The Chrysalids - John Wyndham

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham (UK, US), is part of my Apocalypse Watch reading. (I'd already read The Day Of The Triffids). And once again Wyndham has surprised me. I'm not sure why, it's becoming clear that I have a completely invalid view of what Wyndhams novels are like.

The Chrysalids is set a thousand or so years in the future, it's not precisely clear, after a nuclear apocalypse. The plot follows David Storm from when he is a young boy. He lives in a religious agricultural community where deviation from God's true forms is vigorously attacked. The true form is spelt out in complimentary book to the bible, that has been passed down through generations. So, mutated crops are burnt, mutated cattle are killed and mutated people are banished to the Fringes, where life is hard and feral.

The style threw me at first in a good way, it wasn't what I was expecting, but soon the story of David's life grabbed me in a nice low key way. The events which drive the story grow in impact slowly. It's one of the great strengths of the book, it starts at a very local, focussed point of view and slowly opens up and up until the events have a much larger impact.

The idealogical battle is not as subtle as a modern novel would handle it: take for example how Black Man deals with genetic variance, much less in your face, whereas The Chrysalids has pages of infodump monologue arguing. Still, it's such a big, interesting topic, that I wasn't put off by open arguments. In many ways it's a good old big idea book. What's the true form of man? The current form of man not being the pinnacle, just the current state, and evolution is continuing. What's the difference between mutation and evolution? And so on...

Another topic nicely handled is the idea that those who have exterior deviations, such as an extra finger, are the same inside as "pure" humans. The minor physical aberration is punished because it's visible despite it having negligible effect on how they behave. And yet the biggest deviation in the novel cannot be seen at all, so those who look the same are in fact, very different. Enduring themes, but still worth thinking about.
 
Oh, and being a book written in the fifties it's nice and succinct, less than a couple of hundred pages. Focussed, thought-provoking and still relevant. I like it a lot.