Recently, I took a look over my list of read classic science fiction and found that it was wanting. Driven with a mad desire to succeed at any cost, I launched forth to overcome this deficiency in my character and consume those works of the genre that were glaringly absent from my I’ve-read-that list.
One such work of classic science fiction is one that is probably missing from many an American’s list, especially those born from the 1970s onward. Until recently, I believe that this particular book was hard to come by in the US. In any event, it was completely under my radar until I chanced to learn of it in the most unlikely of places.
When they’re not grunting like primeval apes, passing out from alcohol consumption, or preoccupied with shopping for the latest leather S&M gear, members of the classic metal band Judas Priest can actually form complete sentences. Unsurprisingly to anyone who listens to their lyrics, lyric-writer and vocalist Rob Halford (who once looked sorta normal, unlike his current incarnation as an Earth-bound Vogon escaped convict) is a fan of science-fiction (you can’t hear it, but as I wrote this I said “science-fiction” with a bad Birmingham accent, just to get in the Priest mood). Happening to watch a documentary recently about the band, I heard Rob Halford mention John Wyndham’s 1951 British sci-fi classic Day of the Triffids as an example of science-fiction he loves. Not having heard of this novel before, I instantly declared that if Mr. Rob Halford liked it, then goddamnit so would I.
And I did. A lot.
I just finished the book a few days ago, a nice slim volume that doesn’t fart around like, oh, Robert Jordan, but just gets right on with it, so committing to reading it takes slightly less time than writing a doctoral thesis, or building a pyramid.
Briefly, the story tells of survivors of an apocalypse brought on by humankind’s stupidity and arrogance, two separate catastrophes which unite to utterly destroy civilization, and nearly everyone on the earth, in the most unsettling and disturbing of ways — when a satellite loaded with nasty bacteriological weapons crashes to the earth in a spectacular worldwide light show, it blinds all who watch it. Our hero Bill, recuperating from an accident to his eyes, has missed the whole thing, and removes the bandages to discover a world that doesn’t work anymore. Chaos ensues, and typical post-apocalyptic violence results, while Bill struggles to survive and eventually to locate the handful of others who through pure luck missed the light show, and saved their sight.
But that’s not the end of humanity’s suffering. From somewhere in the heart of Soviet Russia, a genetic-modification experiment gone wrong has resulted in the Triffid, a plant that gets up and walks, and has a nasty habit of lashing out with a poison whip that instantly kills its victim. After a nice ripening process, the Triffid then proceeds to scoop up the flesh of the festering corpse.
With humanity blinded and incapacitated, the Triffids take over, and things get bad very, very quickly.
Day of the Triffids is a post-apocalyptic science-fiction novel before there was a genre called The Post-Apocalyptic Science-Fiction Novel, published years before books like A Canticle for Liebowitz and I Am Legend solidified the stereotypes and established the term. There were obviously grim views of the future (a British specialty), but none so typically post-apocalyptic as this book. From a plot point of view, this story would not have felt at all out of place in the more jaded climate of the 1970s, or even the 1980s. Without artifice, John Wyndham wrote a quintessential survival story in a world irretrievably destroyed.
I’ve been peculiarly interested in the post-apocalyptic novel of late, since I’m knee-deep in my own little composition of the genre. Day of the Triffids proved a particularly enriching read, as Wyndham masterfully exploited the possibilities of the genre to mine immense riches of character and drama. The hero Bill struggles through not just the exigencies and miseries of outer world, but his own internal turmoil, fighting within himself to have a reason to even go on. Post-apocalyptic novels can illuminate the human capacity for hope like no other, and I have yet to read a novel which illustrates it so well as Day of the Triffids.
Tackling the idea of bacteriological warfare and genetic-modification is startlingly prescient for 1951. Indeed, it was so far ahead of its time that it is only now, in the 21st century, that the concepts seem at all timely, particularly the genetic-modification theme. In our current climate, when scientists fiddle with nature by affixing animal genes to plants, suddenly the concept of creating a plant which walks and eats flesh is not so very far-fetched after all.
I grew up on British literature of all types, from When the Tripods Came to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, from P.G. Wodehouse to Arthur Conan Doyle, and discovering a classic written in the literary style I love so much which had somehow passed me by, is a wondrous treat indeed. Had this same story been composed by an American, it would have been so different, in texture, in attitude. Anyone who has ever read a novel by a great 20th Century British novelist knows what I’m talking about. The quality is ineffable, but inescapable.
Humorously, author Brian Aldiss dubbed Day of the Triffids a “cosy catastrophe”, without meaning irony, and I’m damned if he didn’t hit the nail on the head with the term. For even among the dreadful misery and horrors that we experience in the book, there is a grounded, solid and imperturbable core of domesticity and warmth in the English character that even man-eating plants and bacteriological catastrophes cannot diminish. And it’s wonderful.
One of the great classics of science-fiction.
Next up: another of Wyndham’s masterpieces, The Midwich Cuckoos (twice adapted to film as Village of the Damned)
photo from Wikipedia
