Fahrenheit 451 - The Authorized Adaptation!

Take my book from my cold dead hand! That's a paraphrase of an infamous Charlton Heston quote of course concerning guns. It's how I personally feel about the precious tomes which inhabit my house with me. I live alone but not really. My house is full of interesting folks like Asimov, Bester, Cooper, Dickens, Ellison, Fleming, Gaiman, Heinlein, Idle, Jakes, King, Lovecraft, Matheson, Norton, Orwell, Poe, Quinn, Robinson, Spinrad, Tolkien, Updike, Verne, Wells, Yarbro, and Zelazny to name a few. Their books and their stories abide with me. They are much more precious than any gun in a civilized society. But there's the rub. 

In America we are not afraid of the military of the military-grade hardware you might be hiding on your person or in your vehicle, but we are fucking terrified that you might have a book which has an unsettling idea or two in it. Electronic media has made book-burning purely a symbolic act of stupidity and fear, but the very effort to suppress ideas and the books that contain them is still raging along as hot as it ever was. Ray Bradbury spoke to this madness in his famous novel Fahrenheit 451 which was first published in the 1950's. I've read this book numerous times and taught it in class several times as well. It's a bracing vision of a future. It was adapted to film in the late 1960's. Now, like so many classic yarns, this story has been given the graphic novel treatment. That's what I'm responding to today. 

I'm not familiar with the work of Tim Hamilton, but based on the stellar storytelling in this tome, I'm a fan. There are lots of cheesy ways this singular book could've been adapted. Hamilton chose a restrained approach which uses a muted color palette and, in a way makes the words in the presentation as important as the pictures. That's not unimportant for a book about the value of words. 

We follow the fireman Montag, a man charged in this society with the destruction of illicit reading materials. What materials are considered verboten you might ask? All of them pretty much it seems. But mostly classic and popular literature, the kinds of fiction and nonfiction which lifts the individual out of their mundane existence and points the way to potentially more durable truths. The great irony in this society which seems to be always at war, is that fireman destroy and not save. That key irony empowers the novel and this graphic novel with a core irony. Montag is a man conflicted and also a perfect example of why a society wishing to maintain control of its populace burns books and instead encourages banal socialization by way of mammoth television screens. That this world is doomed is evident from the very beginning of the book. 

Now given the central message of Bradbury's book, one might think a comic book version of his story might smack too close to the kind of reductionism he preaches against, but this book features an introduction by Bradbury himself, so he apparently was fine with it. A book that inspires self- reflection and a further search for truths is to be celebrated regardless of his format. And that's how I feel as well. This is a dang good adaptation of a story demands to be read in the modern day. 

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