John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids: A Story of Post-Apocalyptic Humanity

The Chrysalids is John Wyndham’s seventh novel, following two of his best, The Day Of The Triffids, and The Kraken Wakes. From the opening pages, he creates an atmosphere of an oddly disturbing future: the narrator, David Strorm, says that as a young boy, he dreamed of cities with carts that moved without horses, “and sometimes there were things in the sky, shiny fish-shaped things that certainly were not birds.”

While walking outside his village, he comes across another child, a girl named Sophie, and they play together. She falls and gets her foot caught in a rock. He tells her he needs to unlace her shoe so she can pull her foot out, and she panics. Eventually, she gives in, and when he is able to extricate her foot, he notices that she has six toes.

When he helps her get back home, her mother is there and, while she genuinely appreciates David’s help, it’s clear she is very apprehensive. She sits him down and asks him to promise he will never tell anyone about Sophie’s extra toes. And then Wyndham includes this intriguing little bit:

I could feel her anxiety strongly; though quite why she should be so worried was not, at first, clear to me. I was surprised by her, for there had been no sign before that she could think in that way. I thought back to her, trying to reassure her and show her that she need not be anxious about me, but the thought didn’t reach her.

“I thought back to her…” Is David telepathic? Yes, he is, and he is able to communicate with a few other children over some distance. Unfortunately, David’s father, Joseph, is a prominent farmer in the area and an ardent “fundamentalist” when it comes to “Offences”, or mutants.

I learnt quite early to know what Offences were. They were things which did not look right — that is to say, did not look like their parents, or parent-plants. Usually there was only some small thing wrong, but however much or little was wrong it was an Offence, and if it happened among people it was a Blasphemy — at least, that was the technical term, though commonly both kinds were called Deviations.

Joseph Strorm rails against tolerating any kind of Offence, to the point of killing a neighbor’s tailless cat, even though the local government Inspector has ruled that there is a naturally occurring species of such felines. If a field of corn or other grain is found to contain any Deviation, it is burned.

Wyndham drops little clues about the society and culture David is living in: centuries ago, there was a Tribulation, which was most likely a nuclear war. His father’s farm is on the edge of civilization in an area called Waknuk, part of what has been called Labrador for time immemorial. The most advanced technology they have is a primitive steam engine. Outside of Waknuk are the Fringes, where uncivilized and mutant humans and animals live. They sometimes raid the farms of normal humans for food, tools, and guns. Beyond the Fringes are the Badlands, from which no one returns alive.

Sophie and her parents live just outside Waknuk. She and David become close friends, and he realizes all of the preaching his father makes against Blasphemies is false. Besides her extra toes, Sophie is a sweet, normal girl. Another boy comes across David and Sophie wading in a creek, and he reports her deviancy to the local Inspector. Sophie’s parents realize she’s in danger, and pack up and leave for the Fringes.

David is brutally punished by his father for hiding Sophie from the authorities, and the Inspector tries to explain how serious David’s offense is:

‘ ”… and each foot shall have five toes,”  ’ he quoted. ‘You remember that?’

‘Yes,’ I admitted, unhappily.

‘Well, every part of the definition is as important as any other; and if a child doesn’t come within it, then it isn’t human, and that means it doesn’t have a soul. It is not in the image of God, it is an imitation, and in the imitations there is always some mistake. Only God produces perfection, so although deviations may look like us in many ways, they cannot be really human. They are something quite different.’

I thought that over. ‘But Sophie isn’t really different — not in any other way,’ I told him.

We eventually learn that David has eight friends in the vicinity who can also send and receive “thought-shapes”. Inevitably, incidents occur that cause normal people to suspect that something is different about David and his friends which include Rosalind, a young woman he loves. It becomes exhausting to keep pretending that they are normal, and after a crisis occurs David and Rosalind have to flee for the Fringes.

One the first and finest post-nuclear apocalyptic novels is Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, which was published in 1959, four years after The Chrysalids. Miller’s novel is better, if harder to understand, than Wyndham’s, but The Chrysalids is one of the best dystopian novels I’ve read. In it, Wyndham illustrates the damage done to innocent people by unthinking bigotry and inflexible religious fundamentalism. He uses subtle details to paint a picture of a largely devastated world and how isolated communities attempt to pick up the pieces. I highly recommend this one if you are looking for a thought-provoking read that was written in the throes of the Cold War of the twentieth century.

John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes: Another Apocalypse

The Kraken Wakes (1953) is John Wyndham’s sixth novel and the first to follow his masterpiece, The Day of the Triffids. Like its predecessor, The Kraken Wakes is the story of an apocalyptic event that threatens the survival of humanity. In this case, it isn’t mass blindness and carnivorous, mobile plants, but rather an unseen yet enormously powerful alien presence that makes its home in the deepest sections of our oceans.

Wyndham begins his tale with the two main characters, Mike and Phyllis Watson, watching icebergs in the English Channel slowly drift past them. Wait, what? Icebergs in the English Channel? Yes, and it isn’t until nearly the end of the book that we learn why that’s the case.

The story is told through the eyes of Mike Watson, a scriptwriter and journalist for the EBC (English Broadcasting Corporation). He divides his account into three large sections, Phase One, Phase Two, and Phase Three.

In Phase One, he and Phyllis – another writer for the EBC – are on their honeymoon aboard a cruise ship, and they notice several red “fireballs” falling out of the sky. One lands in the ocean near their ship. They don’t really think anything of them, even after more fireballs are spotted all over the world. They all fall where the seas are deepest.

One scientist, Alastair Bocker, raises the possibility that the fireballs are spacecraft that contain beings from a planet with an extremely dense atmosphere (like Jupiter), hence their landing in spots where the ocean is miles deep. He suggests trying to peacefully establish communication. Bocker is quickly made a pariah by his scientific peers, and an object of mockery by the mass media.

However, the British Navy decides to send down a couple of men in a bathysphere to see if they can get some visual evidence of what’s down there. The Watsons are on board the vessel that is monitoring the bathysphere’s descent when contact is lost. When the communication cable is brought back up, it has been melted.

Meanwhile, ships are sinking under very mysterious circumstances- so suddenly and rapidly that there are no survivors. Wyndham has a lot of fun at this point in the story, describing Soviet Russian statements that blame the “Western capitalists” for all of the ships disappearing while claiming they only want to promote world peace. The investigators conclude that “metal fatigue” is to blame for the sinking ships, and the incidents fade into the background.

However, things get so bad that all shipping is restricted to relatively shallow seas, which plays havoc with the world economy. Some atomic bombs are dropped in areas where the “bathies” are thought to be, but they don’t seem to have any effect. As this goes on, oceanographers notice that there are large amounts of silt in the major currents that shouldn’t be there. Bocker suggests that whatever is down there is mining the seafloor for ore, and the silt is a result. Once again, he is ignored.

In Phase Two, a consortium of scientists come up with a way to counteract the weapon that the unseen aliens are using to sink ships. However, the conflict soon escalates when some villages on small islands are mysteriously completely depopulated. These incidents increase to the point that Bocker is able to tentatively predict where the next attack will occur. He and a team of researchers, including Mike and Phyllis, spend several uneventful weeks on a Caribbean island, when one night it is attacked. They are able to get the first visual evidence that it is an intelligent race behind all these disasters: “sea-tanks” that look like enormous gray half-eggs come up out of the ocean. They are composed of an unknown alloy that is impervious to bullets, and several deploy around the town square. Then, some sort of bubbles appears on their tops which grow into large balloon-like membranes that explode into anemone-like tentacles. If any tentacle comes into contact with a living being, it attaches itself and drags the poor person or animal into itself. One actually reaches through the hotel window where Mike and Phyllis are hiding, grabs Phyllis’ hand, and she is only saved my Mike holding her until the tentacle tears the skin off of her hand. They survive the attack, but many others were not as fortunate. They watch as the anemone things gather groups of humans and roll down to the beach and into the sea.

At this point, even though it is clear humanity is engaged in a fight for its survival, there is very little cooperation between the liberal western democracies and the Communist Russians. And it is here in the story that Wyndham makes some very interesting claims about the role and responsibility of governments. He is not very optimistic about their ability to cope with a huge threat. Instead, the British government is most concerned with keeping the population calm and manageable. As Mike and Phyllis are told what they can and can’t say in their broadcasts, they become more and more cynical and disillusioned.

Even after it becomes clear that the sea-tanks are vulnerable to larger explosives, the people living on the coasts are not given the means to defend themselves. Trust in the authorities quickly breaks down. As Phyllis laments,

‘What’s wrong, Phyl?’

She shrugged. ‘Nothing, except that at times I get sick of putting up with all the shams and the humbug, and pretending that the lies aren’t lies, and the propaganda isn’t propaganda, and the dirt isn’t dirt. I’ll get over it again…. Don’t you sometimes wish that you had been born into the Age of Reason, instead of into the Age of the Ostensible Reason? I think that they are going to let thousands of people be killed by these horrible things rather than risk giving them powerful enough weapons to defend themselves. And they’ll have rows of arguments why it is best so. What do a few thousands, or a few millions of people matter? Women will just go on making the loss good. But Governments are important — one mustn’t risk them.’

John Wyndham. The Kraken Wakes (Kindle Locations 2632-2638). Delphi Classics. Kindle Edition.

In Phase Three, we learn why there are icebergs in the English Channel, but I don’t want to spoil the story. Suffice it to say that, much like in The Day of the Triffids, civilization continues to break down, and Wyndham is none too confident in government’s ability to stop it.

The Kraken Wakes is an excellent and thought-provoking thriller that, once you accept the possibility of an alien invasion, is a credible account of what would happen in the wake of an apocalyptic event. Unlike The Day of the Triffids, it doesn’t happen suddenly and overnight, but gradually over a period of years. Even so, Wyndham has faith in the power of small groups of people to survive. I highly recommend The Kraken Wakes  – Wyndham hit his stride with The Day of the Triffids, and The Kraken Wakes is just as good, even if not as well known.

John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids: A Classic Dystopian Tale

I have been slowly reading John Wyndham’s works, and I finally hit paydirt! His earlier efforts, Foul Play Suspected, and Planet Plane, were not very good. However, his fourth novel, The Day of the Triffids, is a classic dystopian tale. It’s been made into a movie and TV miniseries, and even though it was published in 1951, it hasn’t aged one bit.

It is told through the eyes of biologist Bill Masen, who has made a career out of studying some strange plants called triffids. They grow to be 8 to 10 feet tall, they produce very useful and nutritious oil, and they are able to move about on their three main roots. Unfortunately, they are also carnivorous and have lethal stingers they can whip out and lash their victim with. It’s possible to “dock” a triffid – i.e. cut off it’s stinging lash – but that reduces the quality of its oil, as well as the yield of its seeds.

No one knows for sure where they came from, but they suddenly appeared all over the world at pretty much the same time. Masen believes they are the result of Soviet genetic engineering. Their benefits outweigh their risks, and Masen works for the main developer of triffid products. One day on the job, he is glancingly stung in the face and temporarily blinded. This accident turns out to be a Godsend, because while he is the hospital bandaged up and recovering, an extraordinary, bright green meteor shower occurs one evening. Everyone on earth is awestruck by its beauty, and Masen has to listen to his nurse describe it in great detail.

However, the next day, when he is scheduled to have his eye bandages removed, no one comes by his room. He calls for breakfast, and there is no reply. He takes the bandages off himself, and he soon realizes that everyone who watched the cosmic pyrotechnics is blind. What follows is a clear-eyed account of what would happen if 99% of humanity suddenly went blind, and there is a strange species of ambulatory plants that seem to be sentient and can kill.

Masen soon connects with a young woman, Josella Playton, who is also able to see. She spent the night sleeping off the effects of a wild party, and never saw the strange meteor shower. Together, they manage to find a small band of other men and women who can see, and here is where Wyndham makes things very interesting. They are faced with a choice: stay in London and try to help as many blind people survive as possible, or leave for the country and set up a self-sufficient colony that will (hopefully) preserve and rebuild civilization.

The group Bill and Josella find have opted for the latter, and they agree to help them stock up on supplies for their venture. Unfortunately, their headquarters is raided and many of the group are kidnapped and forced to be the eyes of roving bands of blind, desperate Londoners. Bill and Josella are separated, and the bulk of the novel details Bill’s efforts to find her. In his quest, he comes into contact with various communities that have reacted to the disaster in different ways: one tries to maintain Christian principles, another is organized along military lines. Meanwhile, the triffids seem to be growing in numbers and intelligence. They have little sticks near their base that clatter against the main stalk, and Bill wonders if that is a mode of communication.

Wyndham’s genius in The Day of the Triffids is his matter-of-fact style of storytelling. Many things are never explained, they’re just dealt with. The book reads like the testimony of someone who is taking pains to be as accurate as possible with no embellishment. This makes the overall story very powerful and believable. As Bill and Josella wrestle with the moral implications of having sight in a world of blind people, they realize that previously held morals and beliefs have to be re-evaluated. There are no easy answers, and everything involves costly tradeoffs. At the end of the novel, there is no clear indication that humanity will survive, but there is definitely hope.

I highly recommend The Day of the Triffids for lovers of realistic sci-fi that poses thoughtful moral dilemmas. As I mentioned earlier, it is a classic dystopian tale that has aged amazingly well. As a matter of fact, so much of sci-fi these days is dystopian to the point that it has become cliched and stale. The Day of the Triffids is justifiably a classic that remains disturbing and thought provoking.