t is some time hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of years after an atomic war shattered civilization and left large parts of the world uninhabitable. Among the rural people of what used to be Newfoundland, the danger of mutation has led to a strict and ruthless definition of what constitutes humanity. Any deviation from the norm is considered an abomination. If livestock, it is slaughtered. Humans are banished to the barbarous lands known as the Fringes.
David Strorm is a young boy being raised by a religious-zealot father who takes the commandments against mutation even more seriously than his society requires. Dad is such a meanie that when his sister-in-law appears, begging for the life of a baby whose mutation she considers slight, he banishes her from his sight with a loud ringing sermon about her wickedness. David, a secret telepath who shares thought-communication with several others his own age, knows his survival depends on his father never being allowed to find out what he is.
One day in early childhood, David meets a young girl named Sophie, and discovers she's hiding an extra toe. He likes her, so he promises to keep her secret. Her fate provides him a stern warning about what might be his own.
Then his younger sister Petra is born—and she has a mutation so powerful it endangers David and his telepath friends ...
A primal tale made rich in the telling
A child growing up in a repressive, unloving family discovers that he has powers that make him special, powers that the normal people who oppress him refuse to tolerate or understand. He finds a new home among people as special as himself, who take him away from his unhappy past into a place where he can be appreciated and loved.
It's a basic plot outline which has long proven irresistible to readers of fantasy and science fiction, as it speaks with such eloquence to the inner (and sometimes outer) geek in all of us. It drives Harry Potter, it drives the X-Men, and it has driven any number of other stories, by authors throughout the history of the field, about children who find out they are secretly royalty or extraterrestrials or the next stage in Mankind's evolution. There wasn't anything startling about it even in 1955, when Wyndham wrote this slim but evocative novel.
The poetry was of course in the details. Wyndham was never a writer of grand innovative ideas; his other novels include a thriller about an island infested with spiders, and another about an invasion by carnivorous trees, ideas so hackneyed on the face of them that plot synopses make his work sound as pedestrian as science fiction ever gets. Wyndham's skill lay in taking such ideas and treating them with a sobriety and a deliberate sense of pace that made them seem real on the printed page. In The Chrysalids, the friendship between the children David and Sophie, forged upon his discovery of the sixth toe that would doom her if publicly revealed, is both subtle and real. The religious fundamentalism that makes David's father such a prig may be shared by his neighbors, but even they believe him to be too much of a humorless fanatic for their tastes. And there's one marvelous, haunting scene that lodges in the memory: a mother's futile pleas for her baby, whose mutation is described only as "such a little thing," and which is never revealed to either David or the reader.
The Chrysalids grows downright unnerving in its final sections, when the rescuers from New Zealand not only massacre David's pursuers in a truly unnerving use of superior technology, but then spend a couple of pages explaining at length why this was just another justified example of evolution in action. But by that point the deus ex machina has blotted the book with ordinariness. What sticks is the portrait of a town rendered a prison by its rigid definition of humanity, and the plight of a little girl whose life depends on the concealment of an extra toe.
