Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham 3/5

A few days ago I finished The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham.

My initial reaction to this story was ERMMERRRGERDDDD THIS.IS.SO.GOOD!

...but that did change.

GREAT Plotline

The beginning of the book starts with our protagonist, Bill, waking up in a hospital bed with his eyes bandaged up (from a work injury). The hospital is eerily quiet, as is the street outside, on occasion, Bill hears mournful screams and shuffling sounds --- weird right?

Turns out, while Bill had been bandaged up, a meteor shower that emitted a green glowing light had fallen to the earth and everyone who had seen the green light had been blinded!

Essentially, the majority of humankind had been blinded and was now walking the streets like sightless zombies trying to hear and feel their way around.

GREAT Monsters

I found this whole premise very interesting and exciting in itself, but then... ENTER THE TRIFFIDS.

Triffids are a dangerous man-eating plant that can walk (yes). They have long tentacles that sting their prey to death and then once the flesh is rotting, they feast on the corpse. In short, they are a type of carrion plant.

People had been using triffids for the oil that they produced. There were huge farms that kept hundreds of triffids chained up (so they couldn't run off) and trimmed of their stings. In fact, Bill, our main man, was a scientist who specialized in triffid studies (how convenient).

Because of the blindness of most of the population, the triffids break free and throughout the book, you get a sense of the growing threat.

An EMBARRASSING reminder of misogyny

Now, I loved that side of the story and reading about how different characters react to the changed world and the oncoming triffid threat.

However, there was a dampener on the story for me - how women were written. 

See, this book was written in the 1950's by a man, and the tone of the book in terms of women is SO patronizing, it's laughable.

You can tell the author is trying to be forward-thinking and writing women in a way that sounds like he is an ally, BUT IT'S AWFUL. 

There's a whole section where a male character gives a speech to a female character telling her how she can do anything she wants, that she can do anything he can do, and that if she refuses to do it it's because she's lazy and wants men to serve her....as if liberating females from social oppression was a male idea.

In another part of the story, we read of how a female character watches her father get slaughtered by a triffid and then has to leave his body lying there without a burial to escape the triffid herself. The only thing she's concerned about after this whole event is finding a new set of clothes. There are at least three pages of the male character making sensible plans and the female interjecting about finding clothes. In another section, this same female character is rescued from being attacked by a group of men, and the first thing she says is,

"God, I must look awful."

The author was clearly under the impression that a woman's thoughts are hellbent on focusing on how they appear to men, and that men have to TEACH women how to be independent.

Summary

This is a really cool, groundbreaking story for the post-apocalyptic genre of literature, but it hasn't aged well in terms of its view of women. 

That being said, I still enjoyed reading the non-misogynistic parts. Love the triffids and the backstory of how they came to be and I thought how the characters deal with the different problems that come with a mostly blind society very interesting. 

I still think this book is worth a read and is a valuable asset for its genre. It is also a good reminder of how things can change for the better in terms of how certain groups of people are viewed. And that this author, and many other men, have missed out on an awful lot by not seeing the truth, power, and value of the women they shared their lives with.