Times of trouble, such as our current nightmare of America being torn apart from within, have a way of bringing up old memories. Lately it’s memories of reading, long ago, John Wyndham’s science fiction novel, The Day of the Triffids (1951), that have been popping up and replaying in my mind.
My first taste of science fiction was The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham, assigned reading in tenth grade. Set in a future, dystopian, post-nuclear-war world where people live by subsistence farming in a landscape created by a forgotten advanced economy, it was an excellent choice for teens, as the young protagonists are misfits rejected by the society they must escape. I was hooked.
Over the next several years I sought out more and more science fiction, particularly looking for John Wyndham’s work. Entering any library I went directly to the W’s to see what they had. I think I read every one of his novels, and maybe every short story.
Although Chrysalids was my introduction, it’s The Day of the Triffids that I most often recall, and lately it’s been bubbling up in my thoughts a lot. I needed to reread it.
It was much harder this time. In that first reading, decades ago, I simply loved the science fiction of it. This time I read it as the horror story that it is. How had I not seen that before? Was I too young, too innocent, to realize? Maybe the love story threaded through the plot was distracting to my young, romantically-inclined mind, so distracting in fact that I didn’t really understand that it’s a story of a rapidly collapsing civilization.
Our narrator, Bill, is in hospital in London, unable to see because his head is wrapped in gauze to protect his eyes. He’d been smacked in the eyes by a triffid, and required emergency treatment to save his eyesight from the effects of triffid poison.
During the days that Bill spent in hospital, effectively blinded by head wrappings, people all around the world were amazed and entertained by an unprecedented event: an all-night light show of green meteors, perhaps from a large field of comet debris.
Everyone who could get to a vantage point watched “the greatest free fireworks display ever.” Radio announcers “advised everyone that it was an amazing scene… not to be missed.” The nurse who brings Bill his supper tells him “the sky’s simply full of shooting stars … all bright green … everybody’s out watching them … [some are] so bright … it hurts to look at.” She adds “It is such a pity you can’t see it…”
Next day, after waiting for medical people who never arrive, he gingerly removes his head wrappings – it was after all the day scheduled for them to come off – to find that although his own eyesight is fine, everyone who saw the “fabulous” green flashes is blind.
And now that most people are blind, triffids, the dangerous plants that have been lurking, tolerated because their dangers seemingly were manageable, are ascendant.
And so “The End Begins.”
The image of what Bill encounters, almost everyone blinded by what they had simply thought was fun entertainment, and everything grinding to a halt as a result, has been with me for days now.
The triffids are part of this picture too. Despite the danger they posed, they had commercial uses, so they were farmed. And “volunteers” grew widely, probably arriving as windblown seed, in neglected garden corners. As triffids grow large they become mobile, pulling up their roots and shambling about. The danger now was that triffids, each with a poisonous stinger that can kill a grown man, can show up in unexpected places.
With almost everyone blinded, everything comes to a halt. People are dying. The few sighted survivors find each other only to devolve into dangerous rival factions. Unsurprisingly, our hero Bill, who had worked with triffids in a production facility and knew their ways, is ignored when he tries to explain to an officious faction leader why triffids are so dangerous, and how to plan for defense against them. Pages later, Bill explains that “there’s a kind of conspiracy not to believe things about triffids.”
Bill escapes to strike out on his own, exploring, collecting supplies where he can, and searching for Josella, the woman he met shortly after the night of green comets. She, like him, did not see the comets. In the months and years after the collapse, as Bill travels around searching for supplies and any other survivors, we hear how the landscape is changing, roads are decaying, flooded in places, weeds and trees growing up in cracks, unmaintained houses are collapsing, all the manmade infrastructure that we all take for granted is falling apart. Always, always, he is alert for and prepared to fight triffids.
And factions grow stronger: some are simply reclusive, others aggressively dangerous.
As the story progresses it’s amusing now to read of the hopeful characters who believe the Americans will come help: “the Americans will find a way.” “The Americans, they assured us, would never have allowed such a thing to happen in their country.” “…it was only a matter of holding out for a while until the Americans arrived to put everything in order.” America: the good guys in white hats!
And now, here we are.
We have our own mass blindness, caused by entertainment that distracted and crippled so many minds. And that blindness has released our own “triffids” that are causing havoc and setting in motion changes that likely will result in many deaths, and even collapse the infrastructure that underpins our economy, and society. Josella questions a future for children “born into a world which had been quite pointlessly destroyed…”
Will our current horror story turn out as badly as Wyndham’s? Or do we still have enough people with vision, perhaps joined by others who recover from their temporary blindness, to join the battle, to find a way to give our story a happier ending?