Reading: Day of the Triffids

     As most of you probably know, I ended up getting covid, as have the other members of my household. The three of us are doing well but we were laid up for about a week forcing ourselves to take things as easy as possible. In that time, I tried to mostly occupy myself with drawing, reading, and watching films. As it happens, I'd just acquired both the Day of the Triffids DVD as well as the novel it was based on.

My copy of Day of the Triffids, with a beautiful dust jacket cover by Gary Viskupik

 

    When I was a child, I was absolutely terrified by and obsessed with Day of the Triffids. My family had it on VHS and I think I was about at the age where I liked to scare myself with movies. I had a highly active imagination and it didn't take a lot to scare me- just a good concept was enough and my brain would connect the dots. The movie of course, to an adult, is a pretty tame affair, but the concept of it all is still compelling. The book illustrates a lot of the horror more profoundly.

    In Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham, a strange plant appears which has unusual properties, possessing both the ability to "walk" by moving its roots like limbs, and having a deadly sting that it can lash out at people to kill them. The triffids feed on insects and on rotting flesh and will eat the victims of their sting once properly decayed. It's suspected that triffids were bioengineered in the Soviet Union, but no one knows that for certain. Triffids are regarded as mostly a nuisance and a curiosity, easily maintained and kept at bay in the developed world, but it turns out that these plants can be processed for a highly vitamin rich oil that is better and more nutritive than fish oil. Humanity starts farming triffids, finding that the plant's oil is best when they still have their sting. Bill Masen, the narrator and hero of our story, is a biologist who works at one of these triffid farms and he is also a survivor of a triffid sting that he'd had as a child, which grants him some resistance to their deadly stings.

    Cold war tensions serve as the backdrop for this story- which mentions as well the positioning of several satellites in Earth's orbit and the deadly potential such technology poses. Not just missile guidance, but the story hints at the possibility of viruses, radioactive dust, and other secret weapons waiting in orbit for one nation to make the first move.

    At his job, Bill ends up being stung by a triffid again and is temporarily blinded by its venom. He is in the hospital in London just as another strange event is occurring- a fantastical green shower of meteors that can be viewed everywhere on Earth. Bill cannot view the showers as his healing eyes are covered in bandages, so he is spared the horrors that befall all its watchers. The meteors render everyone who viewed them completely and permanently blind. It's suspected later on in the book that the meteors might have something to do with the satellite weapons, but we as the audience never know for sure. Bill awakes in the hospital the following morning to find that no one is coming to attend to him on the day his bandages are supposed to come off. He pieces together the horrible situation and has to remove his own bandages himself, thankfully finding himself able to see again as normal.

    The world of the newly blind is horrifying and heart breaking. Bill is unable to help in any meaningful way- the blind being so numerous and panicked that many are now dangerous in their desperation. Many people choose to commit suicide after finding that everyone else is also blind. Thankfully for Bill, he manages to find another seeing person- Josella Playton, and together they plan out what to do next. Most horrifying of all is the revelation that the triffids are now wandering about the streets of London, hunting people- and it seems that triffids might actually be more intelligent and organized than most people expected. Very soon, disease also becomes a concern in the city as the bodies begin to pile up.

 What follows is Bill and Josella trying to find other survivors and leave London, running into various kinds of trouble, being separated, and desperately trying to find each other again amidst chaos. The triffids are a danger of course, but so much of the bigger danger lies in humanity and all the ways that human beings can harm each other.

    Unsurprisingly, the British horror film 28 Days Later (2002) took a deal of inspiration from Day of the Triffids- with that story also beginning with a man in an abandoned hospital, waking to find the world as he knew it is gone. I should also mention that the comic series The Walking Dead starts in a similar fashion with its main character also waking from a coma to zombie apocalypse (and the first issue of that comic being published in 2003).

    One thing I found really fun and refreshing about this novel, penned in 1951, is how forward thinking and modern it felt on a lot of matters. Not perfect, mind, but a lot different than I expected. Josella is very much a liberated and modern woman- and one who'd also written a bawdy romance novel and had her own independent career- and she never seems so much a damsel in distress. She's also more open-minded to the ways the world must change than Bill is. With the conventions of the old world fallen, the book's characters do a lot of thinking about what the new world should look like, if humanity is to survive at all. Among all the horror, there is a hope that society can be something better, something more equitable. The book also examines a variety of interesting moral quandaries, mostly regarding what the main characters can do to aid those that are newly blind. There are no pretensions about "right answers", the characters simply try to do their best, even when the situation feels hopeless.

    What is interesting too is that both military power and religious order are not regarded well in this book. Wyndham himself served during WWII and no doubt was inspired quite a deal by what he witnessed and feared the most. And indeed, military power appears in this novel as one of many things to be feared in the new world- with a military force trying to establish a kind of feudal rule over surviving people. There is also a religious enclave that fails spectacularly to care for and maintain itself, so solidly set in its ways as to be oblivious to the needs that the new world brings. Even if the tone of the book itself feels very white and suburban and middle class, there's still something quite daring about a novel from this time period pushing back against two very respected societal forces. Very briefly the book also touches on a move beyond marriage and the traditional family unit, with Josella even suggesting polygamy as a potentially equitable option. It's an interesting note, though I would have liked to see that explored more in detail (the characters still seem quite content to be monogamous and to raise children that way).

    One of my favorite characters in the book is Coker, a man implied to perhaps be a communist (and is at the very least, a man involved in protests and union organizing), who at first seems like an antagonist in the book as he tries to do what he deems to be the most socially responsible action. I won't spoil all the details, but I really enjoyed his character arc and the way he becomes an important figure in the novel.

    Ultimately, despite being a disaster story, Day of the Triffids is a book that ends on a hopeful note. While nothing is necessarily resolved- the triffids aren't defeated and the world will never be what it used to be- there is the hope that perhaps this means humanity will instead build something better.

    Overall, I'd definitely recommend checking this novel out if you want to read a gripping and peculiar apocalypse story.