50 Book Challenge: Book 44
The Chrysalids – John Wyndham
This is the second John Wyndham I’ve read this month – after a gap of some 20 years – and it has completely vindicated my decision to pick up his work again. And this particular book is startlingly relevant, dealing as it does with a post-Apocalyptic society desperate to preserve its norms and values and classing anything that doesn’t measure up to the ideal (the Image of God) as a Deviant, an Offence or (in the case of humans) a Blasphemy. It is what we now know as a dark future novel where environmental catastrophe is a reality and ‘deviants’ are sterilised to stop them polluting the gene pool before being left to take their chances in the Fringes, land that is still powerfully affected by radioactive fallout, where nothing breeds true. Religious mania abounds and women are forced to wear a cross sewn to the front of their dresses to spare them from the shame of breeding a ‘mutant’. It was impossible to read this and not see powerful parallels with sections of contemporary American society.
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This is a rare combination of things – a deeply intelligent and intellectually-satisfying read combined with a believable world and an exciting story. I can’t express myself better than by quoting the introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition that I read:
In 1953 a new social class was emerging in Great Britain. Increased funding for higher education had encouraged a stream of working- and lower-middle-class adolescents into the redbrick universities. In a country where education was still considered a privilege, they went to another town for three years, and were maintained there by public funds, and compelled into an exchange of ideas; and when they came back they were irrevocably changed. They had more in common with each other than with their parents. Their career expectations were raised. Their social expectations were raised. They had politics, they had sex: they were in possession of new languages. They ate different kinds of food. They knew more. Their parents were horrified: the umbilical cord had been cut again, this time by what seemed like sorcery. Would parental values now mean nothing in the face of book learning? Not if they had anything to do with it. Cultural confrontation was inevitable. The Generation Gap – which would widen within ten years into outright rebellion – was opening up. If the educated young were beginning to feel like strangers in their own homes, their elders were beginning to see them as dangerous, out of control: deviant.
Perhaps the fact that this is so uncannily like my own experience of being the first member of a large, and largely working-class, family to get to university more than 30 years after the book was written is part of the reason why it speaks to me so strongly. And we are undoubtedly now, more than 50 years after The Chrysalids was published, in an age where cultural confrontation is a defining characteristic. On the other hand, it might just be that it is a very good book. It’s well-written and full of acerbic wit; scary, affecting and unsettling by turns. If I have one criticism of the writing it is that the telepathic characters do speak rather too much like a group of undergraduates sitting round in a common room at Cambridge in the 1950s. But, in a book that manages to be very largely timeless, this is a tiny niggle. I would strongly recommend reading this – and at less than 200 pages you’ll get plenty of reward for the effort you are asked to expend.
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