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A review by lkedzie
Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham
5.0
It's like Natural Beauty, but written by a white guy.
Wyndham brings out the proselytizer in me. To write a review of a book is to avoid the desire to grab passerby by the lapel and praise him, because I boggle at how there is not, say, a cult on booktok. But I promised that I was not going to rant about this.
Trouble with Lichen is about the discovery of an anti-aging drug. But it is squarely in the space of works like Primer where the discovery and the scientific applications is secondary to the social and interpersonal ones: when it is revealed, the initial argument about it is.
It is not satire. But it could be. You could easily see someone like Douglas Adams writing a similar book. Here though the domesticity of the problem is not a punchline, but a real question. That does blur into the books major problem, or "problem" in the trouble of feminism. At worst, I think that Wyndham falls into something like Steven Moffat school of ladies are magic, but the particular brand of Vaseline smeared over the text is the '60s, and that all of this has a historical milieu of the characters and their actions. This is less it's okay to be sexist if it is old and more that it is written at a time when when values were rapidly changing based on technological and technologically-driven factors...which might as well be the book's thesis, creating its own brand of social changes around a particular technology.
Anyway, it is good. It is not showy but it does not need to be. It is too clever much of the time, but it is fun like that. It focuses on gender, with a few asides into other territory around class and politics, which feel like great ideas that get left on the cutting room floor, but book is fairly taut and does not work to be broad and epic, (and if you're going to err in one direction, do it to brevity). The found text chapters are fun but disrupt the read and the twist (outside of the racist joke) is satisfying. And while not satire, the dialog is often funny, and in specific Wyndham is one of the few authors who can pull off a 'both sides'-ism expertly, where I feel comfortable saying that yes, the joke did skewer the Left and Right in equal measure.
Again, risking that praise of Wyndham in general, his writing works as a sort of anti-utopian fantasy, which I find causes me to think more about my own life and what I do (or would do) than the typical sort of hero narratives. I urge you to consider the book in the same way.
Wyndham brings out the proselytizer in me. To write a review of a book is to avoid the desire to grab passerby by the lapel and praise him, because I boggle at how there is not, say, a cult on booktok. But I promised that I was not going to rant about this.
Trouble with Lichen is about the discovery of an anti-aging drug. But it is squarely in the space of works like Primer where the discovery and the scientific applications is secondary to the social and interpersonal ones: when it is revealed, the initial argument about it is
Spoiler
what do we tell our spousesIt is not satire. But it could be. You could easily see someone like Douglas Adams writing a similar book. Here though the domesticity of the problem is not a punchline, but a real question. That does blur into the books major problem, or "problem" in the trouble of feminism. At worst, I think that Wyndham falls into something like Steven Moffat school of ladies are magic, but the particular brand of Vaseline smeared over the text is the '60s, and that all of this has a historical milieu of the characters and their actions. This is less it's okay to be sexist if it is old and more that it is written at a time when when values were rapidly changing based on technological and technologically-driven factors...which might as well be the book's thesis, creating its own brand of social changes around a particular technology.
Anyway, it is good. It is not showy but it does not need to be. It is too clever much of the time, but it is fun like that. It focuses on gender, with a few asides into other territory around class and politics, which feel like great ideas that get left on the cutting room floor, but book is fairly taut and does not work to be broad and epic, (and if you're going to err in one direction, do it to brevity). The found text chapters are fun but disrupt the read and the twist (outside of the racist joke) is satisfying. And while not satire, the dialog is often funny, and in specific Wyndham is one of the few authors who can pull off a 'both sides'-ism expertly, where I feel comfortable saying that yes, the joke did skewer the Left and Right in equal measure.
Again, risking that praise of Wyndham in general, his writing works as a sort of anti-utopian fantasy, which I find causes me to think more about my own life and what I do (or would do) than the typical sort of hero narratives. I urge you to consider the book in the same way.