A review by ianbanks
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

5.0

As with all Wyndham novels, it's only the occasional contemporary reference that lets you know you're in the past. It feels astonishingly modern, even (depressingly) down to the debates about the role of women in a future that will take a few steps backwards.

It creaks a little bit - the sudden jump to the "5 years later" that we get in the last couple of chapters has always felt a bit strange, but he does similar things in other novels, so it may be that he's doing something deliberate there and wanting to make a point - but the story moves along quickly, telling the events in an easily read manner that still invite a deeper analysis. Although, the main action of the novel itself is spaced over just a couple of weeks, so the jump may seem more jarring because of that.

Brian Aldiss described it as "... totally devoid of ideas, but read smoothly, and thus reached a maximum audience, who enjoyed cosy disasters." Which is harsh, but to a stylist like Aldiss, entirely fair. However, the label of "cosy disaster" or "cosy catastrophe" really downplays the impact of the story - Bill and Josella do agonise over the lives they might save or could have saved, and the whole subplot involving Coker and his scheme for looking after the blind people of London speaks volumes about what was happening off-page. But Bill is narrating this story and he couldn't be everywhere.

Bill is a competent hero, a type very popular until the '60s when we started to become a more specialised and splintered culture. He faces the catastrophe as a series of problems to be solved. We get clues to the turmoil that he is undergoing and the desperation he feels, but - as the last few paragraphs show - he is reporting on the events from several years removed, so it may be that his account of things is coloured by that distance. Compare it to The Kraken Wakes, where the protagonist admits to having a breakdown at one point, and we get news reports as they happen.

However, for all that distance and cosiness, this is still the template for most disaster novels since the 1950s, and we are still feeling that influence nearly 70 years later.