Fahrenheit 451

Sometimes you come across a book, a Work of Literature, that has changed the world significantly, and did so quite a while ago, and you'd never heard of it before. And you can't imagine how that happened.
In the case of Fahrenheit 451, Neil Gaiman mentioned it in his non-fiction collection The View from the Cheap Seats. In fact, he mentioned it several times, and with high praise. If Neil Gaiman likes something, and I like the things Neil Gaiman likes, then by all common logic I should also like the thing Neil Gaiman likes. So when I had a three hour lay-over on Istanbul Airport on my way back from Israel, I tried to find the novel. Oddly enough, the airport bookshop put it on number 3 of their books top 10. Not bad, for a book that came out in 1953. Also, it made me want to read it even more. Luckily I was smart enough to check it before I bought it, as the books that were in the top 10 were also all in Turkish. So I bought it when I got home.
Now I'd read enough about the genre (speculative fiction), size (just 50,000 words), title (the temperature at which paper burns), writing process (Ray Bradbury sat in a basement of the university at a typewriter you had to feed 10 cents for half an hour of typing and wrote the whole thing in 9 days) and plot (the protagonist's job is to burn books) of the novel to assume I knew quite a bit about it. Also, in hindsight, Fahrenheit 451 explains the very strange title of Michael Moore's documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, which I never quite got. Things were falling into place before I even read it.
And then I read it. This is a novel written in just 9 days, and it took me three bouts of 1-2 hours of reading to get through it. I think there is no other way to read it but fast; you can feel the speed, the urgency with which it was written, and you feel the same urgency to get through it. Not because of the plot, which is, as in any great Literary Work, not the main thing. Because of the ideas, the feeling, the atmosphere the book breathes. This not just about a guy (aptly named Guy) burning books for a living and realising that this is not right. This is about the society he lives in, a future society (the future of 1953) in which people are kept dumb and inactive through government propaganda and excessive home entertainment systems.
As Neil Gaiman writes, this book tells just as much about Ray Bradbury's vision of the future, as it does about the time he wrote it in. Some people believe in 'the death of the author', but this is one novel that cannot be seen separate from the time it was written. It was a warning, a warning against government oppression (the McCarthy trials were in full swing), against fear, against the dumbing down of the population, against the rise of television, against individualism as people isolate themselves through ear buds (Seashells) and live in a world of their own while in the middle of a crowded street. Of course, Bradbury couldn't predict things like the Internet, and in some respect his technologies seem sweetly outdated, but I think he would see his worst fears having become reality if he could see the world today.
Looking back, it is of course ironic that this novel is such a best-seller in Turkey at the moment. It is right up there with 1984 and all those other dystopian novels, the ones that seem to predict the world we find ourselves in more and more. But in contrast to many others, the main point of Fahrenheit 451 is that it's not the government doing these things to people. It's people doing them to themselves. People choosing to be entertained, to isolate themselves, to loose contact with the people that surround them. In that sense, it is closer to Dave Eggers The Circle, although there is no sense of a commercial goal in Fahrenheit.
Bradbury described himself as "not a predictor, but a preventor of futures", and it is sad to see that it did not quite work out that way. The book is on many reading lists in the US, although ironically the book is also sometimes heavily censored because of its 'foul language' and portrayal of Christians. Those who censor a book like this must not have read it for what it is.
I cannot imagine why I've never come across it before, but now that I've read it, I can see its influence on so many other works. I will have to read it again, in a couple of years or so, for all the things I missed when I went through it full speed. This is a book with layers, with subtexts, with themes that will only become apparent on rereading. Luckily for us, the book-burning prediction has not (yet) come true, so it will be waiting for me when I decide to return to it.