ohn Wyndham is a master of tightly-focused disaster stories, and The Day of the Triffids is his calling card. It's set in England in his own time (1951 is the original publication date), but in a world with a vital difference from ours: tall, three-legged ambulatory plants have been discovered growing everywhere. The plants, dubbed triffids, can be crushed to produce a delicate pink oil, far more nutritious and tasty than fish oil, and they become extensively cultivated despite their poisonous whiplash stings. They are harmless enough, although they do enjoy a nice bit of decaying carrion....
The story opens as Bill Masen, eyes bandaged from an industrial accident, wakes in a hospital to an eerie silence. No doctors, no nurses, no breakfast. He removes his bandages, only to find that everyone else in the surrounding city seems to be blind. In fact, everyone in the world is blind, due to the previous night's light-show of beautiful green shooting stars, attributed to comet debris. As Masen goes in search of help and food, the panic and desperation of a blinded populace is revealed.
Masen finds a woman who also escaped blindness, and the two join other sighted survivors. They are few, and they determine to escape the chaos of London's fall and start a new life in the country. But one of the survivors forces them to face the responsibility of caring for some of the blinded people. Trapped in the city, Masen loses the woman, and as he searches for her, he encounters triffids on the hunt.
Humanity plants the seeds of its own demise
The Cold War was clearly preying on Wyndham's mind when he wrote The Day of the Triffids. The triffids themselves, although seemingly extraterrestrial, are given a flashback origin in the depths of biologically irresponsible Russia. The hero attributes the comet debris-induced blindness to satellite weapons systems. But the trick of catalytically combining these ingredients into an Armageddon scenario is what really gives the book its tension. Early on, Wyndham drops clues like mad, as the hero reflects on his coworker's distrust of the triffids: "We can see, and they can't. Take away our vision, and the superiority is gone."
Tales of survival against the odds are always interesting, and Wyndham has a heyday showing the decay of the cities, and images of pretty, rural England lapsing from cultivated meadows back to bog. And there's a piquant, stiff-upper-lip savor to the British public school diction, which came naturally to Wyndham but which rings imposingly--almost officiously--on the modern ear.
But it is Wyndham's investigation of the morality of survival strategies that sticks with readers: the individual vs. the group, the loss of societal restraints, considerations of feudalism and territorialism. The triffids provide an external pressure that forces hard choices on the characters. And it's all packaged in an adventurous yarn with a dash of romance.
