Book review: ‘The Day of the Triffids’ by John Wyndham

By LARRY BALLWAHN | Wilton

“The Day of the Triffids’’ was first published in 1951 and became a bestseller. Called to my attention by my sister, Patti Parker, I found that the public library’s Libby had a couple of electronic copies. I read one of them.

Triffids are plants, though not just any plant. Triffids take their nourishment from the soil, but they can move about, they move toward sound, and they have a long poisonous tendril on top that lashes out at people. They grow nearly anywhere, aim their tendrils for people’s eyes, and can blind or kill people on contact. No one is sure where the first seeds came from, but seeds blow around like milkweed and spread rapidly. The plants seem to communicate. Triffids were initially valued because their oil was better than any other plant oil. And then it happened.

One night, the sky was filled with an amazing meteor shower. Everybody who could watched it. The next day, everyone who had watched the shower was blind. The only sighted people were those who had missed the display for some reason. Bill Mason, a biologist, missed the display because his eyes were bandaged; unbandaged, he became one of the sighted few, and the reader experiences triffids through him. As Bill initially wanders the streets, he hears a woman scream. A sighted woman is being beaten by a blind man as he attempts to own her vision. Bill rescues her and now has a partner, Josella Playton, to help puzzle out a role in the new reality. Is their obligation to assist the blind or to chart a path for themselves and the minority who have vision? And what of the triffids that seem to be spreading now that people are essentially defenseless?

Shortly after joining a university group, Bill and Josella were kidnapped. Each was given responsibilities for several blind people and thus became separated: Bill returned to the university, but Josella was gone. He remembered that she said she had friends at Sussex Downs, and he headed there. On the way, he found a young girl, Susan, trapped with a dead brother killed by triffids. Bill rescued her and went on to find Josella and her friends.

Triffids continued to expand their territory, sometimes simply overpowering fences with sheer numbers. It is Bill who concludes, “I don’t think it had ever before occurred to me that man’s supremacy is not due primarily to his brain, as most of the books would have you think. It is due to the brain’s capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays. His civilization, all that he had achieved, or might achieve, hung upon his ability to perceive that range of vibrations from red to violet. Without that he was lost. I saw for a moment the true tenuousness of his hold on power, the miracles he had wrought with such a fragile instrument ….”

Many hardships were endured, but there was one consistency. The triffids continued to multiply. Years passed. Bill had become a farmer as they attempted becoming a self-sufficient colony with a fenced exterior. Bill, Josella and Susan learned that there was a group on the Isle of Wight that was more secure from the triffids. They would welcome the Susssex family, and since Bill was a biologist, perhaps he could help find a long-term solution to the triffids. Unfortunately, there was also a militaristic group that had other plans. 

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