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| This month features The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham |
I can think of few books which more open themselves to reductive readings than John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids. They are all there for the easy picking: historical, psychological, feminist, deconstructive. Taking them one by one.
(After a brief intermission, during which I say: I'm assuming you know that Triffids are seven foot tall mobile daffodil-like plants which can sting you to death.)
Historical: The Day of the Triffids was published only four years after Orwell's 1984. Yet Orwell's Cold War is the Second World War, badly disguised, whereas Wyndham's is recognisably that of the Cuban Missile Crisis - international espionage, double-crosses, everything. The spreading of the Triffid seeds is part Len Deighton, part Tintin: 'What happened to Umberto himself will never be definitely known. It is my guess that over the Pacific Ocean, somewhere high up in the stratosphere, he and Comrade Baltinoff found themselves attacked by the planes that Fedor had heard in pursuit...'
The Day of the Triffids is an environmentalist parable about what happens when 'Man' tampers with 'Nature'. The Triffids are 'the outcome of a series of ingenious biological meddlings - and very likely accidental at that.' Genetic engineering, by any other name.
Psychological: John Wyndham was a seriously screwed-up individual (see feminist.) There is an argument to be put that The Day of the Triffids is a highly elaborate sexual fantasy, of the sort that adolescent boys construct, ie. if Armageddon comes, at least I'll get laid.
Also convincing is the notion that The Day of the Triffids, like many apocalypse novels, is about the reconstruction of the nuclear family.
Feminist: In the post-Triffid world, Male-Female sexual relations become the issue through which the new society must define itself. Shall practical polygamy replace sentimental Christianity? Wyndham uses the familiar ploy of putting the repressive arguments in the mouths of his female characters.
If you were a woman who was going to spend an hour or two before you went to sleep tonight considering whether you would choose babies and an organisation to look after you, or adherence to a principle which might quite likely mean no babies and no one to look after you, you'd not really be very doubtful, you know. And after all, most women want babies, anyway.
Deconstructionist: The whole novel is revealed in a single word in the chapter 'Shirning'. Throughout the rest of the book, the Triffids are referred to in terms of indifference or repugnance. But here the tone slips:
'Almost every morning revealed one or two new [Triffids] lurking close to the house, and the first task of the day was to shoot the tops off them, until I had constructed a netting fence to keep them out of the garden. Even then they would some right up and loiter suggestively against it until something was done about them'.
Suggestively. Suddenly the Triffids have turned into prostitutes, everything about them from their lashing tongues, their clacking speech, their dirty skirts, is explained. (See Feminist.)
But it is the simplicity of Wyndham's central conceit that creates all this room for interpretation: one night, most of the people of the world watch a display of beautiful lights in the sky; the next day, most people in the world are blind and it is the imaginative rigour with which Wyndham is able to follow ensuing events through that gives the novel its enduring power. Power, very often, to horrify.
'There were fields in which cattle laid dead or wandered blindly, and untended cows lowed in pain; where sheep in their easy discouragement had stood resignedly to die rather than pull themselves free from bramble or barbed wire, and other sheep grazed erratically, or starved with looks of reproach in their blind eyes.'
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