The Day of the Triffids

John Wyndham

If you've only seen the quite fine fifties film based on this book, as is the case with most film adaptations, you don't know triffids. While the folks who made the film did quite a good job within the framework of the fifties horror movie, there's a great deal more to the book.

Bill Masen wakes up in the hospital the morning after a meteor shower that had captivated the entire planet to find that most of his human compatriots have been blinded by the light from the meteors. Masen, with his head in bandages during the shower, missed it, and retains his sight, strolling through a post-apocalyptic England in the first half of the novel, documenting life after the tragedy-- and before the triffids. The triffids are odd plants that seemingly appeared out of nowhere, and Masen, in fact, worked for a company that extracted nutritional compounds from them. Wonderfully useful as long as they were kept in tight check by their human masters, triffids had spread throughout England without anyone giving them a second thought. A blind populace, however, cannot control its previously-useful pet...

Much has been made of the brilliance of the layered narrative and the many parallels with life at the beginning of the Cold War, so I won't do anything here except mention it all in passing. This new edition's introduction, by the always wonderful Edmund Morris, is aimed at convincing a new generation that Wyndham's remarkable Cold War fable is still as relevant, if not more so, in the post-9/11 world. As much as reading Edmund Morris' words, even if only in a brief introduction, pleases me, I have to wonder why this was necessary; a simple reading of this very quick and compelling novel should be more than enough to convince the average person of the validity of the introduction's argument. The Day of the Triffids is very much still relevant, and still just as cracking as it was in 1951.