The Day of the Triffids
John Wyndham & Jeff Vandermeer
INTRODUCTION
Jeff VanderMeer
Originally published in 1951, The Day of the Triffids not only launched John Wyndham’s career, but defined his oeuvre, with its myriad strange invasions by plants and weirder things still. Presaging the weirdness, earlier novels under pen names included stories of trips to Mars, murder mysteries, and secret societies.
Wyndham was in his late forties when he published The Day of the Triffids, and the full flowering of his literary career lasted just short of two decades, ending with his death in 1969. During that time his peculiar visions, housed within sometimes comforting plots, delivered to readers what feel now like the perhaps naive but necessary precursors to the disaster novels of J. G. Ballard, among others.
Certainly, the New Wave of the 1960s in the U.K. was responding and offering correctives to works like Wyndham’s, who in a sense lay outside of time—writing his eccentric stories into the middle of the Cold War, when hotter wars and other preoccupations lay on the horizon. He likely seemed a cult author for this very reason—topical and then not topical, or outdated, depending on the crises facing the world.
The edgy qualities to Wyndham tend to lie not in his landscapes or characters, but in the peculiar phenomena at the heart of his novels; and, in those sections of novels like The Day of the Triffids, the author achieves a timelessness similar to Karel ?apek’s War with the Newts, although ?apek leans rather more heavily on the newts to convey messages than Wyndham on the triffids. (Is there fan fiction somewhere from the point of view of the triffids? I hope so.)
Bill Masen, horticulturalist, proves an able narrator in charting the progress of these nifty new ambulatory plants. But all you need to know before reading the novel is that triffids walk around a lot and spit poison and grow very large. The green meteor shower that has rendered many people blind may or may not involve the triffids—life is tough and many crises may occur simultaneously. But, even so, you can rely on the triffids for being as consistent in the midst of chaos as a cucumber salad.
“The trouble about triffids…is chiefly the things we don’t know about them,” Masen says later, in a brief respite between dodging triffids, having retreated to the countryside. This may be why no one tries to eat a triffid in the novel, despite evidence they might be delicious. Yet, as someone who has rewilded his yard and dealt with a host of invasive plants, the triffids raised the hairs on the back of my neck because they seem familiar. When you battle plants every day that grow aggressively, the idea of a large plant with an unknown agenda doesn’t seem improbable—it seems very much possible. The genius of Wyndham’s creation of triffids lies less in any alien origin than in how the triffids simply accelerate and make visible processes occurring in nature right now.
To those unfamiliar with the horrors of gardening in the modern era, the triffids trigger a general reptile-brain recognition of the unknown—one very much in keeping with Cold War paranoia and also our own “blech” response to fetid, icky non-mammalian organisms. For this reason, even Masen’s matter-of-fact descriptions of triffids still create an emotional reaction in the reader.
Three years after publication of The Day of the Triffids, Jack Finney published The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of, in particular, the 1978 movie version starring Donald Sutherland while reading Triffids. There is a tactile quality to the movie that recalls the triffids, and yet the lack of body horror in The Day of the Triffids is perhaps one of the ways in which the novel feels oddly polite, for lack of a better word, about its own subject matter. Also quaint, compared to The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is the seeming lack of spore or other air-based influence by the triffids. This is a known property of both plants and fungi—invasive plants even put out chemicals that attack native plants and discourage their growth.
But are the triffids just monstrous intelligent plants—and if not, what could they stand for in this modern era of climate crisis and waves of pandemic? “There’s a kind of conspiracy not to believe things about triffids,” Masen says. The novel’s early chapters chronicle this general confusion, including the conflicting facts about triffids given to the public. Much of the debate about disaster response in Triffids may seem quaint—don’t we all know this now, in this century?—but that line resonates, given the disinformation campaigns on social media in the current era, about the pandemic and politics.
Yet the reader must grapple with the question of people’s reactions to triffids perhaps overly much in the novel. I would have preferred more triffid and less talk in the novel’s first half; there is, to be frank, much less triffid in The Day of the Triffids than there are newts in War with the Newts. The ways in which Masen and others form outposts of humanity among the waving fields of wheat, I mean triffids, are perhaps too familiar and the triffids perhaps too conveniently brought in simply to terrorize the plot.
There is also the issue of how much of the novel is a product of the times—a question that may offer too much in the way of apology for what is simply not well handled by a particular author. Is the blindness epidemic handled sensitively by modern standards? Are the polygamous relationships useful in their portrayal or anchored to the era? Masen’s relationship with Josella, writer of Sex Is My Adventure, feels perfunctory at times, and as references to the reaction to triffids in Asia have an unhelpful exotic and stereotypical quality that seems more in line with Wyndham’s pseudonymous early novel The Secret People, in which pygmies who live under the sands of the Sahara kidnap some white people.