As an effort to avoid Jane Eyre for another week I thought
to buy a short novel that I’ve been excited about for a while; The Midwich Cuckoos. However, in my
excitement to buy The Midwich Cuckoos
I either bought The Chysalids by
mistake or Amazon sent me the wrong one. When I received it I was going to send
it back; my joy dulled by receiving a different book, but the sender had
written me a little note and I didn’t have the heart to return it.
As a fangirl of Wyndham, and of Sci Fi generally, I knew I’d
love it as soon as I read the blurb. Set in an apocalyptic future of our own
world we follow the story of Davie, a child bought up in a small section of the
world that has escaped ultimate destruction, the God sent ‘Tribulation’. This
agrarian society functions upon fundamentalist Christian values without
tolerance for mutations and base their knowledge of normality on the ‘Old
people’; a technologically advanced race that destroyed the world through their
own nuclear mistakes.
Living in the country of ‘Labrador’ Davie struggles with his
own father’s intense religiosity, as any mutation is destroyed; crops are
razed, animals slaughtered and humans thrown to the wild ‘Fringes’ where mutations
are rife. As Davie and his friends grow up they not only learn more about the
intensely critical society, but how different they are themselves. Discovering
at an early age they are telepathic the children learn to live in fear of being
identified as ‘Blasphemes’, the worry being that the society will fear them all
the more as their mutation is not noticeable at birth as a physical defect.
The Chrysalids, like
many of Wyndham’s novels, shows the nature of humanity in extreme situations. Not
only that; but it shows the possible catastrophic futures within the post war
era that Wyndham was writing. After reading this book, not only is my love for
Wyndham renewed, but I think I’ve found a new favourite book. I would
completely recommend this novel.
Midwich Cuckoos just fell into my Amazon basket...
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