I hope that Ray Bradbury, in whatever alternate dimension he now occupies, will overlook the transgression and forgive readers like me who have regarded “Fahrenheit 451” as perhaps his finest novel while being such poor stewards of its legacy.
Since its publication in 1953, “Fahrenheit 451” has handily retained its place in the canon of dystopian fiction: more approachable than “1984,” not nearly as baroque as “A Clockwork Orange.” (All three made for equally flamboyant motion pictures.) Its longstanding presence on adolescent reading lists makes it no less worthy of adult attention, and in an era when accessibility to books is still regularly denied — whether by jittery school boards or petulant online retailers — its relevance can hardly be disputed.
But like the somnambulant suburbanites who wander the pages of “Fahrenheit 451,” misremembering their own lives and established history like the hazy contents of dreams, we seem to have forgotten what gives the novel its enduring, prophetic power. It is indeed a story about a world where books are outlawed and burned, but it is also a tale about the value of intellect, the importance of information and the singular, irreplaceable experience of reading books as books — as physical, palpable and precious objects.
It’s not hard to guess why Tim Robbins, the outspoken liberal activist and Academy Award-winning star of films like “Mystic River,” “The Player” and “The Shawshank Redemption,” agreed to serve as the narrator for this project, produced by Audible Studios (owned by Amazon, another despotic state that will someday surely inspire its own great novel about a dehumanized future).
The actor certainly does not phone in his assignment, even if, in this modern age, it may be possible to do the recording work entirely by phone. Robbins has both a gruffness and a gentleness in his voice, and these qualities especially suit his portrayal of the “Fahrenheit 451” protagonist, Guy Montag, a so-called fireman in a future society, whose job is not to put out blazes but to set them in homes and locations suspected of harboring books, and who has become increasingly conflicted about his profession, wondering why it is necessary.
