On John Wyndham's "cosy catastrophe" novels (from 2008)

I wrote this in late 2008 on spec for a publication, but it was never published. My notes remind me that after writing it I came across a post on the Penguin blog drawing this same connection. I don't think I unwittingly lifted the concept from them, but the link I had to their post is dead (link rot is the bane of the web), and it seems worth at least noting that up top in case I'm wrong and they deserve full credit. 

Thirteen years later, it turns out to have unpleasant resonances with our moment, all the way down to my mention of the possibility of a pandemic. 

For those of us fortunate enough not to have lost our jobs, and to still have our possessions in our houses rather than scattered about the lawn by sheriff’s deputies, the deepening financial crisis has been a bit hard to fully digest. Its causes are complicated and poorly understood, its effects (so long as we don’t look at our 401(k)s) still a bit distant. We know there’s a serious problem—such ordinarily staid figures as Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson wouldn’t be looking so stricken were there not—and we extend real sympathy to those who’ve already felt its effects, but for the most part we’re left to go about our daily lives much as usual, the only change a slowly growing cloud of dread hovering just outside our peripheral vision. 

It’s a situation that would, I think, have piqued the imagination of British science fiction novelist John Wyndham (1903–69), and the half-dozen suspenseful, well-crafted novels he published between 1951 and 1968 seem the perfect literary accompaniment to today’s slowly growing disaster. Wyndham’s approach to science fiction, harking back to H. G. Wells, is rooted in the classic “What if?”, but his specialty was teasing out the ramifications of changes—often seemingly minor—to the basic ground rules governing human society. What if nearly everyone went blind, as happens in his best-known novel, The Day of the Triffids (1951)? What if science discovered a way to dramatically extend the human lifespan, as in the surprisingly feminist Trouble with Lichen (1960)? What if the children of a small village were to display unexpected—and unsettling—powers, as in The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)? What if the sub-prime mortgage market were suddenly to melt down . . . ? 

In The Day of the Triffids, the result of the mass blindness is an almost instant collapse of society (abetted, one must point out, by a particularly well-imagined species of ambulatory killer plant). The Day of the Triffids is dramatic and frightening, but it’s nonetheless a fairly straightforward apocalypse novel, if one of the best of the genre. But it’s in his other novels that Wyndham displays his particular genius. They’re less spectacular, but far more insidious—and much harder to shake once they’ve been returned to the shelf. For in them, nothing falls apart instantly; rather, the situation deteriorates slowly, and all the while the characters are forced to continue, more or less unchanged, their daily routines, shadowed by worry and never quite believing the widespread assurances that everything is going to be fine. 

The Kraken Wakes (1953) offers the best example of this approach. Mike and Phyllis Watson, journalists who write radio scripts (and whose banter and resourcefulness makes them seem like nothing so much as Nick and Nora Charles transplanted to an episode of “Lights Out!”), witness something inexplicable when they’re on a honeymoon cruise: a group of glowing red objects, somewhat like meteors, blazing through the sky and crashing into the ocean, where they disappear in a cloud of steam. Though the couple reports on the sighting, little is made of it, and even when accounts of similar events begin trickling in from around the globe, the prevailing public mood is one of curiosity rather than worry. Years later, Mike Watson reflects on that failure to understand the gravity of the sightings:

It began so unrecognizably. Had it been more obvious—and yet it is difficult to see what could have been done effectively even if we had recognised the danger. Recognition and prevention don’t necessarily go hand in hand. We recognized the potential dangers of atomic fission quickly enough—yet we could do little about them.

Over time, though most governments prefer to pretend otherwise, it becomes increasingly clear that the unidentified flying objects were an invasion fleet, and that some alien race has begun colonizing the ocean floor. Eventually, the problem becomes acute, as the aliens begin destroying naval vessels and disrupting shipping lanes, wreaking havoc on the global economy and leaving political and military leaders at a loss for effective responses. 

Yet even these earth-shaking events do relatively little to change the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. Living on land and unable even to see the miles-deep alien incursion, they are left to merely consume the limited available news and wonder what steps their government should take. As events slowly unfold over a number of years, the prevailing mood is one of dread and uncertainty rather than panic, and even when the aliens begin attacking coastal towns, and it becomes impossible to deny that humanity is in a struggle for its very survival, people’s panic has almost no outlet in action. Even Mike and Phyllis, who are attentive to the dangers from the start, and who have far better sources of information than the average citizen, aren’t sure what they can do: they attempt to take precautionary measures, like laying in stores of food, but the very uncertainty of the threat leaves them, for the most part, in a maddening state of abeyance. 

That is what Wyndham is best at: portraying the fundamental—and for the most part unacknowledged—uncertainty of life, and the essential futility of our attempts to control for it. Because we have little choice, we tell ourselves that tomorrow will be like today, but in reality we can never be sure. Wyndham’s work is shadowed by the Bomb and the disinformation of the cold war, but his lessons are no less applicable today; the immediate threat of nuclear holocaust may have receded, but the increasing interconnectedness of our world has opened us up to new dangers, from global pandemics to rippling financial crises. Human society perpetually teeters on a knife’s edge, and the smallest of changes to such a complex system could have entirely unforeseeable effects. Last time the global economy melted down on this scale, the result was the New Deal—but also the rise of fascism; who’s to say what will follow this time? 

Though Wyndham was always well-regarded in the United Kingdom, and nearly all of his novels remain in print there, in the United States his work has been largely ignored, aside from The Day of the Triffids. But the New York Review of Books has recently republished what may be his most perfectly realized novel, The Chrysalids (1955), a tale of post-apocalyptic fundamentalism, and apparently Steven Spielberg is planning a movie of his final novel, Chocky (1968), so maybe we are on the verge of a Wyndham revival. Would it be too much to hope that it might be accompanied by a financial revival as well?

"Almost the only people I know who agree word for word on what they saw on the night of 15 July are Phyllis and I."

On the recommendation of the Caustic Cover Critic, who recently revealed that the oeuvre of John Wyndham extends far beyond his justly famous The Day of the Triffids (1951), in recent days I've been racing through some of what Wyndham described as his "logical science fiction" novels. Had Wyndham not named his style, I would probably have tagged it with something clunky like "It was a day like any other . . ." science fiction. In the Wyndham novels I've read so far--the aforementioned Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) (which is better known among American readers in its movie form, where it was called Village of the Damned), and The Kraken Wakes (1953), which I'm halfway through--space-borne entities of utterly inscrutable origin and intentions arrive and initiate a struggle for survival with the human race. What's so compelling about Wyndham's work is that by shifting the terms of our everyday life just a tiny bit he reveals--logically and convincingly--the shaky foundations and unquestioned assumptions on which our entire human world is based. It was an ordinary day . . . and then, again and again--sometimes suddenly, sometimes with dreadful, clawing slowness--it isn't.

I'll almost certainly have more to say about Wyndham in the coming months, as I work my way through the rest of his novels. For now, I simply want to share a great pasage from The Kraken Wakes. Whereas The Day of the Triffids is unrelenting in its tension, and The Midwich Cuckoos, though a bit more restrained, also rarely shifts its narrative attention from the creepy children at its core, The Kraken Wakes reads more like Wyndham's attempt to transplant Nick and Nora Charles into a particularly sharp episode of Lights Out. The couple who are its center are writers for the EBC, a commercial cousin of the BBC, and their comfortable banter offers considerable leaven to the slowly accumulating horrors of the first half of the novel.

This particular passage follows the late night-arrival of a couple of visiting friends, a husband and wife, and it shares the dry wit for which I praised Wyndham's prose earlier in the week--but with the addition of some finely honed thoughts about friendship and marriage, and a perfectly phrased observation to close it:

Wondering why one's friends chose to marry the people they did is unprofitable, but recurrent. One could so often have done so much better for them. For instance, I could think of three girls who would have been better for Harold, in their different ways; one would have pushed him, another would have looked after him, the third would have amused him. It is true that they were none of them quite as decorative as Tuny, but that's not--well, it's something like the difference between the room you live in and the one at the Ideal Home Exhibition. However, there it was, and, as Phyllis said, a girl who makes good with a name like Petunia must at least have something her parents didn't have.

Do you see why Wyndham has succeeded in enchanting me?

Are you an Anglophile? Take this simple quiz and find out!

Reading John Wyndham's creepy and well-conceived The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), which was later filmed as The Village of the Damned, brought me several unexpected pleasures.

1 I smiled at this sentence describing the sleepy hamlet of Midwich:

And before that it hit the headlines--well, anyway, the broadsheets--when Black Ned, a second-class highwayman, was shot on the steps of The Scythe and Stone Inn by Sweet Polly Parker, and although this gesture of reproof appears to have been of a more personal than social nature, she was, nevertheless, much lauded for it in the ballads of 1768.

Then I stopped, for it occurred to me that here was a perfect test of whether a reader is amenable to English literature: this droll, historically inclined sentence, which draws its arch-eyebrowed humor largely from its balanced, careful organization, seems characteristic of the dominant strain of the nation's literary output. A reader who pauses to enjoy this sentence might as well move on to Dickens, Thackeray, Waugh, Powell, Fitzgerald, and others. One who doesn't should probably plump for Dostoevsky or Melville instead.

2 As I was reading the book I realized that Ed's and my recent creation of the Invisible Library has unexpectedly added a new layer of drama to my reading. Early in the novel, the narrator refers to Midwich resident Gordon Zellaby's work of philosophy While We Last; soon after, Zellaby himself mentions that the manuscript for his next book, The British Twilight, is overdue.

I snapped to attention: would he--given the distractions posed by an infestation of possibly alien children--deliver the manuscript? Would The British Twilight ever be published--and thus available for stocking at the Invisible Library?

Sadly, John Wyndham seems to have been far less concerned about the fate of The British Twilight than I am, for the novel ends without a definite answer. Given, however, that nine years pass between the initial mention of the book and the conclusion of The Midwich Cuckoos, I decided, in my role as Invisible Librarian, that Zellaby--a professional philosopher--would surely have found the time to finish The British Twilight at some point. Thus a copy now resides on the "Z" shelf.

Did I make the right decision? Only Wyndham would know for sure, and he left this world nearly forty years ago; should his spirit visit the Library, I'll let you know.

3 Because I've had the Invisible Library on the brain this week, I also perked up at the following line spoken by a character:

What's going on here is the burning of books before they have been written.

The character is using books as a metaphor to describe the short-sightedness of the government's failure to study the alien children, but it also seems like a phrase one might find decorating one of the more cobwebby carrels in the Invisible Library.

It seems like it would go nicely that area of special collections that would house lost books like Profiles in String, the greatest work of X. Trapnel, the only manuscript of which was chucked into a Venetian canal by Pamela Widmerpool, because "it wasn't worthy of X."

Now any reader in possession of an Invisible Library card can see for himself whether Pamela was right . . . or whether perhaps the book was brilliant, and that was why it haunted her . . . if that was why, after Trapnel's death she admitted with a shiver, "I see that manuscript of his floating away on every canal."

A weekend's reading

I spent the weekend reading about lost worlds. First I was wrapping up George Orwell's Coming Up for Air (1939), which is an engrossing monologue by an unexpectedly thoughtful low-level insurance executive who, like everyone else in 1938 England, is dangling between the ordinariness of daily life and the certain horrors of impending war. The thought of war leads him back to his own childhood, before World War I, the last, lingering years of old country life in England--a life that would have been recognizable in its contours, if not its particulars, to his great-great-great grandparents. His appraisal is fairly clear-eyed, but he looks back on that time (and his youth, cut short by war), with real nostalgia:

I'm back in Lower Binfield, and the year's 1900. Beside the horse-trough in the market-place the carrier's horse is having its nose-bag. At the sweet-shop on the corner Mother Wheeler is weighing out a ha'porth of brandy balls. Lady Rampling's carriage is driving by, with the tiger sitting behind in his pipeclayed breeches with his arms folded. Uncle Ezekiel is cursing Joe Chamberlain. The recruiting-sergeant in his scarlet jacket, tight blue overalls and pillbox hat, is strutting up and down twisting his moustache. The drunks are puking in the yard behind the George. Vicky's a Windsor, God's in heaven, Christ's on the cross, Jonah's in the whale, Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego are in the fiery furnace, and Sihon king of the Amorites and Og the king of Bashan are sitting on their thrones looking at one another--not doing anything, exactly, just existing, keeping their appointed places, like a couple of fire-dogs, or the Lion and the Unicorn.

Is it gone for ever? I'm not certain. But I tell you it was a good world to live in. I belong to it. So do you.

The world he speaks of is greatly changed, yet it is not totally lost. But in my reading, things got worse from there. I moved to Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), which tells of a man living in Los Angeles, barricaded in his house by night, the only survivor of a plague of vampirism. Matheson builds up a terrifying account through layers of plausible detail, leading us through the difficult, repetitive tasks that take up the man's day--and that are essential to his survival:

In the beginning he had hung these necklaces [of garlic] over the windows. But from a distance they'd thrown rocks until he'd been forced to cover the broken panes with plywood scraps. Finally one day he'd torn off the plywood and nailed up even rows of planks instead. It had made the house a gloomy sepulcher, but it was better than having rocks come flying into his rooms in a shower of splintered glass. And, once he had installed the three air-conditioning units, it wasn't too bad. A man could get used to anything if he had to.

That ability to cope--or lack of it--is at the heart of the book I read next, John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951), which envisions the utter breakdown of society that would occur if nearly everyone went blind. Though Wyndham complicates the story wonderfully, introducing a second, effectively creepy threat in an invasive species of woody shrubs known as Triffids, the collapse that the blindness alone brings about is instant and total. London is left with perhaps a couple of hundred sighted people, and The Day of the Triffids is concerned with the different ways they respond, the possible ways they imagine structuring a new society. Like I Am Legend--or any other good apocalypse novel--it uses detailed accounts of the hard work necessitated by the failure of our specialized supply and production system as the backdrop for the fundamental questions about nature, sufficiency, society, and knowledge that would instantly be laid bare by such a fundamental rupture of daily life.

Then I watched 28 Days Later, which, not being a book, I won't discuss here beyond saying it's scary and was perhaps, on top of the two books, a bit more than I needed in that vein in one weekend. Dark, apocalyptic, riddled with loss and unresolvable questions--this reading list is a reliable recipe for swampy anxiety dreams.

But then today the sun came out, the temperature warmed up and nearly chased the last of the snow--the ice on the lake went out, floes of it floating from the shore carrying groups of seagulls--and after taking a walk, Stacey and I sat on the back steps in the late-afternoon sun with our pet fish and some iced tea. She embroidered and I read out loud from The Letters of E. B. White (2006). And the large-hearted humanity that comes through White's letters immediately began to change the tenor of the whole weekend.

White is sometimes comfortably curmudgeonly--in August of 1944, despite being concerned about the war, he writes to Harold Ross of the New Yorker, asking that items sent to him not be stapled together. In response, Ross sends him an unstapling machine:

18 August 1944
Dear Ross:
The unstapling machine arrived yesterday and has given me new courage to go on. So far, the only thing I have had to unstaple is the card marked "Mr. H. W. Ross," which was attached by staple. Anyway, it gave me a nice workout, although in order to hold the box properly, I had to cover the instructions with my hand, which made it necessary for me to memorize the instructions, instead of reading them as I went along. The "Mr." in front of your name sounds like a phony, by the way. Sounds like the "Prince" in front of Romanoff. I suspect you are an imposter--have all along.

If they can invent a thing to remove staples, it is conceivable that they can eventually find something to emasculate a rocket bomb. Anything is possible today, as you know.

This is just to thank you for the Ace Staple Remover.
Brig. Gen. White

At other times, White tells of his life in rural Maine, which usually takes the form of a slightly pixilated comedy. A few weeks after the stapler exchange, he writes to his brother:

I had just gone out when you phoned last night, and Aunt Caroline took the call. She is slightly deaf, and probably had to make up all the answers. The reason nobody else was in the house was that we were all out returning a visiting pig to its owner. When the owner came along the road to meet us, he looked accusingly at the pig and said: "Hell, everything I own is adrift tonight."

Later in the letter he says of a visitor: "Her St. Bernard left last week, and the departure of a St. Bernard from a home is one of the finest things that can happen to the home." This particular St. Bernard, a footnote informs us, "insisted on rescuing swimmers who were not in need of rescue."

New York can provide comedy, too: he writes to his wife's secretary at the New Yorker to say:

I know you will be interested to hear that I left New York, by mistake, one day sooner than I intended to. Meant to go Friday, got on the train Thursday in error. Pullman seat was for Friday. I just stood up.
Yrs in error,
EBW

Even business correspondence includes jokes and anecdotes, written in White's wry, careful, balanced prose. Here he writes to his editor about Charlotte's Web (1952):

I am relieved to learn that the first printing wasn't too ambitious and that there will be a second. My wife is buying a great many copies and has, I believe, managed to exhaust the first printing almost singlehanded. I'm not sure there is any profit for the author in this sort of arrangement, but I shall not attempt to work it out on paper.

Meanwhile, he replies to fans in surprisingly straightforward fashion:

There is no sequel to "Stuart Little." A lot of children seem to want one, but there isn't any. I think many readers find the end inconclusive but I have always found life inconclusive, and I guess it shows up in my work.

To another, he writes:

Dear Mr. Mouthrop:
Thanks for your letter. I'm very glad to know that Stuart and Charlotte can take someo f hte pressure off an adolescent. I haven't been an adolescent for a number of years but I can remember that the pressure was fierce.

But my favorite of the letters I've read so far, and the one that seemed most fitting for the lovely late-afternoon light of this unexpectedly springlike Sunday, is one from 26 December 1952, to Grade 5-B in Larchmont, New York:

I was delighted to get you letters telling me waht you thought about "Charlotte's Web." It must be fine to have a teacher who is a bookworm like Mrs. Bard.

It is true that I live on a far. It is on the sea. My barn is big and old, and I have ten sheep, eighteen hens, a goose, a gander, a bull calf, a rat, a chipmunk, and many spiders. In the woods near the barn are red squirrels, crows, thrushes, owls, porcupines, woodchucks, foxes, rabbits, and deer. In the pasture pond are frogs, polliwogs, and salamanders. Sometimes a Great Blue Heron comes to the pond and catches frogs. At the shore of the sea are sandpipers, gulls, plovers, and kingfishers. In the mud at low tide are clams. Seven seals live on nearby rocks and in the sea, and they swim close to my boat when I row. Barn swallows nest in the barn, and I have a skunk that lives under the garage.

I didn't like spiders at first, but then I began watching one of them, and soon saw what a wonderful creature she was and what a skillful weaver. I named her Charlotte, and now I like spiders along with everything else in nature.

I'm glad you enjoyed the book, and I thank you for the interesting letters.

What a thrill that deeply generous letter must have given Mrs. Bard and her students when they returned from the Christmas holidays!

And what a good note on which to end a weekend.