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.
The last chapters of the novel do include quite a bit of triffid excitement, as Masen struggles with the idea of how to continue building a society in the midst of disruption both plant-and human-driven. Outposts of civilization are overrun by other outposts, the clash of ideologies not put aside just because large ambulatory plants threaten all human life.
If the answers in The Day of the Triffids seem perhaps a bit too sensible and not complex enough, then it may just be that the twenty-first century has eclipsed the twentieth in what those answers need to be and where they reside. In an era of pandemic denialism and self-made climate crises, it turns out that the real trouble with triffids is…people?
Oh, what we might give for a quiet triffid life in the countryside, dodging the predations of sentient bamboo!
* * *
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Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander, Dead Astronauts, Borne, and The Southern Reach Trilogy, the first volume of which, Annihilation, won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland starring Natalie Portman. VanderMeer speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change and is the co-founder of a North Florida new media site, Our Tallahassee. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, and their cats, plants, and bird feeders.
THE END BEGINS
When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
I felt that from the moment I woke. And yet, when I started functioning a little more smartly, I became doubtful. After all, the odds were that it was I who was wrong, and not everyone else—though I did not see how that could be. I went on waiting, tinged with doubt. But presently I had my first bit of objective evidence—a distant clock struck what sounded to me just like eight. I listened hard and suspiciously. Soon another clock began, on a hard, decisive note. In a leisurely fashion it gave an indisputable eight. Then I knew things were awry.
The way I came to miss the end of the world—well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years—was sheer accident: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it. In the nature of things a good many somebodies are always in hospital, and the law of averages had picked on me to be one of them a week or so before. It might just as easily have been the week before that—in which case I’d not be writing now: I’d not be here at all. But chance played it not only that I should be in hospital at that particular time, but that my eyes, and indeed my whole head, should be wreathed in bandages—and that’s why I have to be grateful to whoever orders these averages. At the time, however, I was only peevish, wondering what in thunder went on, for I had been in the place long enough to know that, next to the matron, the clock is the most sacred thing in a hospital.
Without a clock the place simply couldn’t work. Each second there’s someone consulting it on births, deaths, doses, meals, lights, talking, working, sleeping, resting, visiting, dressing, washing—and hitherto it had decreed that someone should begin to wash and tidy me up at exactly three minutes after 7 a.m. That was one of the best reasons I had for appreciating a private room. In a public ward the messy proceeding would have taken place a whole unnecessary hour earlier. But here, today, clocks of varying reliability were continuing to strike eight in all directions—and still nobody had shown up.