Review: The Day of the Triffids

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a surprisingly good read! I only picked up on a friends very strong recommendation; based on the title, melodramatic cover and trite premise, it looked like it was going to be just another trashy sci-fi story; wow, was I wrong!

The beginning is very well written and very intriguing, it pulls you in right away. The book tells a story of survival in a post-apocalyptic world, where the thing that destroyed mankind was *blindness*, not the titular Triffids. After a strange meteor shower, the vast majority of people wake up blind, and only a few are left with sight. Society quickly disintegrates, people turn against each other, or abandon each other to misery and death. And as the world crumbles, a new power emerge: the triffids, giant walking killer plants that suddenly find themselves at the top of the food chain, so to speak (they don’t actually eat people, just kill them). This happens over a long time, the title is actually misleading - the rise of the triffids doesn’t happen in a single day, but over a long period. They are not a catastrophe, but rather a constant threat that keeps the remainder of mankind on its toes.

This is one of the first books of post-apocalyptical survivor horror, a precursor to the zombie apocalypse genre -and true to the genre, the scariest monsters are not the triffids, but other people! The description of the end of society is quite chilling: everything falls apart because of a single detail (blindness), which turned out to be crucial to pretty much everything. Questions of what is right and wrong are constant themes, and never quite resolved: how do you help so many helpless people? is a quick death better than a slow one? how do you rebuild? who do you rescue? what morals are artifacts of our comfortable lives, which ones are worth keeping? This might cause the reader some discomfort, and possibly some nightmares about going blind. The story really makes you think; at first, “no, it wouldn’t be so bad”, followed by “oh my god, it would be that bad!”.

The book is not without its weakness. For example, some of its sci-fi aspects are very strange and unlikely (like the blindness), although the author leaves the mechanism unspecified, so one can imagine it freely. The author is also an elitist and seems to think that helping others is ultimately a recipe for disaster (and he tries very hard to make that point, heaping misfortune upon misfortune whenever sighted people try to help the blind). However, the biggest weakness of the book is the clear and pervasive sexism of the author and characters; the description of gender roles are a firmly planted in the 50s, when the book was written. It might feel a little dated, but then again sexism is still everywhere, so it’s not that dated.

In the end, though, it’s still a very good story and a well written book!

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