"The Chrysalids", John Wyndham
22 October 2023 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeCalling "The Chrysalids" YA fiction has got to be the ultimate manifestation ad absurdum of identity politics, where the assumption is that the reader can only 'identify with' a protagonist who represents them -- and therefore fiction for children cannot show adult protagonists, and adult fiction cannot be written from the point of view of a child's growth to adulthood... unless, presumably, it's a memoir. This was very definitely not written for children; Wyndham is making conscious use of his young narrator to gradually reveal the full implications of his setting through oblivious eyes.
However, I read it as a child young enough to have no idea that 'Labrador' or 'Zealand' were real places (I think I had probably heard of New Zealand, but failed to make the connection), or to have any concept of post-apocalyptic fiction as a genre, so I took the whole business of the Tribulation pretty much as straight fantasy world history, much as its inhabitants do. To adult eyes there are all sorts of clues that this is the aftermath of a devastating nuclear apocalypse, and that the widespread mutations (like the 'muties' of Miles Vorkosigan's Barrayar) are the result of gradually fading radioactive pollution on the outer fringes of the conflict.
When I first read it I didn't like it because of the ending; I didn't understand anything about romance and was distressed by the tangled relationship between David's resurrected 'old' love for Sophie and his interloping 'new' love for Rosalind. I still feel that Sophie gets very much the thin edge of the wedge in this -- she is depicted as hopelessly in love with a leader who is happy to dump her for a newer model, and who doesn't demonstrate any other appealing qualities other than a possible last-ditch attempt to shield her, and her prime motivation for helping David is to get her potential rival Rosalind out of sight and out of mind.
I didn't like the fact that the long-awaited rescuers turn up and proceed to indiscriminately kill everybody on both sides of the battle, either, on the grounds that they are inferior and in any case are getting in the way of the real goal of the mission. I still don't like it, and it's an unsettling outcome (as Wyndham acknowledges through the protagonists' reactions).
But I appreciate a bit better now the points that the author was trying to make, and his efforts at providing even-handedness (Rosalind's recoil from the deformed Gordon as a monster differs from David's physical acceptance but unease at his vengeful attitude towards his family, and Sophie's desperation at the thought of losing him). At the beginning of the book we are shown the slow reclaiming of the 'Badlands' to normality by means of the rigid laws about deformities in animals and livestock; at the end of the book this tiny isolated society is suggested to be fatally hidebound rather than a world on the frontier of progress. And of course the quasi-religious ideology that hunts down and eradicates deviation says as much about the writer's views on blind faith as anything else.
It's not a comfortable book, in many ways, and it may be one of Wyndham's bleakest, with the exception of his short stories. David's nose is put out of joint fairly early on by the discovery that not only are he and his contemporaries regarded with fear by the community around them, their abilities are already obsolete in comparison to people with far more mental power than they have; Petra is the important one from the point of view of the rescuers, and even if they all eventually reach techno-Utopia the main conversations are going to be going on over their heads. Their people are regarded by their new friends as primitive and unspeakably backward. And pretty well everyone else comes to a (often literally) sticky end, with both communities effectively destroyed/depopulated and abandoned to their fate.
I think on the whole I'd agree with the party that feels that the first half of the book, showing David growing up within the norms of his post-apocalyptic world, is ultimately stronger than the second half, where he and we venture out beyond rigid normality and go on the run. Things go wrong one after another, and the protagonists are very much swept along by events -- realistic, with hindsight, as they have no experience of this sort of life or environment, but it does leave them very much dependent on the deus ex machina to turn up in time, and as a child I found it left me unhappy for reasons I couldn't put my finger on but which may well have been that lack of agency... coupled with the way that everything generally falls apart.
I'm assuming that the Deviations two feet tall with tails who ran up trees are, in fact, monkeys...
However, I read it as a child young enough to have no idea that 'Labrador' or 'Zealand' were real places (I think I had probably heard of New Zealand, but failed to make the connection), or to have any concept of post-apocalyptic fiction as a genre, so I took the whole business of the Tribulation pretty much as straight fantasy world history, much as its inhabitants do. To adult eyes there are all sorts of clues that this is the aftermath of a devastating nuclear apocalypse, and that the widespread mutations (like the 'muties' of Miles Vorkosigan's Barrayar) are the result of gradually fading radioactive pollution on the outer fringes of the conflict.
When I first read it I didn't like it because of the ending; I didn't understand anything about romance and was distressed by the tangled relationship between David's resurrected 'old' love for Sophie and his interloping 'new' love for Rosalind. I still feel that Sophie gets very much the thin edge of the wedge in this -- she is depicted as hopelessly in love with a leader who is happy to dump her for a newer model, and who doesn't demonstrate any other appealing qualities other than a possible last-ditch attempt to shield her, and her prime motivation for helping David is to get her potential rival Rosalind out of sight and out of mind.
I didn't like the fact that the long-awaited rescuers turn up and proceed to indiscriminately kill everybody on both sides of the battle, either, on the grounds that they are inferior and in any case are getting in the way of the real goal of the mission. I still don't like it, and it's an unsettling outcome (as Wyndham acknowledges through the protagonists' reactions).
But I appreciate a bit better now the points that the author was trying to make, and his efforts at providing even-handedness (Rosalind's recoil from the deformed Gordon as a monster differs from David's physical acceptance but unease at his vengeful attitude towards his family, and Sophie's desperation at the thought of losing him). At the beginning of the book we are shown the slow reclaiming of the 'Badlands' to normality by means of the rigid laws about deformities in animals and livestock; at the end of the book this tiny isolated society is suggested to be fatally hidebound rather than a world on the frontier of progress. And of course the quasi-religious ideology that hunts down and eradicates deviation says as much about the writer's views on blind faith as anything else.
It's not a comfortable book, in many ways, and it may be one of Wyndham's bleakest, with the exception of his short stories. David's nose is put out of joint fairly early on by the discovery that not only are he and his contemporaries regarded with fear by the community around them, their abilities are already obsolete in comparison to people with far more mental power than they have; Petra is the important one from the point of view of the rescuers, and even if they all eventually reach techno-Utopia the main conversations are going to be going on over their heads. Their people are regarded by their new friends as primitive and unspeakably backward. And pretty well everyone else comes to a (often literally) sticky end, with both communities effectively destroyed/depopulated and abandoned to their fate.
I think on the whole I'd agree with the party that feels that the first half of the book, showing David growing up within the norms of his post-apocalyptic world, is ultimately stronger than the second half, where he and we venture out beyond rigid normality and go on the run. Things go wrong one after another, and the protagonists are very much swept along by events -- realistic, with hindsight, as they have no experience of this sort of life or environment, but it does leave them very much dependent on the deus ex machina to turn up in time, and as a child I found it left me unhappy for reasons I couldn't put my finger on but which may well have been that lack of agency... coupled with the way that everything generally falls apart.
I'm assuming that the Deviations two feet tall with tails who ran up trees are, in fact, monkeys...
no subject
Date: 2023-10-23 10:32 pm (UTC)To call this book an YA novel would of course be a stretch. It doesn't appear to be intended for the teenage audience, and it very much doesn't correspond to the style and values of modern YA.
Sorry for dropping from the picture for so long - I had a lot on my plate and besides was rediscovering the love of reading books, so I didn't participate much in the fandoms and Internet discussions.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-23 11:59 pm (UTC)The YA rant was a response to looking at the reviews for the book on Goodreads, a high proportion of which seem to start off by describing it as "a YA novel" -- which it isn't, any more than Philip Turner's novels about teenage boys (or 'schoolboys', as they were simply called in those days). Those were highly intelligent and literate novels aimed at children, not "young adults"; "The Chrysalids" is an adult novel effectively exploring the opposite situation to that in Wyndham's more famous "The Midwich Cuckoos". Only in this scenario, it is our protagonists who are the 'cuckoos' in their society, with mental abilities that set them apart from those with whom they grew up and which are seen as a threat, rather than the story being told from the point of view of the humans who are threatened with extinction by the emergence of a superior hive-mind...
In both cases I think Wyndham is looking at the pettiness of the human mind, or at least at its general inability to grasp anything outside its immediate terms of experience (local society is shown as coping with the whole 'Day Out' experience and the existence of the Children in what is by and large a very parochial way). "The Chrysalids" is unusual among Wyndham novels in that it doesn't really have a Zellaby, Coker or Bocker ("The Kraken Wakes") character who is shown as preaching unwelcome truths early on; David is subjected to 'preaching' from a number of different sources and tends to be ambivalent if not sceptical about all of the certainties presented. It's an interesting choice that it is *not* the protagonist but his little sister who turns out to be the Chosen One, with David just tagging along -- although that is perhaps consistent with Wyndham's normal tendency to use an 'everyman' character to depict the experience of apocalypse rather than someone who comes out as a leader. Diana in "Trouble With Lichen" is probably the main exception, and that novel is unusual because it cuts away from her and moves into multiple other viewpoint characters -- initially at least in order to obscure what she has been up to!
I think "The Day of the Triffids" and "The Kraken Wakes" (which I also encountered very young, and spent years wondering what "kraken wakes" looked like) are probably my favourite among Wyndham's novels; "The Kraken Wakes" was of course the reason why I was familiar with the threat of melting global ice-caps many years before the media started to panic over it.... Again, I would probably like "The Trouble With Lichen" better on rereading it now; I remember being uncomfortable with the unsatisfactory daughter-in-law who betrays the secret, and with the idea of Francis, who was devoted to his first wife, eventually taking up with Diana. (I really did not like incomprehensible adult disloyalties, and wasn't that keen on ironic endings... but I definitely liked it better than "The Chrysalids", which was just too bleak.)
Reading books is always good ;-)