Blind Sunk: The Triffids vs The Middle Class
The premise is simple. Mankind bears witness to unprecedented celestial light show, caused by debris from a comet, which renders anyone who saw it immediately blind. The chaos the comet leaves in its wake results in the liberation of thousands of specimens the previously contained plant, the “triffid”, which is mobile, lethal, and hungry. Humans, especially ones incapacitated by blindness, are the perfect source of food for this protein hungry shrub. And so the end begins.
John Wyndham’s seminal 1951 sci-fi novel is about more than just these lumbering, malevolent plants, it’s about mankind’s ultimate vulnerability and the dark places we descend when faced with faced with the dilemma of our individual survival against that of others more vulnerable.
Set in England, the story revolves around Bill Masen, a triffid expert who has been temporarily blinded be a triffid and hence misses the fateful lightshow. Masen wakes up in hospital to find a world gone to pieces and a desolated London. We follow him as he and others struggle in the bleak new world.
The perennial themes of the post-apocalypse – entropy, the decay of the human machine – are devastatingly apparent as shock-stricken Masen walks the deserted streets. The striking imagery of this haunting opening passage is much emulated. Effectively translated in the two BBC adaptations (1981 and 2009) this scene is still best illustrated to jaw dropping effect in the opening scenes of Danny Boyle’s disease apocalypse movie 28 Days Later – Boyle candidly acknowledges his debt to Wyndham’s book. The city, usually alive with the ‘miracles’ of human achievement, takes no time at all to atrophy into an inert, functionless monument to human arrogance – a sprawling tomb. Masen is not alone. Those blinded by the comet fumble and grope their way around looking for a saviour; and in this land of the blind, the sighted are a commodity. Although essentially vulnerable, these unfortunate incapacitates turn quickly desperate and feral. In these early passages Masen’s main foe is not the triffids but these sightless wanderers. In an effort to recover a semblance of their lost sense, they rabidly and at times violently pursue those they perceive to be sighted, and Masen has several close shaves before finding future soul mate Jo in captivity by one such foe. It’s inconceivable the George A. Romero hadn’t taken some inspiration from Triffids when he single handedly created the Zombie Apocalypse in his seminal movie Night of the Living Dead some 18 years later. The dual threat of the pawing blind and man-eating plants of Wyndham’s book, along with Richard Matheson’s vampire apocalypse in I am Legend (written 2 years later) are the precursors of the now ubiquitous ‘bogeyman’ apocalypse.
Wyndham is quick to dehumanize the blind who seemingly lose their of wit and morality along with their sight. There’s a palpable sense of “them and us” or “don’t make your problems my problems” from the very beginning, perhaps a reflection of the middle class values that play a strong role in this book born from a society still bitterly divided by class. It’s a facile view, but one that serves the book’s narrative purposes.
Bill and Jo have various encounters with sighted folk as they navigate the increasingly treacherous, triffid infested streets of London. One group seem largely intent of forsaking the blind entirely to pursue an agenda of escape to the country to begin re-population of the ‘human’ race. In Wyndham’s world (and is also the case in his other post-apocalyptic piece Kraken Wakes) restoration of safe middle class normality – an image of civilization free from worries and threat – seems to transcend survival itself. The absurdity of actively perusing an strategyof re-population literally days after the apocalypse, while millions of otherwise healthy blind are forgotten, is not lost on Masen and Jo who, somewhat paradoxically, later spend several years hiding out in a cosy farm cottage when surely a remote prison or an island somewhere would have made a much safer stronghold.
Another delusional, Coker, has taken pity on the blind and treating them as something between slaves and pets. By handcuffing them to sighted folk, and sending everyone out foraging for food he ultimately risks everyone’s demise. And here’s the key dilemma of the story – you can’t help all the blind, and helping any at all will drastically increase your chances of reaching a premature demise, at which point your no help to anyone (except, perhaps, the triffids) anyway.
Wyndham’s answer to this tricky situation is core to his whole apparent philosophy on the world. Ultimately it’s normality that matters – the ordinariness, domesticity and blinkered bourgeois ignorance – and it’s this passive aggressive mentality that prompted Brian Aldiss to label Wyndham’s work a “cosy catastrophe”. It’s easy to see why. Somehow the reader is never really asked to sympathise with the helpless blind, and no-one that we really care about dies. Wyndham sets the story out on a clean emotional playing field by rendering the protagonist Mason seemingly relative free and connectionless (a trick also pulled by George R. Stewart in his 1949 classic Earth Abides). However, Wyndham pulls no punches and rarely shies away from tackling difficult or unpleasant issues, he simply doesn’t ask us to get involved in all the emotional ickiness. Here there’s a job to be done – restoration of middle class comfort. So our protagonists help the few blind who they feel comfortable with and forget the rest.
Pretty much everyone the pair meets is either delusional, a danger to themselves and everyone else or untrustworthy. You’re left feeling that the biggest foe in this triffid infested world is the people, particularly the sighted ones. This is an aspect built heavily upon in BBC’s 2009 adaptation which sees character Torrence (played brilliantly by comedian Eddie Izzard), really a bit part player in the novel, appointing himself leader of the Brits and enacts a dastardly plan to control the country and steal the girl. Master villains aside, Bill and Jo just don’t meet many people that they get on with – just because the sighted share a common plight, this doesn’t mean that their differences are forgotten or irrelevant. Ultimately they gather a small group of like minded middle of the road types and hide themselves away from the manifold threats of the new world.
Amidst all this, as if blinding half the population wasn’t trauma enough for the human race, Wyndham sadistically unleashes the triffids. A simple enemy, these towering flesh eating plants (like giant pitcher plant with an extensible, lashing, venomous stamen). They are pretty easy to evade on their own, but as they start to spawn and spread they become the final blight of the ailing human race. Perhaps Wyndham thought we’d feel too sorry mankind were they wiped out simply by unwittingly watching a radioactive, interstellar rock, so he introduced a monster of our own making. The novel is somewhat sketchy about the origins of the triffid. Speculating that they are the result of “ingenious biological meddlings” at the cold hands of the Russians, Wyndham mirrors the Cold War paranoia that dominated pulp fiction and shock flicks of the time. BBC’s glossy 2009 adaptation is not so vague about their origin and the blame for this herbal scourge. Here, the triffids are farmed and bred for their oil which, topically, saved the human race from global warming. Unfortunately it’s the very genetic modification that enables this that transforms these plants into vicious predators. This poses and ingenious irony, but is ultimately lost in the monster movie trappings that render it little better that the shallow but entertaining 1962 version. But is this a case of nature reclaiming what’s rightfully its, or merely a predictable calamity befalling the arrogant human species? Wyndham leaves us to draw our own conclusion. One thing Wyndham is certain of though – mankind is defeated. Masen and Jo may cobble together a semblance of their former carefree lives, but you get the feeling that they’re living on borrowed time as the threat of the triffid plague bears down on them. This is not the case in the two ‘monster movie’ adaptations (1962 and 2009) which both see a some hero finding a solution to the triffid menace. Only the superior BBC 1981 version has the balls to stick with the original premise.
Given the title of the book it perhaps unsurprising that of its three significant interpretations, two are essentially monster/horror stories. But if you take the spirit of the original story as it was meant, the triffids are really beside the point – they are a narrative mechanism to create peril, tension and suspense. The most most faithful and consequently the best adaptation is BBC’s revered 1981 series which concentrates on really building characters and addressing the tough questions.
Day of the Triffids manages to pull off the nifty trick of being both optimistic and cynical at the same, largely thanks to a single-minded and blinkered mentality that we’re surely even more guilty of in these pampered modern times. Despite being a little twee in its approach to such dark subject matter, the questions it raises are more relevant today than they ever were, and if this story of ultimate doom were to be set in modern times, then surely it would be an even greater horror story.
by theinevitablenose
