Worth Reading: The Day of the Triffids

Cover of Day of the Triffids

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (1951)

Note: There are some spoilers in this review.

When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.

I’ve seen this apocalyptic novel referred to as a “cozy catastrophe.” It’s easy to see why the term cozy would be applied to it. For a large part of the book, the main characters hunker down in an English farmhouse in the lush countryside. The only thing that spoils their pastoral post-apocalyptic life are the hordes of Triffids — giant, carnivorous, locomotive plants with deadly stingers whose origins are unknown but appear to have been genetically engineered — besieging the gates. But while the Triffids are more numerous than the surviving humans, they are not more clever, and they can be kept at bay with diligence. By today’s standards for apocalyptic fiction, this story does seem quaint. Violence and death are present, but kept at arm’s length. Still, I think The Day of the Triffids is far too unsettling to qualify as “cozy”; it’s just more subtle that what we’re used to.

I remember how shocked I was when I read this for the first time many years ago, and realized that even before the Triffids lurched on the scene, everyone in the world goes blind as the result of watching a peculiar green meteor shower. This is the real catastrophe that destroys civilization and gives the Triffids the upper hand (so to speak). All of our advances and progress as a species are wiped out literally overnight by such a simple thing. This is not the only apocalyptic book to explore blindness as a catalyzing event, but it was the first one that I read. It wasn’t that the idea was so terrifying, but that it was so isolating. Even the few remaining sighted are cut off because they can’t reveal their ability to see for fear of being conscripted by the blind.

Bill Masen is in the hospital, eyes bandaged from a recent Triffid attack (he works with them), when the calamity occurs. The first few chapters, when he realizes the extent of what has happened and then wanders through an eerily quiet London observing small but heartbreaking scenes of the newly blind, are bleak and disquieting. The overwhelming feeling of The Day of the Triffids is not terror or coziness, but resignation and a gloomy sense  of loss. Also regret, as the characters come to realize that humankind must be responsible for what has happened to them.

The Triffids are never a truly terrifying threat, as zombies might have been (although they resemble zombies in many ways). They just are able to multiply and relentlessly besiege the survivors. It doesn’t seem cozy to imagine how tiring it must be, always keeping your guard up against millions of persistent plants. And the novel offers no satisfying resolution (unlike the movie), only a determination by the characters to take their world back. We don’t know if they will succeed.

For more:

• Wikipedia article
• Reader’s guide
• John Wyndham archive
• BBC television series adaptation
• “We Are the Dead”: The Day of the Triffids and Nineteen-Eighty Four (essay)

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