Day 6 The Day of the Triffids (1951)
By: John Wyndham
Impressions
A man tells the story of how he survived the rise of the Triffids. After a comet blinds all adults who looked at it. The world is overrun with a strange and deadly species of plant monster. However; different ideas spring from humanity as to how to deal with the sighted and the blind. Bill Masen must choose between bad and worse.
This is another novel that skirts my rule against alien invasions for this list. In the movie version the Triffids are alien invaders, but in the novel they are far more interesting. The novel may not go over well with disabled rights groups as the blind are most often protrayed as a drain on the post-apocalyptic society. As with most of the novels Ive covered, this one also contains some sexist and racist notions that were typical of the time, but they don't distract from the plot. This especially noticed in the character of Josella as she walks the line between damsel love interest and independent woman.
Our Heroes
Bill Masen is the protagonist who escapes being blinded due to a Triffid attack. Having worked with Triffids as part of his job, he becomes more sought after once the Triffid threat becomes real. He is also a romantic and falls for Josella. Once apart he risks his own life to be with her.
Josella Playton is a former novelist who loses her family to the Triffids. Bill first rescues her after she is enslaved by an abusive blind man. Josella is quite a progressive woman, after she gets over her initial shock. She gives some nice insight into the ideas presented for the future.
Sighted Foes
Coker is an altruistic person who feel that the blind can be saved. He captures Bill and Josella and forces them to lead groups of the blind in different parts of London.
Durrant is a stubborn woman whose Christian virtues blind her to the present problems. She runs a farm commune that tries to save several hundred of the blind.
Torrence is a man with red hair who has notions of international control. He is the ultimate threat that seeks to split the lovers and is quick to use force.
The Triffids are large plant monsters with a deadly sting. In the novel they are treated similarly to how zombies often are: dangerous, but not as dangerous as other humans. They are probably the book's best idea and it is a shame that they are cheapened in the film.
Cold War AtmosphereThis novel was written early in the cold war and you can feel it in some of the paranoid comments. The descriptions of the slowly overgrown London countryside mesh well with the nefarious triffids knocking at the gates.
In the End
I wish the end had more to say. One of the villains reappears after not having been seen since about the halfway point. This results in a daring ruse that isn't too exiciting. Then we get a glimpse of the future, but as much as I would have liked. Maybe I've been spoiled by The Earth Abides.
Overall
This is a very enjoyable sci-fi tale that has really great concepts and ideas. This book's biggest problem is that it gets a bit diluted. There are four antagonists throughout the book that serve to represent different ways for dealing with the crisis. It is necessary to serve the book's goal, but hinders the story progression. This book has a lot of great ideas and will be a treat for fans of fifties sci-fi.
7.5/10
Having been born and raised in London, and having moved to Los Angeles 18 years ago (when I was 45, yikes!) I feel compelled to say that, in the late 50s/early 60s this was compulsory reading for just about everyone in the UK, and as one of the recent reprints declares on its cover, read it when you are young and "it haunts you for the rest of your life". Indeed it does. The sexism is really not as noticeable as, I think, you imply. Certainly Wyndham was ahead of his era in some of his other works - Trouble With Lichen is particularly interesting in this respect. And in The Chrysalids he proves himself a pitless, if realistic, Darwinist. Racism (which, in the UK, was actually known as "racialism" in those post-war years) is far less evident *given the era in which the book was written* - the UK was undergoing staggering social upheavals, and the enormous influx of West Indian immigrants and families from the Sub-Continent (not to mention from other reaches of the British Empire), invited to the UK to help staff our public transportation sytems and our hospitals and the nascent National Health Service, was causing extraordinarily painful tensions, particularly in the cities. It is within this context of post-WW2 exhaustion and socio-political chaos that DOTT emerged and seized the public imagination. Triffid, the word itself, passed quickly into the public colloquial vocabulary. Also of interest, given that in the Cold War era the use of US airbases on British soil for the placement of American guided missiles pointing at the USSR, making us a prime target for a nuclear first strike by the Soviets, caused great anxiety - most vividly captured in the Peter Watkins faux-documentary The War Game, an anti-war film commisioned by the BBC but promptly banned by the organization as too disturbing - I was 16 when I attended a theatrical screening and *immediately* afterwards I joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The green meteor storm which destroys the optic nerves of the UK population in DOTT is, it is implied, a dreadful piece of Soviet weaponry activated in error by the USSR. And the Triffids? No more, no less, than the result of genetic engineering - but by whom and from where? Monsanto, anyone?
ReplyDeleteIt really is a great pity that the film and tv versions are so, frankly, inept. Perhaps the scale of the novel is broader than we acknowledge - refusing to lower its head and be confined to a purely visual medium. And yet - Danny Boyle's marvelous tribute to DOTT (28 Days Later) is a wonderful recent example of how to approach the story - albeit without the Triffids themselves. Perhaps that *is* the only way to do it. Thanks for your terrific post.
p.s I must say sorry, after re-reading my post, for some dreadfully clumsy grammar (or absence thereof) and typos!
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