I would be surprised
if anyone reading this remembers The Day of the Triffids, or
has even read it—it was out of print in American for many years.
The copy I found in the late 70s was an old paperback already, in my
parents' eclectic collection—probably my mother's, though maybe
actually my father's, from back when he still read books and hadn't
yet succumbed to the great god Television. The Day of the Triffids
was the first 'adult' novel I
ever read, which, I think, was what attracted me to
it—certainly wasn't the Hardy Boys or Old Yeller, though,
like a lot of science fiction, neither was it inaccessibly difficult
for a ten or twelve-year-old—not one of my mom's eastern religion
books, or The Brothers Karamazov.
Maybe it's because you always remember your first, but in the deluge
of sci-fi and fantasy books I read in the years after, I never quite
forgot Day of the Triffids,
and after reading a crop of recent dystopian novels, all now mostly
classed at YA, like The Hunger Games,
World War Z,
Divergent, Feed,
and others (there are a lot
of dystopian YA novels nowadays), and having discussions about
formative books with my friend Jen, I had to go back and see if 1)
Day of the Triffids
still held up, and 2) I could learn anything more about myself, and
my younger self, from what I was reading back then.
The
story begins with the main character and narrator, Bill,
waking up in a deserted hospital, after being unconscious for a
while, and learning that while he was out, most everyone in the world
has gone blind, and that not only that, what everybody took for
non-sentient genetically modified plants have pulled up their roots
and begun to hunt. I know, I know, in these days of zombies and
vampires, the idea of killer plants doesn't sound so killer, but if
one is willing to suspend their disbelief about zombies, a killer
plant dystopia is at least as plausible. I couldn't have told
you then why Triffids imprinted itself on me—the immediate
thrill was imagining what I would do if I were one of the lone
survivors of the destruction of human civilization—which is still
true with the current crop, but as anyone who has thought about
science fiction (meaning, I guess, trying to justify it to myself)
will tell you, those dystopian worlds are stand-ins (not quite
metaphors) (maybe fables) for our own world. In fact, those worlds
do not seem so different to us readers than our own world. I read
Triffids maybe at age eleven or twelve, not entering a new
world but no, feeling that the world had changed.
With puberty, I felt like I was waking after being unconscious for a
long time, into a mostly deserted world run by things I'd thought of
as weird and harmless (adults, and humans in general) but who were in
fact scary and dangerous. Also, the people like me, the left-over
puberty survivors, were mostly blind and helpless and, if I wanted to
survive, I very quickly needed to find others like me, who could see.
Also, once I realized that I liked what was called
'science-fiction,' I had a place to go, that I belonged somewhere: in
the science-fiction section of the bookstore. Once I started carrying
science-fiction books around at school, I began to find the other
survivors—kids, mostly boys (though girls, I sensed, weren't killer
plants)(or mostly not—cue Newt from Aliens: “Mostly....”)
who were reading similar books, and these texts gave us a 'secret
language' that the triffids couldn't understand.
The Day of the
Triffids was written by David Wyndham, real name John
Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (!), a British science
fiction writer who's other works I've never heard of. He was
apparently quite well-known in the 50s and 60s, and though he died in
1969, some of his posthumous writing has been published as recently
as 2009. Still popular and read in England, his books went out of
print here in the States, until recently, when Triffids and
his other most popular novel, The Chrysalids, were re-issued,
by The Modern Library, both under the label of a “20th
Century Rediscovery.”
What I didn't
remember, and maybe just didn't consider back then, was how much the
novel is less about the weird evil flesh-eating triffids, than about
humans, and Wyndham's thoughts on how exactly humans in a
post-disaster world would re-form and survive. Most dystopian books
present one form, one way, that the author thinks humans will govern
themselves, or, usually, be governed. Wyndham presents many, using
the structure of the book, with Bill traveling around England to
various groups of survivors, as a way to present different
philosophies about the best way to survive: Some as
anarachic/communal groups, some as smaller family-sized units, and
some (the really bad guys) going back to a form of medieval
feudalism, with sighted people ruling estates of blind serfs (who
will be fed on ground up triffid gruel). What I like about the novel
is that Wyndam's characters have some actual intelligent
conversations about the pluses and minuses of each form of
government, though, interestingly, the increasing number of triffids
force Bill and his fellow survivors to opt for larger groups, with
larger areas of protected land.
What the few sighted
people do, or don't do, with the now blind rest of the population
becomes the big question. Do they take the truly compassionate route,
and try and help everyone? Seemingly impossible, and endangering
everyone, especially, as if blindness and carnivore plants weren't
bad enough, with some kind of sickness, which may or may not be
typhoid, or the result of biological weapons, ravaging London and
other larger cities. Or, cut their losses and regroup in smaller
groups with other sighted people, knowing that the blind people left
behind will suffer and die? Not easy decisions, and no decision any
character makes in the novel is without some dialogue with another
character about its feasibility and morality. Even the 'best' guys
(there are no real good guys) that Bill and crew join up with are not
without some disturbing new rules, and in any case, in any variation
of post-disaster re-organization, the general lot of women seems to
always end up as baby-makers, which is the one conversation Wyndham
avoids, by having even the main female character, Josella, an
independent and intelligent woman before the disaster, and a writer
of a novel that seems to be the equivalent of Shades of Grey
(ultimate male science-fiction nerd fantasy: to be trapped in a scary
new world with a hot female porn writer), happy and willing, and even
looking forward to, having babies.
Re-reading Triffids
now, I'm just struck at how seminal it was: its influence shows in
all kinds of books and movies now, from Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, to Stephen King's The Stand, to José
Saramago's Blindness. One of my favorite zombie movies, 28
Days Later (screenplay by Alex Garland, another brit, who wrote
The Beach) begins with
the same premise of (and I take as an homage to) Triffids: a
man waking up in a hospital after an overnight disaster, to find
himself one of the few survivors). In fact, I think the whole zombie
genre premise (ie zombies spread over the world, small groups of
humans survive) comes from Wyndham's novel: just substitute killer
plants for zombies. Or apes, say, in Planet of the Apes. Apes
and especially zombies seem to make for a better metaphor (for
example, racism/slavery, capitalism, AIDS, the invasion of Iraq)
though who knows, with the now almost common, though still scary,
genetically modified foods, care of the Monsanto cabal, maybe the
triffids' time is close at hand! Maybe not even as metaphor!
And what did I learn
about my younger self? Well, obviously, the world was full of
metaphorically helpless blind people, and metaphorically evil
triffids, and I was on my own, surviving the disaster called 'growing
up.' And some of my fellow survivors might not be the nicest people
either. Nor did compassion for the blind seem to be enough. In fact,
it might have been too much: That, to have compassion and try to
relieve the suffering of all the metaphorically blind people in the
world would make me triffid food. No, best to withdraw, with a few
like-minded souls, if I could find them (and especially with a woman
who writes porn) and live on an island, where we could survive, and
(maybe) figure out how to rid the world of triffids, and repopulate
it with our metaphorically non-blind children.
Nothing has changed.
I still feel this way.
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