Chocky
By John Wyndham
Author: John Wyndham
Rating: ★★★★
As would be expected, when considering the source material of a show that impactfully scared the bejesus out of me, I loved this novella. Nevertheless, this story as rendered in text added some interesting nuances that were not present in a made-for-English-children Thames TV adaptation.
First, the book is narrated from the point of view of the father. He has no idea whether his son is being visited by an alien, a demon, or is mentally disturbed. The phenomenological experience (“My son is arguing with himself”) is the same regardless of the actual case, and all the parents can wonder is “how far is too far?”
Second, the book makes an interesting comment on facing the prospect of infertility in the era before IVF, IXI, and other advances. Wyndham is an astoundingly sharp social critic where he notices the strange competitive bitchiness with which women assay and assail one-another when measuring their freshly-born. Wyndham is of his time and considers the constant sitting of children to be the concern of mothers.
Third, the book has a pronouncedly dickish quality. The narrator freely indulges fairly misogynistic tropes and/or parrots other just-so tales about women in a way that’s entirely unflattering. In the story, he trivializes his daughter (‘shut up or go away’) and discounts his wife’s input as emotional nonsense. A scene where he has to slap “some hysterical woman” back into good sense would not have been out of place.
That said, these oversights are part and parcel with the fact that this fairly for-seeing story was written in 1955 and his attitudes seem of a piece with a man of the final throes of Empire looking around and wonder who will run it as well as Her Majesty’s overseas administration.
It’s a comfortable and fun flight or beach read that will engage, activate, and puzzle.
{
"title": "Chocky",
"author": "John Wyndham",
"highlightCount": 7,
"noteCount": 12,
"annotations": [
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "I don't know, and nor do they, for instance, how far this compulsion that most of them have to produce a baby as soon as possible after marriage is attributable to a straight biological urge, and what percentages of it can be more justly credited to other factors such as conformity with peoples' expectations, the desire to prove that one is normal, the belief that it will establish status, a sense of personal achievement, the symbol of one's maturity, a feeling of solidarity, the obligation of holding one's own in competition with the neighbours.",
"annotation": "OK as someone who's been through infertility considerations, this feels like he's been grinding an axe here. He's right that children are not a silver bullet, but there's something staggeringly cold here that's making Dad seem like a mega-jerk. Is this Wyndham coming through. Ugh.",
"location": "15"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "It is not the least use pointing out that some of the world's most influential women, Elizabeth the First, Florence Nightingale, for instance, would actually have lost status had they become mums, in fact it is much wiser not to try. Babies, in a world that already has far too many, remain desirable.",
"annotation": "Not wrong, prefiguring the exhaustion of the planet argument by about 20 years",
"location": "15"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "Each new baby that comes along makes her feel more inadequate and inferior until I don't know, and I'm sure she no longer knows, how much she want a baby for itself, and how far it has become a sort of challenge",
"annotation": "It's possible, but man this is some unfeeling text",
"location": "16"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "So we had adopted Matthew. / For a time he seemed to be the answer. Mary adored him, and he certainly gave her plenty to do. And he enabled her to talk babies on an equal footing with the rest. / Or was it? Well, not Quite, perhaps... She began to get an impression that some babies confer a little more equality than other babies)",
"annotation": "Assuredly true, but wow, this is a pretty levelling criticism of bourgeois post-war society. Reminds me a lot of the South.",
"location": "16"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "It was all conveyed by the nicest, almost indetectably refined blend of sympathy and bitchiness../",
"annotation": "Per above, it IS the South :)",
"location": "16"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "'Oh, it's simple, enough. After all the arrangement of a calendar is just a convention ..' / \"But that's just what it isn't - not to a child, David. To an eleven-year-old it seems like a natural law -just as much as day and night, or the seasons. ... A week is a week, and it has seven days -\"",
"location": "20"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "I know you shouldn't crush a child's imagination, and all that, but what nobody tells you is how far is enough. There comes a stage when it begins to get a bit like conspiracy. I mean, if everyone goes around pretending to believe in things that aren't there, how on earth is a child going to learn, to distinguish what really is, from what really isn't?'",
"annotation": "Wyndham would have been astounded by the powers of denial of reality of the January 6 Trumpists! Apparently adults can fabulate at the level of children when they want to.",
"location": "28"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "When people live their lives by their beliefs objective reality is almost irrelevant.",
"annotation": "",
"location": "34"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Rocketry, she told Matthew, was simple (I think he meant naive)",
"location": "61"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "There are fears that we would strongly assert, and honestly believe, we have outgrown which, nevertheless, still lie dormant in all of us, ready to be aroused by a careless, unexpected word used at a critical moment. All the visit seemed to have done was to add an element of irrationality to Mary's anxiety.",
"location": "67"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "'I don't care about that,' she said. 'All I want is for him to be normally normal, not plus or minus anything I just want him to be happy.'",
"annotation": "There's something profound about parenting here. We hope for our children to be exceptional, but the awesome weight and burden of them truly being so is beyond our comprehension of knowing how to parent",
"location": "69"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "'It's safer to treat the unknown as inimical until it has proved itself Hence the instinctive opposition to change",
"location": "84"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Chocky thinks that; except where we've spoilt it, this is a very beautiful planet.",
"location": "108"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "I have been astonished before, and doubtless shall be again, how the kindliest and most sympathetic of women can pettify and downgrade the searing anguishes of childhood.",
"location": "118"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "Silence closed down again. After a time Polly found it irksome. She fidgeted. Presently she felt impelled to make conversation. She observed: \" When Twinklehooves was kidnapped they tried to turn him into a pit pony.\" 'Shut up,' I told her. \"Either shut up, or go away.\" She regarded me with hurt reproof, but decided to go away, in a huff.",
"annotation": "Not entirely father of the year material here",
"location": "127"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "For still longer we thought we were unique - the only intelligent form of life - a single, freakish pinpoint of reason in a vast, adventitious cosmos - utterly lonely in the horrid wastes of space...But intelligent life is rare...very rare indeed...For intelligent life is the only thing that gives meaning to the universe. It is a holy thing to be fostered and treasured.",
"location": "141"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Therefore, the nurture of all intelligent forms is a sacred duty. Even the merest spark of reason must be fanned in the hope of a flame. Frustrated intelligence must have its bonds broken. Narrow-channelled intelligence must be given the power to widen out. High intelligence must be learned from. That is why I have stayed here.",
"location": "142"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "But you still live in a finite, sun-based economy...you call that progress. It is not progress. Progress is an advance towards an objective. What is your objective? You do not know, and since you do not know, you might as well be going round in a circle - which, indeed, is just what you are doing, for you are squandering your sources of power. And they are your capital: when they are spent you will be back where you were before you found them. This is not progress, it is profligacy.",
"annotation": "It's definitely eco-aware, but it's an acceptance that inefficient power caches must be used to mobilize and effectively use efficient and ecologically correct power sources.",
"location": "142"
},
{
"type": "Note",
"highlight": "Intelligent forms are rare. In each form they owe a duty to all other forms. Moreover, some forms are complementary. No one can assess the potentialities that are latent in any intelligent form. Today we can help you over some obstacles; it may be you will so develop that in some future time you will be able to help us, or others, over obstacles.",
"annotation": "Shades of Arrival",
"location": "144"
}
]
}