Amusements
Aug. 22nd, 2005 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lederhosenBrowsing an article on John Wyndham:
Wyndham's work owes much to H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), but its conservative arguments reflected the political change in the United Kingdom - The Web [sic - correct title is just 'Web'] appeared in the same year, when Margaret Thatcher was appointed prime minister.
One *teensy* problem with that theory - Web was published posthumously. Wyndham died in 1969, during the not-particularly-Thatcherite Labour government of Harold Wilson. This would be less silly if the article didn't give the correct date for Wyndham's death in the very next paragraph, and at the beginning of the article. Over-interpretation of books always annoyed me, so I get cheap laughs when it falls apart.
(I remember studying Patrick White's A Fringe of Leaves in year 12. The book repeatedly uses bird imagery, and at one stage two characters are trekking through the bush together. "Great grey birds" are mentioned, and a friend and I got into a ferocious argument over whether they were emus (my position) or metaphors (his). A couple of pages later this argument was resolved in decisive fashion when the protagonists killed and ate one. I think that may have been the only moment of pleasure I got from that entire book.)
I'm still mystified by the contention of some of Wyndham's critics, expressed by John Clute: "his protagonists and their women tend to behave with old fashioned decency and courage, rather as though they were involved in the Battle of Britain, a time imaginatively close to his and his market... He will be remembered mainly for the brief moment in which he expressed English hopes, fears and complacency to a readership that recognised a kindred spirit."
In Day of the Triffids, Wyndham offers a world in which the heroes leave blind people to starve to death or, occasionally, help them take their own lives. Although circumstances keep it off-stage during the course of the book, both Bill and Josella accept (ten years before Heinlein wrote Stranger in a Strange Land) that polygamy will be a social necessity; further, Josella declares that if it comes to that, *she* will be the one who chooses another wife.
One can argue for or against these ideas, but I have trouble seeing them as 'old-fashioned English decency'. If anything, the two characters who *do* try clinging to old-fashioned decency - Coker and Durrant - are used as object lessons in why it must be abandoned. Coker learns from his mistakes, adapts, and survives; Durrant does not.
Wyndham's work owes much to H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), but its conservative arguments reflected the political change in the United Kingdom - The Web [sic - correct title is just 'Web'] appeared in the same year, when Margaret Thatcher was appointed prime minister.
One *teensy* problem with that theory - Web was published posthumously. Wyndham died in 1969, during the not-particularly-Thatcherite Labour government of Harold Wilson. This would be less silly if the article didn't give the correct date for Wyndham's death in the very next paragraph, and at the beginning of the article. Over-interpretation of books always annoyed me, so I get cheap laughs when it falls apart.
(I remember studying Patrick White's A Fringe of Leaves in year 12. The book repeatedly uses bird imagery, and at one stage two characters are trekking through the bush together. "Great grey birds" are mentioned, and a friend and I got into a ferocious argument over whether they were emus (my position) or metaphors (his). A couple of pages later this argument was resolved in decisive fashion when the protagonists killed and ate one. I think that may have been the only moment of pleasure I got from that entire book.)
I'm still mystified by the contention of some of Wyndham's critics, expressed by John Clute: "his protagonists and their women tend to behave with old fashioned decency and courage, rather as though they were involved in the Battle of Britain, a time imaginatively close to his and his market... He will be remembered mainly for the brief moment in which he expressed English hopes, fears and complacency to a readership that recognised a kindred spirit."
In Day of the Triffids, Wyndham offers a world in which the heroes leave blind people to starve to death or, occasionally, help them take their own lives. Although circumstances keep it off-stage during the course of the book, both Bill and Josella accept (ten years before Heinlein wrote Stranger in a Strange Land) that polygamy will be a social necessity; further, Josella declares that if it comes to that, *she* will be the one who chooses another wife.
One can argue for or against these ideas, but I have trouble seeing them as 'old-fashioned English decency'. If anything, the two characters who *do* try clinging to old-fashioned decency - Coker and Durrant - are used as object lessons in why it must be abandoned. Coker learns from his mistakes, adapts, and survives; Durrant does not.
