Burning still: Fahrenheit 451

Incendiary material ... Anton Difrring in the film version of Fahrenheit 451. Photograph: Kobal

I have to admit that I'm a bit over-awed by the fact that Fahrenheit 451 is the next book up on my trawl through the Hugo awards. I'm not sure I can offer you anything new about a book so widely read and known. Once a book's title has entered the language, is there anything a book blogger can add? What is there to be said about it if Michael Moore could reference its contents in the highest grossing documentary film of all time and everyone knew what he was talking about. The temperature at which truth burns.

I can at least start by explaining why I'm writing about it now. The book forms a curious entry among the recipients of the Hugos.When the venerable science-fiction award was first given in 1953, it was supposed to be a one off. In 1954, therefore, there was no ceremony and no award given. The Hugos came back by popular acclaim in 1955 but by then, it was too late for Fahrenheit 451. As later voters from the science fiction world convention (worldcon) realised, all that that meant that one of the most influential books in the genre had gone unrewarded and they retrospectively gave it a gong on its 50th anniversary in 2004.

It was probably lucky for them, mind you, that they did originally miss out 1954 and had the gift of hindsight when they honoured Ray Bradbury. It's open to debate whether enough people would have spotted the book's unique qualities when it first came out. Angus Wilson, the book's reviewer in the Observer, for instance, described it as "a little pale" and "a little naive." Plus, if the winner of 1955 is anything to go by (of which more soon) the voters would probably have given the thing to L Ron Hubbard or something equally dreadful.

I'll stop here, before I get too deep into geek-lore and the ghosts of sci-fi past. Suffice to say that often the most enduring books often take a while to seep into the popular consciousness. When they get there, of course, some of them even change the world, or at the very least the way we view it. Let me give two small personal examples of episodes that take on a very different hue when refracted through the glass of Bradbury's fireman's helmet.

I spent a large chunk of last year living in a small town in the USA. Although it was a pretty little place, easily navigable by foot, no one at all used to walk around. Pedestrians anywhere other than the main street were regarded as eccentric at best. Even so, thanks to my UK programming, it was my frequent habit to go for a walk at dusk. Or at least, it was until I got fed up of being stalked by a slow-cruising squad car as I did so, a car that I would often spot tracking me, at walking place, on the opposite side of green squares that dotted the town, following me down streets, waiting for me at junctions, letting me know that my increasingly less relaxed progress was being monitored.

Just in case readers in the UK are starting to feel superior at this point, the other incident happened near my childhood home, in the Lune valley. There, three friends and I were out one evening, walking a dog. A policeman stopped us, detained us by the road side for an hour, searched us and threatened to arrest us all. The reason he eventually gave? We had wet feet close to agricultural land. That we had just walked from my friend's house across the fields along a public footpath carried no weight with him.

Would these small instances have taken on such burning significance for me if I hadn't read Fahrenheit 451? It's so ingrained it's impossible to say.

On a broader scale, I'd hope that it wouldn't take Ray Bradbury to tell me that the proscription of books is alarming. Even so this is probably a good place to be reminded of the various works that are currently banned in different parts of the USA:

Harry Potter (demons), The Phantom Toolbooth (more demons), Huckleberry Finn (racist), The Catcher in the Rye (drugs, swearing, prostitutes), Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (explicit sex), and, perhaps most shocking of all, The Diary of Anne Frank (titillating and "a real downer"). The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron. There's a full list available at the excellent Pelham Public library. Yes, Fahrenheit 451 is on it.

It's probably also worth quoting the recent research in the UK that suggests one in four adults reads less than one book a year. But that watch statistics TV.

I notice now, that I've got through most of my allotted space and hardly said a word about the actual contents of the book. Although I guess that quite neatly makes my point about how much baggage goes along with something so influential, and how difficult it is to talk about it free of my own and everyone else's prejudices previous opinions.

But I must say, having re-read the book last week, that there were a few things that surprised me. It was at once far clumsier and far more effective than I'd remembered.

Large chunks seemed preachy, it wasn't free of the scourge of exposition that haunts so many sci-fi novels and some of the dialogue is ridiculous: "'Damn', said Beatty. 'You've gone right by the corner where we turn for the firehouse.'"

Elsewhere, it is often startling and poetic. I'm tempted to write that it's almost as memorable for its imagery as its ideas, although the fact that I'd forgotten about the existence of the half-alive hound that sniffs out wrong thinkers and injects death into them rather undermines that statement. Whatever. There are some fantastic visual passages as this metal monster is lowered by helicopter to start hunting, and the book is as much a page-turner as a novel as ideas.

As far as ideas go, the effect was just as powerful when I read the book anew. Yes, it's crude, but it's very effective. Bradbury's central message that the loss of freedom is as much the fault of the private individual as the interfering government rings just as loud now as it must have in the days of McCarthyism. It's salutary to note that the last two news articles I read were about sweeping Arts Council cuts from literary bodies and a huge planned expansion of nuclear power in the UK - and that no one seems to be doing anything about it.