The Chrysalids

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If the authorities will ruthlessly destroy such outward Deviations, David can imagine what would happen if village leaders discovered he and several of his friends posses a particularly powerful Deviation: they are telepathic, capable of sharing mental images and speaking with one another internally, mind-to-mind. And David's younger sister Petra is born with super, mind-blowing telepathic powers, able to communicate with other telepaths halfway across the globe. Holy Deviation! The Chrysalids is a story where those who are different live a short and precarious life. Their ‘uniqueness’ is perceived as an abomination and a threat to the community, and hence something that must be culled at any cost. This belief is held supreme, even more important than family and love. And within this setting, our main characters learn to survive and make sense of their situation. David, Rosalind, and Petra have been kidnapped by the Fringes people and are being taken to meet the Fringes leaders. The Fringe people are not all as strange-looking as David expected: they mostly just look dirty. Michael is with the army of people from Waknuk and is updating David on the army’s whereabouts. According to Petra, the Sealand people are going to rescue them, but Michael is skeptical. David meets Gordon Strorm/the spider-man again, who is the leader of the Fringes group. David fights Gordon because Gordon wants to take Rosalind to bear his children. David is thrown out of the Fringes encampment; Rosalind and Petra are kept there as prisoners. It is easy to imagine how this apoplectic setting could have created controversies at the time of its release because after all only a decade earlier the world had suffered World War II, and the horrors were still fresh. But what appalled me most is that even after five decades nothing has changed and people are still trying to overpower each other, still committing heinous crime against each other in the name of religion and superiority. I had remembered this book as one of my two favourite John Wyndham novels. I didn’t remember much of the detail, but what I do remember is that the setting really gripped my teenage imagination.

John Wyndham is often described in rather disparaging term as the main proponent of cosy catastrophe. This based on the allegation that his protagonists tend to be English middle class white males who are not much inconvenienced by the apocalypse, somehow continuing to live it up while the rest of the populace suffer. Having read three of his books I find that while the allegation is not entirely unwarranted it is also not quite fair. I hope to write more about this issue when I get around to reviewing The Day of the Triffids.The disturbing post-apocalyptic novel The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, author of The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes and dramatised on BBC Radio 4. This book is beautifully, subtly, skilfully written. For that alone it is worth reading. Characters are rarely described yet vividly portrayed through their words, their speech-patterns, their reactions. The feeling of suspense and danger overshadows a Little House on the Prairie kind of lifestyle, and the small-minded bigotry comes across clearly in the small details as much as in the story itself. Chapter 2 discusses David’s family tree and his grandfather, Elias Strorm, the founder of Waknuk. Elias' son, Joseph, who is David's father, is an important man in their town and is a very religious individual—as is his wife, Emily. The Strorm’s family life is filled with religious practices. The religion is focused on keeping the “pure” form of humans, as defined by their text Nicholson’s Repentances. Anyone who does not conform to the norm is considered Deviant. Most Deviants live in the Fringes, the area outside of Waknuk and the surrounding farming communities. As a farming society, Waknuk is also concerned with destroying any genetically mutated plant or animal, known as Offences. For mutant crops, they are burned. Mutant animals have their throats slit at dawn. It seems wrong for the first adjective I'd use to describe a rather miserable future dystopia to be "nostalgic" but that was the mood this book swept me into. Not a nostalgia for the world described within the book, but rather for the style of writing. I read a great deal of fiction very similar to this in my early teenage years, but somehow, I believe I missed this one. Even if I had read it before, it would've held up to re-reading - this is quite an excellent book. I first read The Chrysalids when I was 12, an age when any child is beginning to wonder about where he or she fits into the world. This is the subject of John Wyndham's novel. His protagonist, David Strorm, inhabits a prospering district on the edge of the Unknown. Everybody lives in awe of the "Old People", whose might built marvels, yet they believe that God sent "Tribulation" (most likely some form of nuclear war) to punish them for amorality. Hence they fear mutations, expelling anybody who bears a sign of difference. In this, they resemble the pioneer community in Arthur Miller's The Crucible (written two years before Wyndham's book and reflecting the same anxieties).

Aldiss, Brian W (1973). Billion year spree: the history of science fiction. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. p.254. ISBN 978-0-297-76555-4. This is the story of David, a young boy who has a troubled upbringing in a rural farming community. He's brought into a culture where 'Deviation' is seen as Devil-work and anything that 'Deviates' in any way must be exterminated. This extends through all the crops that the farmers grow, right through to the children they birth. Any abnormality will mean death or desertion of children/burning of crops. Nothing is allowed to go against the True Image, and David's father is one of the most staunch in the community about enforcing this rule. It leaves one to think about one’s own experience with racism in this pre-apocalyptic world. Not being ‘white’ can expose one to all sorts of risks and not being a ‘straight male’ may mean that one is disproportionately exposed to hurt, both physical and psychological. So, if/when you find yourself in that spot, remember that your uniqueness makes this world what it is; wondrous and beautiful. John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids anticipates and surpasses many of today’s dystopian thrillers…. The Chrysalids explores intolerance and bigotry with satisfying complexity as it races toward an ending that is truly unpredictable.”— The Seattle Times Miller, P. Schuyler. "The Reference Library", Astounding Science-Fiction, October 1955, pp. 144–45.

by John Wyndham

Wyndham’s fiction, the world is in constant flux, and most people are either unwilling to face change or too eager to capitalize on it for their own advantage. Caught in this paradox are the Wyndham protagonists, ordinary men, women, and children pummeled by the past and present into resolutions of transcendence and new, meaningful undertakings. No guarantees await them in the future. Sealand, to which David, Rosalind, and Petra escape, is peopled by beings who view themselves as superior and, by their own admission and as shown in their obsession with Petra’s harrowing gift, are doomed one day to self-destruct, as have the unyielding remnants of the Old People they are supplanting. The apocalyptic Cold War era science fiction classic of a young boy’s quest for freedom in a post-nuclear religious extremist society