Ray Bradbury at 100: read The Telegraph's original Fahrenheit 451 review
Ray Bradbury was born 100 years ago today. To celebrate the great sci-fi author's centenary, we present reviews from the Telegraph archive of three of his most celebrated books – his classic dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, and his short story collections The Golden Apples of the Sun and The October Country.
Praised for his poetic writing style, Bradbury (who died in 2012) was reviewed for The Telegraph in the 1950s by two of the 20th century's best loved poets – Stevie Smith and future poet laureate John Betjeman.
In 1954, Betjeman recognised Fahrenheit 451 as a modern classic. "Once read," he wrote, "it will never be forgotten."
Fahrenheit 451
Reviewed by John Betjeman
Ray Bradbury, an American, is far the best science-fiction writer. But it comes as no surprise to me to find Fahrenheit 451 a betrayal of modern science and the false idea that "progress" can be reckoned in terms of scientific inventions. He is too much of a poet in all he writes, too full of imagination to be anything but a prophet.
He forsees an America living in cities and at war with the rest of the world. A war is a matter of sending out flights of bombers and is over in 48 hours. All houses are fireproof. Interior walls are just huge television screens. Conversation is just mutual back-slapping. Education is just committing facts to memory. No opinions, no philosophy or sociology are allowed. Religion is run by advertising firms and Our Lord is used for toothpaste advertisements.
His hero is a man called Montag, a fireman. Firemen in his world are used to start fires, not to prevent them. They are a sort of sanitary squad and rush out, at the command of the State Police, to burn any secret hoards of books. Books are illegal. One reads from State-selected books thrown on to the television screen.
Montag is so foolish as to steal one of the books from a pile he is burning and to read it. He also makes friends with a young girl who is a rebel and subsequently liquidated. Montag's wife betrays him to the police and he escapes, in a thrilling chase wherein he is pursued by an eight-legged mechanical hound.
I have left out of this description the powerful horror of this unlikeable but compelling tale. I advise it for all worshippers of speed, popular wireless entertainment, luxury flats and mechanical labour-saving devices. Once read it will never be forgotten and should be in every laboratory and technical college and atomic plant in the country – if those places are allowed subversive books. First published April 2, 1954
The Golden Apples of the Sun
Reviewed by John Betjeman
A friend who runs a circulating library in a small town tells me that people will not read short stories. This is a pity because they may miss The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury. As a science fiction writer Ray Bradbury has long been streets ahead of anyone else. He has the imagination of Wells coupled with a poetical gift for prose writing. I think the best of the 20 stories here is the first, about a lonely lighthouse which summons out of the deeps of the ocean an enormous monster lured by its fog-horn and flashing eye.
The title story about a refrigerated rocket which journeys to the sun does not quite come off: it is so allusive and complicated. All the other stories are effective, whether dealing with the year 2003 or witchcraft or Hollywood or the macabre. They are all made for reading aloud, and they never deviate into the commonplace with the usual twaddle that science fiction scientists talk to one another as they change gear in their space ships. First published Oct 9, 1953
The October Country
Reviewed by Stevie Smith (from a longer review of six books)
There is hardly a short story in these six books that is not a pleasure to read, from the Irish sentiments and landscape of Walter Macken... [to] the extravagant genius of Ray Bradbury, whose collection is really splendid – if you can take it.
But Mr Bradbury's talent is not for everybody, being inclined to a graveyard mixture of up-to-date witchcraft, death, formaldehyde, crumbs, cobwebs and deformity; and all so lovingly treated, as if life in its shadier manifestations were in need of a good word... To pin the bright moment with passion and significance, yet link it by the power of suggestion with all that went before and comes after and is not said, to touch the heart and the imagination and open in brief a whole world of experience – this is the art of the short story, and these writers stretch honestly after it, even if they do not always quite get their hands round it.
Mr Bradbury, along with the graves and freaks, has a poet's gift for words. He strains this sometimes, but one likes "the elegant sea in full lace" that comes in his uncharacteristic last story, which is positively joyful.
Sometimes the same characters appear in different stories, in "Uncle Einar" and "Homecoming", for instance. The people here are ghouls, living on blood and corpses, but they are homely ghouls and love company and love their sad little son, who has turned out human and feels awkward. There is no comicality in "Jack-in-the-Box", the story of a child's escape from the mad enclosure of a rich and demented mother, or in "The Wind", a fine piece of destructive haunting. At his best Mr Bradbury is as ominous as a dream. First published Aug 31, 1956
