User:Joereadel/The Day of the Triffids

Summary

The novel's protagonist is Bill Masen, a biologist who has made his living working with triffids—tall, venomous, carnivorous plants capable of locomotion. Due to his background in biology, Masen suspects the triffids were bioengineered in the U.S.S.R. and accidentally released into the wild. Triffids are cultivated around the world for the excellent industrial oil they produce.

The narrative begins with Bill Masen awaking in hospital with his eyes bandaged after having been splashed with triffid poison from a stinger. During his convalescence he is told of an unexpected green meteor shower. The next morning he learns that the light from the unusual display has rendered any who watched it blind (later in the novel Masen speculates that the "meteor shower" may have been orbiting satellite weapons that were triggered accidentally). After removing the bandages from his eyes he finds the hospital in chaos, with staff and patients without sight. Masen wanders through a chaotic London, where he eventually rescues wealthy novelist Josella Playton after discovering that she's being forcibly used as a guide by a blind man. Intrigued by a single light on top of the Senate House in an otherwise darkened London, Bill and Josella discover a group of sighted survivors led by a man named Beadley, who plans to establish a colony in the countryside. They decide to join the group.

The polygamy implicit in Beadley's scheme appalls some group members, especially the religious Miss Durrant—but before this schism can be dealt with, a man named Wilfred Coker stages a fire at the university and kidnaps a number of sighted individuals, including Bill and Josella. They are each chained to a blind person and assigned to lead a squadron of the blind, collecting food and other supplies, all the while beset by escaped triffids and rival scavengers.

Soon Masen's followers begin to fall sick and die of an unknown disease. When he wakes one morning to find the survivors have left him, Masen returns to the University Tower to seek Josella but his only lead is an address left behind by Beadley's group. Joined by a repentant Coker, Masen drives to the address - a country estate called Tynsham in Wiltshire. He finds part of the Beadley group, now led by Miss Durrant, who eventually tells him that Beadley went to Beaminster, in Dorset a few days before he arrived. Josella is nowhere to be found.

Masen and Coker decide to follow Beadley to Dorset. They find small groups of blind and sighted people along the way, but no trace of Beadley. Eventually they decide to separate. Coker returns to help at Tynsham, while Masen heads for the Sussex Downs after remembering a remark Josella made about friends she had there.

En route, Masen rescues a young sighted girl named Susan, whom he takes along with him after learning her family has been killed by triffids. A few days later, during a night of heavy rain, they see a faint light in the distance. Upon reaching it they discover Josella and her friends.

The group tries to establish a self-sufficient colony in Sussex, and though they have some success, they are constantly threatened by the triffids that mass around the fenced exterior. Several years pass, until one day a representative of Beadley's faction lands a helicopter in their yard and reports that his group has established a colony on the Isle of Wight. Durrant's talk of Beaminster was a deliberate attempt to throw Masen off on his journey to find Beadley. While Masen and the others are reluctant to leave their own settlement, the group decide to see the summer out in Sussex before moving to the Isle of Wight.

Their plans are hurried by the arrival of the militaristic representatives of a new despotic and self-appointed government, who arrive in an armoured car. Masen recognises the leader as a ruthless young man he had encountered on a scavenging expedition in London and whom he had watched cold-bloodedly execute one of his own party after they had fallen ill. The latter plans to give Masen a large number of blind people to care for and use on the farm as slave labour; he will also take Susan as hostage. Feigning agreement, Masen's group throw a party, during which they encourage the visitors to get drunk. Creeping out of the house whilst the visitors are fast asleep, they disable the armoured car by pouring honey into the fuel tank and drive through the gates, which they leave open to allow the triffids to pour in. The novel ends with Masen's group on the Isle of Wight, determined one day to destroy the triffids and reclaim their world.

Influences

Wyndham frequently acknowledged the influence of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1897) on The Day of the Triffids — Wells's working title had been The Day of the Tripods.

The triffids are related, in some editions of the novel, to brief mention of the theories of the Soviet agronomist and would-be biologist Trofim Lysenko, who eventually was thoroughly debunked. "In the days when information was still exchanged Russia had reported some successes. Later, however, a cleavage of methods and views had caused biology there, under a man called Lysenko, to take a different course" (Chapter 2). Lysenkoism at the time of the novel's creation was still being defended by some prominent international Stalinists."

During the Blitz, Wyndham was a fire watcher and later member of the Home Guard. He witnessed the destruction of London from the rooftops of Bloomsbury. He described many scenes and incidents, including the uncanny silence of London on a Sunday morning after a heavy bombardment, in letters to his long-term partner Grace Wilson. These found their way into The Day of the Triffids.

Themes

Science and Technology

The Day of the Triffids touches on mankind's advances in science and technology as a possible contributor to the collapse of society that’s depicted in the novel.

"I saw them now with a disgust that they had never roused in me before. Horrible alien things which some of us had somehow created, and which the rest of us, in our careless greed, had cultured all over the world, One could not even blame nature for them."

— Bill Masen, in The Day of the Triffids

In an essay entitled Social Critique in the Major Novels of John Wyndham: Civilization's Secrets and Nature's Truths, Michael Douglas Green writes about other scientific contributions to the novel's apocalypse:

"The apocalypse in The Day of the Triffids is not merely a result of the creation of the triffids, however. It is instead, a sort of compound disaster; the triffids only gain free reign after another man-made horror--a satellite--goes awry. The narrator describes the advent of a sort of orbital missile (not utterly unlike an ICBM) developed in both the East and West carrying not only atomic weapons but also “such things as crop diseases, cattle diseases, radioactive dusts, viruses, and infections not only of familiar kinds, but brand-new sorts recently thought up in laboratories, all floating around up there.”

— 28-9

Post-WWII British Politics

Critics have highlighted the parallels between the triffids and the decolonization that took place in Europe after 1945. In an essay entitled The Politics of Post-Apocalypse: Ideologies on Trial in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids , literary critic Jerry Määttä writes:

"It could be argued that one of the reasons why John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids reached such a vast audience is that it can be read as a symbolic negotiation of the British situation in the first few years after the Second World War. Elsewhere, I have also suggested that the curiously under-analysed triffids could be read as distorted metaphors for the colonised peoples of the British Empire – then in the middle of the process of decolonisation – coming back to haunt mainland Britain, much as the Martians did in H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), one of Wyndham’s main influences."

— 13.2 End of Empire

Robert Yeates, in his essay Gender and Ethnicity in Post-Apocalyptic Suburbia, proposes another connection to colonialism:

“The title “The Day of the Triffids” shows a colonial role reversal of this kind in which humanity is no longer the most powerful species, and Masen remarks that it is “an unnatural thought that one type of creature should dominate perpetually.”

— 112

At the time of the novel's writing there was an emerging welfare state in Great Britain after the formation of the Atlee ministry. Coker's forced shackling of sighted people to the blind echoes the sentiments that many middle class British citizens felt in the wake of the changes imposed by the Labour party after their 1945 election victory.

Loss of Identity

The novel frequently brings into question the utility of individualism during the apocalypse. Colin Manlove highlights this phenomenon in his essay Everything Slipping Away: John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids:

“Simultaneous with this process, people lose their identities. Part of this comes from the fact that all now exist in a shared situation, the catastrophe: no longer can one be an agronomist, a doctor, a farmer, a novelist, but only one more individual up against the triffids, one only real distinction being if one is sighted.”