The Day of the Triffids
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The Day of the Triffids
Buy Now for $26.99
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Narrated by:
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Kingsley Ben-Adir
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By:
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John Wyndham
About this listen
In 1951 John Wyndham published his novel The Day of the Triffids to moderate acclaim. Fifty-two years later, this horrifying story is a science-fiction classic, touted by The Times (London) as having 'all the reality of a vividly realised nightmare'.
Bill Masen, bandages over his wounded eyes, misses the most spectacular meteorite shower England has ever seen. Removing his bandages the next morning, he finds masses of sightless people wandering the city. He soon meets Josella, another lucky person who has retained her sight, and together they leave the city, aware that the safe, familiar world they knew a mere 24 hours before is gone forever.
But to survive in this post-apocalyptic world, one must survive the Triffids, strange plants that years before began appearing all over the world. The Triffids can grow to over seven feet tall, pull their roots from the ground to walk and kill a man with one quick lash of their poisonous stingers. With society in shambles, they are now poised to prey on humankind. Wyndham chillingly anticipates bio-warfare and mass destruction, 50 years before their realisation, in this prescient account of Cold War paranoia.
About the author: John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Benyon Harris was born in 1903, the son of a barrister. He tried a number of careers including farming, law, commercial art and advertising, and started writing short stories, intended for sale, in 1925. From 1930 to 1939 he wrote stories of various kinds under different names, almost exclusively for American publications, while also writing detective novels. During the war he was in the Civil Service and then the Army. In 1946 he went back to writing stories for publication in the USA and decided to try a modified form of science fiction, a form he called 'logical fantasy'.
©1951 John Wyndham (P)2021 Audible, LtdThe writing is a little dated now, and the narrator tended to get a bit monotonous at times, but overall I really enjoyed listening to this book.
Great to revisit my teen years
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Kingsley Ben-Adir in my opinion does not have the voice range to tell a good, convincing story.
Good story.
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Thrilling Sci fi
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Loved this book as a kid.
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I do love the way the English use the English language and I found a great deal of wit and humour in Wyndham's book. I don't recall 'The Chrysalids' being quite so much fun to read (although that was over a decade ago and my memory is notoriously bad). I found this one often hilarious even though I wasn't always sure that was the intention.
According to the GR author profile this guy's full name was "John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Benyon Harris" which seems to me like what would happen if two partners each with hyphenated surnames decided to carry on hyphenating when they name their children. Or maybe that's just a British thing that I don't understand.
There are plenty of oddities. It gets pretty intense about preferring to die rather than to live blind. Later it is suggested that suicide may be a reasonable if not the morally correct alternative to striving in vain against the crisis. In this book is possibly the first use of the term "Glory Hole" and in reference to the sex organs of plants!
There are loads of accounts of where people were when the blinding had occurred and what they had done hence. So many that I would say most of the book is made up of such stories. This is an alright writing mechanism for telling various possible reactions to the crisis and it was always interesting but sometimes seemed tedious. However, probably if you were in the situation you would swap these stories with every person you met and so it isn't unrealistic.
Casual sexism occurs frequently but usually presented as a poor trait of a nasty character and the main character, Bill is himself relatively fair especially notable when he takes Josella's ideas as seriously as his own and often he requests her view of his own thoughts. He really does seem to get it for the most part. We have to remember this is a 1951 book, so even when it's done right, it's slightly off the mark. There was Coco with his rant about how women are intellectually equal to men but both sexes have found it convenient to let the illusion to persist. It came across as both enlightened and regressive all at once. Points for
Racism occurred less frequently but was never really objected to by any of the characters (or the writing in general) when it did occur and actually I thought that the blinding event would have served as a perfect opportunity to challenge those racial misconceptions.
I thought many of the characters were probably a bit quick to jump to discussing new philosophies of society, a lot of this seemed to be occurring within days of the beginning of the crisis but I did find I was losing task of time more and more as the book progressed. This was mostly interesting and would have had a much greater impact when this book came out (before the free loving sixties).
Triffids are great but as has been noted by others, they play a largely background role in this story which has a much larger focus on how society might fall apart and the different ways that people might try to persist. When we think about societal collapse we often think about our reliance on certain technologies, but I thought it was very interesting to think instead about the collapse in terms of our reliance on one of our senses.
Bill has a great deal of empathy and reason. I found him a very likeable main character. When Bill finds a young girl alone he confesses to himself that he "knew little of little girls" but still he sets about looking after her with no hesitation. The young lady eats much more of the food he had prepared than he'd figured possible and she innocently proclaims that her previous diet of cookies had been much less enjoyable than she would have guessed. Classic.
There's a weird switch at the end where Bill has been the one suspicious of the Triffids for the entire story until apparently after his farming work he'd found Susan's suggestion of their intelligence as ridiculous. Bill explains he's been too busy to worry about such things, but then again later he goes on to extrapolate new theories of how the near apocalyptic event may have been caused. Oh I don't know, it's all a bit flip floppy.
The end comes on pretty quickly with two major events taking place in the last hour (or less) of reading. I loved the story all the way through and can almost definitely see myself reading it again someday (a rarity for me). I'm certainly going to have a look at some of the other John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Benyon Harris stories out there!
The narration was sensational, Kingsley Ben-Adir nailed every voice and did many accents very well. This version has been offered to audible members at no extra cost and I'm pleased that I took advantage of the offering.
Post-apocalypse with a twist.
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A brilliant way to get back into books.
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it is written in the fifties so some of the language and gender roles is somewhat antiqued. notwithstanding I very enjoyed.
it's a classic
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It's a classic
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Good story bolstered by a great narrator.
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I enjoyed the narration, I think it is more (justified) grim consternation at the events of the story than the monotone people complain about. There are not really 'lighter' parts of the story to create that change. The narrator changes voice for different characters.
Triffids
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