Even so, I found the book boring and tiresome, although I appreciated the lesson it underscored.
Bradbury wrote “Fahrenheit 451” in 1953, and then, told a story of a future which looks imminent now, as I read this in 2014. Everything around us is being dumbed down for the lowest common denominator and the shortest attention span. Pictures replace words. News becomes flaky and frivolous, and the television is really transforming into the idiot box. It is not too far to the entertainment parlors and the video walls described in the novel. Fahrenheit 451 is indeed to be commended for this interesting premise and train of thought.
However interesting the initial premise, the book had a sparse plot and laggard pace; I could probably sum up the entire book in a few sentences. The characters – Montag, his wife Mildred, his neighbor Clarisse and Montag’s captain Beatty are shallowly described, and we never quite get to know the kind of people they really are. Besides that, I found the language and the (archaic?) phrasing quite tiresome.
This was narrated by Stephen Hoye, and he has a peculiar style to his voice (like a snooty British-German butler on too much wine), which remains regardless of the character he’s portraying. That, along with the sing-song lilt in his tone made it quite tempting to give up this listen midway but I stuck on because this book has classic status and because it is a fairly short audiobook. I’m glad it’s over though.
