Today
let’s step back into classic science fiction, with a guest review by the
lovely Chris King. To read his last review, of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four,
click here.
The Chrysalids shows a different aspect of the
same ideal presented in George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four. Nineteen Eighty-Four shows
an obsession with ensuring that all people think the same in order to ensure
the continuation of the same system, while The
Chrysalids depicts an obsession with physical purity for much the same end.
The world
of The Chrysalids is a post-apocalyptic
one; the only two books to have survived are Nicholson’s Repentance and the Bible. The land before this time, as near as
anyone could tell, was called Labrador. The setting of the story is probably
best described as frontier America. The majority of people live in small
communities with pre-industrial technology and raid and are raided by the
fringes people – but think of these fringe dwellers as native American tribes
people would be inaccurate; these are mutants, they have long arms or thick
long facial hair or something else considered Blasphemy, and rely on cunning for
military success.
The Strorm
family in particular stringently enforces these rules in their household. This
leading family of Walnuk hate the mutants more than any other, hating even the government-approved
selective breeding mutations. This appears to be because the family may be more
afflicted by mutated children than other families; though in this world no one
is considered to have been born unless they are free of mutation. Otherwise
they are deemed one of the Devil's parodies and meet an undisclosed fate.
David
Strorm is a young child and eldest son of the Strorm family. One day, as he is
playing with a girl called Sophie, her shoe falls off, revealing an extra toe.
David thinks nothing of it and starts to wonder if a Blasphemy was really all
that bad. He also has no idea that no one else can see emotions as thought
shapes.
Wyndham
aptly shows the fear and confusion that intolerant religions like this can
prompt in children. As David reaches out to a few others across the region who
seem to have the same telepathic ability, they too are worried by the
possibility that they are different. The plaques on the wall that warn of the
evils of the mutant scare young David, who struggles with his childhood
naivety. He knows crops that are a Blasphemy are burnt, and that mutant animals
are held down and have their throats slit. Without having witnessed what
happens to a person no longer considered human, he has a recurring dream of his
father holding someone down and dragging a knife across their throat. Initially
this is the multi-toed Sophie but the dream changes to show others which
torments David with the idea that his father, the person who he knows he should
love, would kill him and his friends.
For the
most part the psychic children are able to live life in peace, talking to one
another over long distances as the great people of the past were said to be
able to do; until they discover another child with the power. She has an
intensity far greater than their own and is formless and commanding. They feel
compelled to obey and when supposed strangers from all around are riding full
speed towards the same point, without apparent reason, the children’s safety
becomes more tenuous. Inevitably things go wrong and a witch hunt for these
daemon children begins. So they flee into the outer regions (and if you have
read another of Wyndham’s books, The
Midwich Cuckoos then you may feel the people of Walnuk are justified).
Beyond the
Fringes are the Badlands, full of mutated creatures, giant plants and black glass
deserts. Beyond are islands of people, all of whom think that they are the
ideal of Purity, be it having no hair, having white hair, having webbed toes,
multiple breasts or even black skin. One of the islands is called ‘Sealand’
where people live as a hive mind, all thinking and feeling together as one. It
is there that the children hope to finally find safety, if only they can tear
themselves away from the place they call home and brave the nightmare lands in
between.
While we have
today progressed beyond the ideas on eugenics of the 50’s, genetic diversity is
still a concern to us. We can now surgically change brown eyes to blue and debate
persists regarding GM crops and selective breeding. So just because
sterilisation or genocide are no longer seriously considered when we discuss
the world’s genetic future, it hardly means that you cannot be worried by the
people of the world and their various ideas of the physical ideal.
While mental
illness is not mentioned in the book as a possible source of deviation, it is
possible to recognise elements concerning it. The telepathic children are
physically the ideal human, but this just makes their neighbours more scared of
them; because the thing that makes them different cannot be seen – much like
mental illness is treated today (although I hope that times are changing).
When Anne,
one of the telepathic children, marries a normal person without a special mind,
the others can tell that she suffers, like cutting off a part of their identity
or refusing to use a sense. This is when the themes of identity and belonging become
most apparent. When Anne shuns them, the other gifted children are faced with
the irrevocable truth that they consider themselves aliens to their home who
don’t fit in. Best of all the reactions of the children seem real. The plot is
not spurred on by the children deciding to up and leave, but the struggle we
all face with reconciling our uniqueness with the need to conform with the
place we call home, the place we wish to remain.
What I
like about this book is that it has universal relevance: in every society there
is a norm which is enforced to some degree, and there will always be those who
seek to fit in while knowing that they are different from others. The action is
maintained throughout and between incidents, both minor and major, the plot is
not slowed with padded character building. Every character is forged in
desperate situations and anything else is just skipped over keeping a focus over
a long span of years. After all, I believe it is the way we act in a crisis
that shows character more than any number of conversations or events in a calm
situation.
Greatest Strength: Fast pace with universal plot that
has kept the book notable for more than half a century.
Greatest weakness: Deus ex machina climax and short
epilogue that leaves the fate of many characters to reader assumption.
Let’s finish on a quote: ‘I’m telling you,’ he went on, ‘that
a lot of people saying that a thing is so, doesn’t prove it is so. I’m telling you that nobody, nobody really knows what
is the true image.’
With many thanks to Chris King for
this review. I’ll be back next week with another review.
Read more of Chris’s reviews:
No comments:
Post a Comment