Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

From the favourer: "Fahrenheit 451 was my gateway drug to all kinds of literature. I first came across it when I bought a computer text adventure game in the late 1980s for the Commodore 64 with the same title. Clues from the game had me scrambling for my mum's dictionary of quotations, or looking up chapter 2 verse 10 of 'Song of Songs', or finding a copy of 'Moby Dick' to get the opening sentence. Then I found out that the game was actually based on a book. This introduced me to the wonderful world of Ray Bradbury, where science fiction was about people rather than science doodads."

A bit like The Lost Estate, Fahrenheit 451 is a book I read Many Moons ago and can't remember much about the ending. In fact, before re-reading it, my memory of the ending of Ray Bradbury's novel amounted to: "I think there's a river."

The copy I'm re-reading was given to me by the favourer, a Voyager Classics paperback rebound into hardback by Apollo Moon - now defunct bookbinder who I have a soft spot for as we had all our Rowden White Library binding done there until they went under. Ah, the smell of fresh book glue. *sniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiff* Reading a professionally bound book has the advantage over the glue-bound paperback as these are also stitch-bound, so you can bend the bugger back as far as you like and never hear the tell-tale splitting noise along the spine. (Sorry, I'm a bit rough with my books. I also write notes in their margins. Sorry again.)

Montag is a fireman. But unlike the firemen of our age, Montag's role is to set fires, to burn down houses that have books in them. Books are forbidden, and must be destroyed for the good of the community. Montag takes pride in his role as a fireman, enjoys spraying the kerosene and seeing the fire obliterate objects inside. The owners of the houses have always been safely removed by the police beforehand, so they're not burning people. Just 'things'. And at night Montag comes home and finds that his wife Mildred has taken a overdose of sleeping pills. He calls an ambulance, but instead of a medic arriving, the emergency is attended by indifferent technicians who whoosh in, coldly pump Mildred's stomach, replace her entire blood supply, and whoosh off in their craft again. Montag is troubled by the incident, but his wife's chipper amnesia about the whole event convinces him that things are probably fine.

Then Montag meets Clarisse. Clarisse is different to anyone he's ever met. Unlike everyone else, Clarisse doesn't sit at home all day, watching the floor-to-ceiling tv walls where "the relatives" encourage individual watchers to participate in their inane interactive plays. Instead, Clarisse has a sunburnt face from being in the woods all day. She shows Montag how old leaves smell like cinnamon. She watches people, and concludes that they don't talk about "...anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming-pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else."

Shades of Holden Caulfield aside, Clarisse is different and vibrant, and Montag is entranced. When he suddenly no longer encounters Clarisse on his daily outings, and shortly thereafter he attends a fire that burns more than just 'things', Montag is forced to confront his career and life in a way that will endanger both.

When I began re-reading Fahrenheit 451 (the title refers to the temperature at which paper catches fire and burns), I was quite shocked by how seriously good it is - and also how I had completely forgotten how seriously good it is. I'm a bit of a sucker for a depressing, technology-has-dehumanised-us world (which explains my small obsession with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep). Like the world of Dick - let me rephrase that - like the world of Androids, Ray Bradbury questions the nature of self and humanity in an increasingly technological world.

Unlike Dick, Bradbury is less concerned with the blurring of boundaries between human and android, and more with the loss of humanity through the loss of the past. In the world of Fahrenheit 451, books that are "English-influenced" are forbidden. But these books weren't initially banned by a Big Brother-style government initiative, but more gradually and disturbingly:

"The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. And they did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damed snobbish critics, said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic-books survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick."

Of course, this is the devil's advocate character Beatty - Montag's fire chief - speaking, and we can't trust him. But his words have resonance today, and that's why they're initially scary. I wonder about this character that Bradbury created. Someone so committed to their cause, but so torn apart by it that - well, I don't spoiler so you'll have to read the book to see what happens to Beatty.

I wonder about him because while he presents the most pessimistic view of their society possible (fine), he also contributes to a funny thread of elitism that runs through the novel (weird). Quite often, the book implies that only the 'chosen ones' will understand the value of books, and the rest of society needs to be literally razed before books can be appreciated anew. People like the previously inane Mrs Phelps, who displays a deeply emotional reaction when exposed to a book for the very first time, are ultimately lumped with the Mildred-masses. Also, prejudice against comic books. Also, when are three-dimensional sex magazines going to be invented?

I re-read this book furiously over one workday up to about page 100 (hi Clint, no I didn't read it while I was supposed to be working). But after that I started to slow down, and I can see now why I don't really remember the ending that well. It still feels a little anticlimactic, almost as if it's winding down/forward to the start of a sequel. And it does reinforce the elitist idea that only the chosen few will be keepers of the books, and also that they won't do anything until the times are right to accept them:

"...we're the odd minority crying in the wilderness. When the war's over, perhaps we can be of some use in the world.

'Do you really think they'll listen then?'

'If not, we'll just have to wait.'"

Honestly. Grow a pair and fight for it!

Anyway.

I've learned enough from reading (ye olde 30 year old reader on high speaketh to you) to know that the end doesn't always colour the book. And in this case, it really doesn't. Fahrenheit 451 was written in 1953 and still presents a smack-in-the-face of a world that is riveting, shocking, and truth be told, more than a little too familiar.

AND - sorry for max caps - RAD BRADBURY PREDICTED 'DON'T FORGET THE LYRICS':

"If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry about; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the Government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' that they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change."

But this is Beatty speaking again. So we shouldn't take what he says seriously.

Right?

______________________________________________________________

(Also, memory served me correctly. There WAS a river at the end!)

And the winner is...

...Kirsty Eagar for Raw Blue! Yep, that's the book we all held up.

Woot!

The awards dinner was held last night, and was made spectacularly enjoyable by MC Casey Bennetto - I strongly believe all awards ceremonies should be presented in musical theatre form (especially as the introduction to the award for a First Book of History included the line "She didn't think the colon vital, she didn't pick a compound title"). There was also some amusing cross-room tweeted arguments about which of us was on the kids' table (I reckoned it was us, but was told: "Nup. Bloggers and cartoonists and plus ones on table 4 is kids table.") And then, there was FOOOOOOD:

Kirsty was there to collect her award, and gets extra points for mentioning the awards had been "tantalizingly blogged about". From now on my bio will read "Anna Ryan-Punch: tantalizing blogger."

It is a real thrill to give the award to this fantastic and assured first novel - the quality and polish of writing in Raw Blue is astonishing, as is the sophistication of structure (see, I mentioned structure!) and verisimilitude of the characters. Even the marginal characters and smallest details in Raw Blue never really leave you - for me, hollandaise sauce will never be quite the same.

It's a brilliant whack-in-the-face of a novel, and I urge you all to go out and buy it if you haven't already.

Oh, and the rumours about the dessert buffet at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards are true. Just in case you were wondering.

The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) by Alain-Fournier

From the favourer: "It is as close as a book has come to being a dream that I have ever read."

Le Grand Meaulnes, alternately translated at The Lost Estate or The Wanderer, is a book I have a fairly long history with.

When I was 19, I went into Alice's Bookshop in Rathdowne St, and like many students before me, started chatting to the bookshop owner Anthony. For reasons I have absolutely no recollection of, he gave me a free copy of Le Grand Meaulnes (my copy's title was translated as The Wanderer), said it was his favourite book, and asked me to come back when I'd read it and tell him what I thought. I never told him. I've been back to the shop many times since, and he knows me because he knows Paul (partly because our courtship involved Alice's Bookshop in a big way*), but I've never told him what I thought about the book he so freely gave me.

So it's funny that this book should end up as being one of Paul's nominated favourites (though he first read it years after me).

Le Grand Meaulnes is a book about finding something perfect, losing it, and then spending the rest of your life trying to find it again.

In a quiet French village, a new schoolboy named Augustin Meaulnes arrives, and his charismatic nature leads him to be nicknamed Le Grand Meaulnes (The Great Meaulnes). His magnetic spirit and country charm make him popular with the other boys, but he disappears for a few days and comes back changed. On his travels, it is revealed, Meaulnes arrived at an isolated chateau (the 'Lost Estate' that titles many translations of the book), a crumbling, abandoned building that is suddenly populated by children, and enlivened for the purpose of a wedding. A stranger in their midst, Meaulnes is curiously welcomed as a guest, and catches sight of a beautiful woman who he instantly falls in love with. One night, however, the wedding is suddenly cancelled. All the guests hurriedly depart the chateau and Meaulnes is set down on the road. He spends the rest of his life trying to recapture the mysterious happiness that he found at the estate.

From when I first read Le Grand Meaulnes in about 1999, to my recent re-reading in 2010, I've discovered nothing much has changed for me about this book. It's a book where the plot is blurred by memory. I couldn't remember exactly what happened, who met/married who, who had children with who, who died. And on re-reading, I think it's because it's not the point of this book.

This book is like a dream. When you are reading it, you return to the page not entirely sure what is happening, and not convinced that the events of the last chapter actually happened. You discover the Lost Estate with Meaulnes, you lose it with him, and you suffer the dreamlike agonies of not being able to find your way back. He pores over maps, his friends are infected with his longing and try to map out the details of his travels, but the Estate remains elusive. And, just like in a dream, when he finds what he is looking for - suddenly it wasn't really what he wanted at all.

It's a book where the turn of the seasons is incredibly important. This is such a novelty for me - I can't remember reading a book where a frost or a spring breeze had such impact on my reading:

"Everything was icy: the waxed tablecloth with no linen one covering it, the wine cold in the glasses, the red tiles beneath our feet."

"I went down into the yard and suddenly realized it was spring. A delicious breeze, like warm water, was flowing over the wall, and during the night a fall of rain had noiselessly dampened the leaves of the peonies...We were leaning against the low wall on the little street and talking, bareheaded and with our hands in our pockets, while the wind alternately made us shiver with cold and at other times, with gusts of warm air, aroused some long-buried excitement in us."

I think a lot of this book is about the contradictions of adolescence. What Meaulnes - at fifteen - discovers at the mysterious chateau is that he can preserve the wonder of his childhood, but also capture the beautiful woman. He can have his cake and get laid too. Of course, this doesn't happen. He is dumped unceremoniously at the roadside of childhood, and can never quite remember how to get back to that magical place. But he continues to search for the woman and the chateau that seemed to hold the essence of his future happiness.

I think the way the title is translated is important. We're all familiar with The Great Gatsby, and how the title relates to Jay Gatsby. But Le Grand Meaulnes is rarely translated as The Great Meaulnes in English (partly I think because of the similarity to The Great Gatsby and partly because English speakers often mispronounce 'Meaulnes') - more likely we get The Lost Estate or The Wanderer. The first shifts the emphasis from the character to the place, the second shifts the character from being a person to a figure. Neither are really appropriate. The book is not really about the chateau, or the journey that Meaulnes spends his life trying to recapture.

As I write this, I'm furious that I'm writing all about Meaulnes. It's not all about him. The narrator, for one thing, is his best friend, one of several friends who are drawn into Meaulnes' orbit and his search for the chateau and the mysterious woman. They are drawn into his longing so much that their whole lives come to be about Meaulnes, his search, his longing. His hauntedness becomes their hauntedness. And it becomes the reader's, too.

It's a frustrating book, just like dreams are frustrating. It's not a book you read for rigorous characterisation, or continuity of plot. You read it like you are dreaming. You have to accept dream-logic. I finished reading this book for the second time about a week ago, and just like the first time I read it, the details are fading. I think this is why I never went back and told Anthony what I thought about it. I can't find my way to an evaluation of this book any more than Meaulnes can find his way back to the chateau. But what I will remember are the snap of the images, the huge sense of longing and pleasant melancholy, and the furious burning that if I could just look hard enough at the pages, I would find my way to the centre of this book.

________________________________________

*For those of you who are wondering, shortly after Paul and I first met, he gave me an envelope that had $40 of Monopoly money in it. The instructions in the envelope said that if I went to Alice's Bookshop and asked for the copy of Jules Verne's The Moon Voyage in the window, I would find that my money was welcome there. I did as instructed, and Anthony handed over the lovely copy of The Moon Voyage, already inscribed to me by Paul. I was embarrassed and excited and nervous and every time I look at that book, I remember that with a bit of love and eccentricity, scraps of toy paper can buy you a flight to the moon.

Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2010 shortlists are announced!

And the books shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards YA Prize are:

• Raw Blue by Kirsty Eagar


• Swerve by Phillip Gwynne


• Beatle Meets Destiny by Gabrielle Williams

Phew. I don't have to keep my mouth shut any more! Except about the winner, of course, but that's easier somehow. It's just a cosy little one-book secret, rather than a big rambling three-book secret. I think my secret limit is two books.

Big congratulations to all the shortlisted authors - I'm extremely proud and excited about our shortlist. And also congrats to the authors we longlisted: Kirsty Murray for Vulture's Gate, Richard Harland for Worldshaker and Bill Condon for Confessions of a Liar, Thief and Failed Sex God. You can read the judges' reports here.

Judging this year was a completely different experience to the 2007 VPLA - which makes sense I suppose, given that you have a completely different set of entries for the year, and a completely different set of judges. (Except me. I am not completely different.) One important difference was that we didn't have to write a judge bio for the website, or provide a photo. Which absolved me from the photo-choosing despair that I encountered last time! I was going to go with this one, in case you're interested:

Myself and my fellow judges (Pam Macintyre from Viewpoint Magazine and Leesa Lambert from The Little Bookroom) used the same judging process as the last time I was a judge - once the entries were received we all squirrelled ourselves away and read like the blazes, and we each created our own personal longlists for our next meeting. We kept our longlists a secret from each other until the meeting, to see if there would be any overlap.

In 2008, when I judged the award with lovely authors Kirsty Murray and Simmone Howell, our initial personal longlists had very little overlap, which I found fascinating. So there was lots of re-reading and re-evaluating done after our initial read-through. Our final shortlist and winner were arrived at through a lot of analysis, a lot of brain-wracking, a few more meetings, and a bit of voting.

I expected pretty much the same turn of events this year - when you give three different people a pile of 75 different books and ask them to pick the best ones, you'd assume you'd get some different answers.

So Pam and I turned up at the Little Bookroom on Longlist Meeting Day with our little piles of novels hidden in our bags.

I produced my longlist first. Then Pam produced hers. Then Leesa pulled out hers.

Each of our 4-book longlists overlapped by at least 3 books. Wow.

"So," Pam said, "Which one do we think is the winner?"

And we all held up the same book.

Then we kind of got the giggles, because it was so unexpected, and so exciting! We were unanimous before we'd even opened our mouths!

Narrowing down the rest of the shortlist took a bit longer - a bit of re-reading and discussing and voting, but given that we already had a three-book overlap in our longlists it didn't take too long.

So: a different year, a different set of entries and judges, a completely different judging experience. Last time I was pregnant, this time I have an 18mth old. Both years it has been exciting, confusing, and brain-tearingly full on. So has the judging.

I can't imagine what will happen if I judge this award again in the future. Probably I'll just have given birth to triplets, we judges will have a shortlist of twenty books that we CANNOT cut down any further, our heads will explode and someone else will have to judge the award for us.

Oh, and did I forget to tell you this year's winner? How terribly remiss of me.

1.38 metres of reading

I received the complete lot of books for judging today. 70 entries, 7 weeks til The Decision is due.

Luka very kindly helped me unpack the books:

I've judged this award once before, and I remember the stack of books was pretty tall, but I don't remember it being THIS TALL:

It's 138cm of books. Yes, I'm in my pyjamas. It's 7pm, aren't you in your pyjamas?

I'm also 179cm tall, which is pretty tall for a woman (or a man for that matter, but even more so for a woman) so having a stack of books come up past my boobs is kind of scary. Some of my friends only come up to my boobs. I'm not scared of them, though. That's different.

Looking back, in 2008 the stack was this tall:

I was about 3 weeks pregnant there, though I didn't know it yet. Aw.

There were 65 entries that year. Though there are only 5 more entries this year, it feels like a big difference in stack height.

Oh hey, but I'm wearing the same socks today!

Are books getting longer? Am I getting shorter? Can I get through 70 books in the next 7 weeks?

There once was a man from Nantucket (or, Why I love limericks)

As some of you know, I write poetry. So I would like to tell you about my most favourite, no competition, above-all-rubies sort of poem.

The limerick.

I love limericks. There, I've said it. I'd rather read a good limerick than a good sonnet. That bastion of information (Wikipedia), says the limerick is "sometimes obscene, with humorous intent."

(I think I'd like that on my gravestone. "Here lies Anna Ryan-Punch. She was sometimes obscene, with humorous intent.")

The reason they're known as 'limericks' is the source of a bit of debate, but most sources say it's because they fit into a song, the chorus of which begins 'Oh won't you come up to Limerick', and any limerick slots into the verse tune. (When I was a kid we sang limericks to a similar sort of song, where the chorus encouraged: "So sing me another verse that's worse than the first verse, make sure that it's foolish and silly.") As you all know, the limerick is a 5-line rhyming stanza (aabba) written in anapestic or amphibrachic metre.

There. Educational part of the blog concluded.

Limericks are funny, mostly naughty, rhyming poems. What's not to love? Well, apparently some people don't like them. When I professed my love of limericks to my fellow librarian Alana, she said: "But they're lame, and they're always rude." She's probably right. I think this is why I like them. They appeal to my love of bad puns:

'I must leave here,' said Lady De Vere,

'For these damp airs don't suit me, I fear.'

Said her friend: 'Goodness me!

If they don't agree

With your system, why eat pears, my dear?'

(Anon)

They appeal to my love of swearing:

There was a young man of Nepal

Who had a mathematical ball;

The cube of it's weight

Times Pi, minus eight

Is four thirds the root of fuck all.

(Anon)

They often poke fun at figures political, literary and academic. Being married to a philosopher (and in having majored in philosophy at uni in a past life), among my favourites are the ones that poke fun at philosophers:

An example of Kant's sterling wit

Was his theory that farts could be lit,

And it's said that all night

By the flickering light,

He composed his 'Critique of Pure Shit'.

(Victor Gray)

This one is obviously a firm fave in our household (especially when needing to bitch about academia):

When a man's too old even to toss off, he

Can sometimes be consoled by philosophy.

One frequently shows a

Strong taste for Spinoza

When one's balls are beginning to ossify.

(Robert Conquest)

I'm not a big fan of the Edward Lear limericks (the ones that end with pretty much the same line they started with, and aren't rude, and as a result of both these things, aren't funny):

There was an Old Man in a tree,

Who was horribly stung by a bee;

When they said: 'Does it buzz?'

He replied: 'Yes it does.

It's a regular brute of a bee!

(Edward Lear)

See? Yawn. But there's a reply to this limerick of his that I find absurdly funny:

There was an old man of St Bees

Who was horribly stung by a wasp.

When they said: 'Does it hurt?'

He replied: 'No it doesn't -

It's a good job it wasn't a hornet!'

(Sir William S. Gilbert)

I love this. It's poking fun at how Lear's limerick is so lame, but even when I didn't know it was a reply to Lear, I still thought it was hilarious. It gets recited often at our family gatherings (which gives you an idea of how I came to be the person I am today).

There are people who are even more into limericks than me. The OEDILF (The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form) project aims to write one limerick on the subject of every single word in the English language. No joke. So far they've got 61786 'approved' limericks. I'm not sure of the details of the approval process, but I'm sure it's very rigorous.

Scholar of rudey humour Gershon Legman maintained that the true limerick is always obscene. But in case you think I am a bawdy old wench who just likes to make jokes about balls and boobs all day (you can lead a horticulture, etc.), I also love those rare limericks that manage to be delightful without being rude at all:

A psychiatrist fellow from Rye

Went to visit another close by,

Who said, with a grin,

As he welcomed him in:

'Hullo, Smith! You're all right! How am I?'

(Stephen Cass)

A combustible woman from Thang

Exploded one day with a BANG!

The maid then rushed in,

And said with a grin,

'Pardon me Madam - you rang?'

(Spike Milligan)

A wonderful bird is the pelican

His bill can hold more than his belican.

He can take in his beak

Food enough for a week

But I'm damned if I see how the helican.

(Dixon Merritt)

One of my favourite books of poetry that I used to nick off my mum's bookshelf is the Penguin Book of Limericks (ed. E.O. Parrott). It is now housed on my bookshelves between Ovid and Rilke (which is funny in itself). I probably wasn't really supposed to be reading it (given that it contains more sex and swearing than Deadwood and True Blood combined) but I thought it was great. I loved how the rhythm and rhyme scheme of limericks made me laugh even if they weren't terribly funny or I didn't really get it, and how the really good ones can still make me cry laughing. And I suspect that that the randy old Dean at Harvard was right:

At Harvard a randy old Dean

Said: 'The funniest jokes are obscene.

To bowdlerize wit

Takes the shit out of it -

Who wants a limerick clean?

(Anon)

(Meal) ticket to read

Pretty soon I'll be embarking on another judging-related reading binge, which will mean even less blogging than usual (again!). But hey, I get paid to judge (why don't I get paid to blog?) and I like to know where my next meal is coming from.

On that note, I've been rekindling my love affair with John Forbes. Perhaps I'll keep him in mind when I can't face another novel:

Reading

funny
how the eye
goes right
to the line
where we left off
reading
but the brain
can't accept
how serenely
at one
with the book
we are,
the way
hunters once knew
- just knew -
when to throw
the spear & where
exactly,
in all
the bright world,
their next meal
was coming from.

- John Forbes