Sometimes pulp fiction tells you so much more than academic papers can. As in the first pages of John Wyndham’s classic Sci-Fi novel “The Day of the Triffids” from 1951. By ways of a lead by a friend in Brussels to an interview with British scholar Dorian Lynskey I came across what Lynskey calls the first true popular disaster novel. Earlier efforts in making the end of the world sound entertaining where isolated efforts and met with intellectual skepticism or moral criticism or a simple lack of reader’s interest. The end of the world was just not very fashionable in most capitalist societies prior to World War II and the atomic bomb really.
British writer John Wyndham might have been the one who turned disaster into a smash with this hugely successful novel from 1951. Considering that it was meant as and also succeeded as a piece of pulp literature, “Day of the Triffids” is written in a suprisingly unagitated, laconic tone and the dramaturgy is almost dull. But Wyndham was a master of concise, often funny and condensed intellectual observations and analogies. This is particularly evident to me in the beautiful exposition of the book, which I quote here:
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 sharply, I misgave. 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 loud, 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.
To me, this short piece of fiction writing from the 1950s contains all the elements of our current climate anxiety. Or at least what I expect it to feel like once we collectively actually wake up to the reality of the current crisis!
The protagonist senses the change before he knows it. Wyndham beautifully describes this uncanny mixture of disbelieve, self-doubt, mental effort of self-deception and absolute emotional clarity that something, in fact everything, is terribly wrong. It’s the most common observation that confirms the most fundamental change: It’s work time and everything is quite. It’s the absence of something as negligible as this background sound that signals the end of the world. As things go at the moment, we might soon experience the same moment of clarity, when in spring suddenly there are no bird sounds to be heard anymore – that’s when we will know things are awry. And sadly probably not any earlier…
Equally striking I find the protagonist’s simple but profound insight, that he missed the disaster by pure chance. In fact, he survived the big disaster because of a small mishap that had him spend the night in a hospital bed. In a beautifully laconic intellectual side jump he gets from the personal to the existential, to the transience and fragility of life itself: Like a lot of survival – when you come to think of it. Wyndham here it seems, wants to remind his readers of how lucky we have been thus far. Yes, we have! Extremely lucky.
A page and a half further into the book, the protagonist reflects on his situation prior to the disaster:
It is not easy to think oneself back to the outlook of those days. We have to be more self-reliant now. But then there was so much routine, things were so interlinked. Each one of us so steadily did his little part in the right place that it was easy to mistake habit and custom for the natural law — and all the more disturbing, therefore, when the routine was in any way upset.
When getting on for half a lifetime has been spent in one conception of order, reorientation is no five-minute business. Looking back at the shape of things then, the amount we did not know and did not care to know about our daily lives is not only astonishing, but somehow a bit shocking. I knew practically nothing, for instance, of such ordinary things as how my food reached me, where the fresh water came from, how the clothes I wore were woven and made, how the drainage of cities kept them healthy. Our life had become a complexity specialists all attending to their own jobs with more or less efficiency, and expecting others to do the same.
Sounds familiar? Well it does to me. Most of us live lives that are dependent on seamless technological mashes, as far removed from the so called natural world as possible. Wyndham’s protagonist not only comes to understand in retrospect the sad consequences of this techno-hubris-life-style, in a witty dramaturgical loop he also circles back to the moment in the story:
That made it incredible to me, therefore, that complete disorganization could have overtaken the hospital. Somebody somewhere, I was sure, must have it in hand — unfortunately it was a somebody who had forgotten all about Room 48.
The patient in Room 48 becomes us, our grant man-made world reduced to a small hospital room with a random number. Stuck in room 48 – what a sad and fitting metaphor for the Anthropocene!
“Day of the Triffids” was a major inspiration for Alex Garland and Danny Boyle for the seminal post-apocalyptic movie “28 days later” from 2002. The movie borrows some central moments and character constellations from the novel. It is certainly as big an influence on story telling since the 2000s as the novel was in it’s time. “28 days later” birthed (or revived) a whole genre of blockbuster cinema: the post-apocalyptic urban action drama. Now the traces of both Wyndham and Garland/Boyle can be found in any of the hundreds of series and movies about the end of the world.
