"The Day of the Triffids" by John Wyndham, 16. -23. September (Sunniva)

Yes, man. I probably sneaked this book into the list because I remembered a conversation I had with my uni housemate Emma years ago. We were discussing our enjoyment of Science Fiction written in the 1950s or thereabouts, and how interesting it can be to see what inventions the authors have trusted us with in the year 2000. She mentioned this book, which is more of a Dystopia, and how she liked it because they also poke around a bit in her local geography of Devizes and Marlborough.

Never did I expect it to be this well-written. Or this creepy. I usually stay away from horror stories and suchlike before bedtime (The Shadow over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft was impossible to read after 9 pm), because I have a very active nightly imagination. And right enough, as I was carrying this book with me through Finnmark (about as far north as you can go in Norway), speaking Spanish with my Nicaraguans and Mexicans along the way, and only reading it during the quiet hours before bedtime, I have had so many strange dreams. There have been people that wanted rescuing. There have been strange dystopian places where people, including me, have had to trust complete strangers on their word, and ask beggars for their food. I even think my dream a few nights before I finished the book, about one lady wanting to commit suicide, and later on a group of teenagers wanting the same thing, come from this book.

WARNING: SLIGHT SPOILERSBecause right from the beginning, some twelve pages into the story, we have suicides. There are plenty of people who can't handle being suddenly blind, or who realise what a struggle there will be to survive, and choose another way out. My dream was incredibly disturbing, and I am choosing to believe it had with all the occurrences of suicides in the book, because I don't want to believe it has anything to do with anyone else.

"It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that 'it can't happen here' – that one's own little time and place is beyond cataclysms." 

p.86

What makes this book so potent and convincing is the straight forward language that Wyndham uses. Even on the first page does he talk about the end of the world. He has a brilliant way of mixing information about what has happened and will happen with seemingly random descriptions of his surroundings. Even many of these have a value later in the book, either as plot points or just as groundwork for what will come. Much of the smaller details make the book so much more likely. Like how the press uses several tentative names for the triffids, such as trigons, trilogs, trinits, and trippets, all "near-scientific", or "quasi-etymological". Like they always do.

There are also plenty of corners marked in this book, as you will see from the quotes dotted around this review. Of course it is a commentary on how we've developed our society with too many machines, not knowing where anything is made or how, not relying on nature and so on. The plants are taking over. More intriguing is that this book was written more than sixty years ago, and this problem – our distance from the actual world – is just getting bigger.

"...the amount we did not know and did not care to know about our daily lives is not only astonishing, but somehow a bit shocking. I knew practically nothing, for instance, of such ordinary things as how my food reached me, where the fresh water came from, how the clothes I wore were woven and made, how the drainage of cities kept them healthy." 

p.16

I still don't know half of this.

There were no characters I sympathised with very much, except for the protagonist of course, because he is most the only character we get to follow for a long while. I did however project other people onto the characters in the book. Juan writes a little like John, or Bill, therefore they are the same person. Josella is in fact Erica Jong, who in her turn is of course Isadora Wing. Coker is the character I would have liked to see more of, to turn him from your standard engaged representant for the working class (I will give you my favourite of these: Mr Higgins in North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell) into a someone I am glimpsing underneath.

Mr Thornton and Mr Higgins, the best video I could find

Josella suffers from a similar problem to Coker's – she's borderline stereotype. Of course the first non-blind girl -nay, person - the protagonist meets is very good-looking, three or four inches shorter than him, blonde, although not too blonde, strong, and definitely middle class. Who had a short teenage rebellion before going back to her safe family home. Please, Mr Wyndham.

But still. All the moral questions! This book is so intriguing. Will you help a larger amount of people for some time, or a smaller amount of people for a longer time? There is actually some very sad research, also known as cold logic, that our charity funds would be spent better if we helped a few children throughout their lives, instead of giving nutrition packs to millions and millions of them, which will last one month. But we can't do that. How would you choose the children? So we/NGOs/the state is/are always Coker in the beginning of the book.

I could write the longest review yet, even though Fear of Flying seemed more important to me than this book. There are themes of divisions of class, and how different classes form after a disaster. There are also supposedly radical ideas of free love, while the underlying message seems to be that we must all be man and wife living together. There are supposedly some ideas that men and women are equal, but when it comes to it, the man works outside, doing the hunting and gathering of materials, while the women stay inside to cook, sew, and repair. Then again, we are in the fifties. Then again, Wyndham shouldn't pretend he's being radical and new when he's really not. Maybe he believed he was.

"'You know perfectly well that women can do – or rather did – handle the most complicated and delicate machines when they took the trouble to understand them. What generally happens is that they're too lazy to take the trouble unless they have to.'" 

p.175

"'You are Josella Playton, author of -'
'You're quite wrong,' she interrupted him, firmly. 'I'm Josella Mason, author of "David Masen".'"

p.253

There is also the shortly mentioned, but slightly frightening, idea that most people need to be herded, because they are not intelligent enough to know their own good.

Why did we include the soundtrack in "how to write a review"? I seriously never listen to music while I am reading. If I hear it, I'm not listening.

My favourite quote to finish this rambling review:

"The word was 'when', but the tone was 'if'." 

p.207

*This edition: 1974, Penguin Books, Middlesex, England