The Day of the Triffids (1951)

John Wyndham

Penguin, London; ISBN: 0-14-000993-0; Pages: 272

I read this for the first time almost twenty years ago in Bulgarian. The book was part of the sci-fi "Galaxy" series that appeared in tens annually. It was my favorite sci-fi book that I read and re-read many times. When I learned enough English to read the original, I bought the copy that I still have today (cover scan on this page). It's been badly mauled by the years but is a treasured memory because it still has pencil markings around the words I did not know.

After watching the abominable 28 Days Later, and recognizing the outlines of the plot, I re-read the book that very same afternoon. With great pleasure I discovered that I still loved it, even so many years after being thrilled by it. I also found out things I had missed in previous reads (or maybe some of them were deliberately "lost" in translating it to Bulgarian, I am not sure, but it's funny I did not really pay much attention to them even when I read the English original) but that now struck me as pretty interesting.

Quick summary of the plot. One Wednesday morning Bill Masen wakes up in his hospital bad and soon realizes that he has missed the end of the world. An utterly ordinary biologist who would probably led a life of quiet unobtrusiveness and inconsequentiality, as billions of others, he finds himself among the few survivors of the old world. Everyone else is blind. Bill soon stumbles across a man beating a helpless woman and frees her, finding his companion Josella, who would keep him sane, give him purpose, and help him transform from an unsure creature overly dependent on the comforts of civilization and urbane norms into a self-reliant enterprising individual ready to build a brave new world.

As the two ponder their fate and prospects, they also have to grapple with the ultimate moral problem: What, if anything, should they do for the millions helpless blind people of London? The heart says "help them," but reason says "impossible." The two resolve to join a group of seeing intent on building a new community, even though this necessarily means abandoning some of the old ways, especially in Christian morality. It is quite astonishing that, just like a Heinlein heroine, it is Josella who quickly realizes that the survival imperative will turn women into children-bearers and men into more (less?) than husbands. That Bill objects to this and has to be persuaded to take on a harem is perhaps even more astonishing.

But the group cannot leave London that easily. That very night, a gang of enterprising blind men led by Jack Coker, their seeing leader who had unsuccessfully tried to persuade the other group to take the moral high road, contrive a fire alarm and nab a bunch of the survivors including Bill and Josella. They are separated and each is tethered to two goons, assigned a group to care for, and given a territory in London to forage in. Soon, however, a mysterious plague kills off almost the whole of Bill's group and he sets out to find Josella.

He finds Coker instead who joins him in following up on an address written on the wall of the former HQ of the original group. Coker is an interesting character, who starts out as the unlikable, almost criminal, leader of the blind. He clearly thinks himself superior to the group who wants to abandon them, but in fact he has no plan, and succeeds in little more than prolonging their agony for a few days. He soon realizes that he must cooperate with others or perish, and turns into an effective leader although his direct ways sometimes cost him some potential goodwill among his followers. Coker's impulsiveness stands in sharp contrast to Bill's resigned quest for Josella.

When the two arrive at the location specified by the address, they only find a devoutly Christian community that has split from the original group because of the latter's immoral ways. This community is obviously doomed to a slow extinction, and it finally succumbs to a combination of the plague and the triffids.

The triffids. The carnivorous man-made plants that walk, communicate with each other, and are now poised to take over the world from man. They are everywhere after an attempt to steal their seeds from the Russian labs goes awry and the seeds get distributed all over the world. While everything is normal, the triffids are kept under control. But once man loses his sight, they go on the rampage, killing everyone they can find with their poisonous whorl and then waiting for putrescence to make the corpses easy enough to digest.

Bill, having come across the little Susan, eventually finds Josella huddled away in a country cottage with three blind friends. The six slowly settle into a daily routine of survival, beset by a world narrowing around them. The roads deteriorate, fuel supplies run short, and the triffids besiege their "farm." The humans spend years building defenses against them, but the plants lean, and they are patient. Time is on their side. One day, however, a helicopter lands on the lawn and Bill's party finds out that the original group has reached the Isle of Wright, cleared it of triffids, and is busy building a new world.

Before it can join them there, however, Bill's party has to undergo a final ordeal when a bunch of soldiers come to their home and attempt to shanghai them into their own new semi-feudal order where a bunch of petty tyrants would run their own fiefs populated with blind under the pretext of saving them. They are also busy building an army to fight off possible invasions or invade others. It is so incongruous that one involuntarily recalls the famous "shaft-gap" scene in Dr. Strangelove. After outwitting the soldiers, the party joins to Isle of Wright group.

The book is an unmistakable product of Cold War apprehension about what many perceived to be the impending doom of the human race. Written at the time when the Russians had just exploded their own atomic bomb (but before the true nuclear horrors of the hydrogen weapons), the novel is a reflection of the fright that one day (and possibly sooner than later), humanity will slip off the tight-rope of nuclear brinkmanship into the abyss of nuclear holocaust. It is no coincidence that the Russians engineer the triffids in the first place in an apparent attempt to deal with overpopulation, lack of resources, and overcome dependence on capitalist oil. It is ironic, of course, that it takes the greed of Westerners to unleash the scourge upon the world.

It would have been a feeble scourge though if people had retained their advantage: sight, but this they lose when an orbiting satellite discharges its hideous weapon designed to blind (and others, like the mysterious plague that killed many of the survivors). This was years before the Russians launched Sputnik (1957), moving intercontinental ballistic missiles and satellite weapons from theory into practice. But the writing was on the wall and Wyndham correctly saw it.

Another bit of the Cold War shadow hanging over the book is the touching faith of many Britons in America. It is expressed several times throughout the book and ranges from "the Americans could not let something like this happen to them" to "they will be here any time soon to rescue us." Whether they would was, of course, the quintessential puzzle for the Europeans. Although dismissed by everyone who let himself or herself acknowledge to true magnitude of the disaster, the blind faith in America is touching even today. If America does not save the world, who would? Who could?

Beside the political allegory, the book is a thoughtful rumination on morality. There are no easy choices, and many wrong ones that look right. The incessant militancy of man still lurks underneath. Even though the triffids appear to be the ostensible danger, it is clear that they will be tamed or destroyed in due course. Once man establishes even a tiny foothold, he will eventually master his environment. The truly scary part that Wyndham leaves tantalizingly open, is the design of other fellow men. Like Torrence and his ilk who want more than survival. They are bent on conquest, however strange this may appear. What happens to the Isle of Wright colony and Torrence's neo-feudal army is something one can only speculate at.

I love tales of humanity overcoming adversity (which explains why I am so partial to Heinlein's work) and The Day of the Triffids is among the best. Written over half a century ago, it has lost none of its potency and urgency. There's an authorized sequel by Simon Clark called The Night of the Triffids, which is set 25 years from the end of Wyndham's story. It's worth checking out.