The Chrysalids
By John Wyndham
Author: John Wyndham
Rating: ★★★★½
The Chrysalids is a really engaging and insightful tale about the emergence of a new subspecies of human within a theocratic state that has risen to power after the loosely-defined disaster of a Tribulation some time in recent history. It has many of the genetic markers of proto-YA literature that has become robust in the post-Harry Potter era and which includes Percy Jackson and dozens of other sagas i which the youth awaken to a power latent within them that adults cannot or will not tolerate. As we join the story, the narrator’s father is a patriarch within the theocracy and is a vehement axe-man against “Deviations:” stock, crop, or human whose phenotypic expression suggests corruption via the latent effects of the Tribulation (i.e. “mutants”). Much as Scout narrates a corrupt society innocently in To Kill a Mockingbird, David blindly narrates, blithely, the horrors of this genetic aristocracy. Motifs of The Crucible and The Lottery manifest to crank tension and peril.
Apparently this story was commonly used within Canada for high school reading, so I was interested to discover both British Columbian and Ontarians who knew the story before I recommended it. I recommend doing no research on the book, there are a delightful series of reveals that are better experienced unspoiled. As such, I’ll not say much or anything about the plot here. Instead I’ll make a few notes about how this particular story contrasts with the style of writing Wyndham presented in Chocky.
First, the outright misogynistic voice is missing. This leads me to ask whether that was a feature of the narrator of the book or Wyndham himself. There are a few spots where some woman/woman competition are narrated, but don’t have judgement associated with them. We do see women assessing each other via their progeny in one tense scene and we also see two women assessing each other in a near-erotic context where they compare their use value in the theocracy in terms of their desirability. These are brief, though. I don’t think Wyndham had the proopensity or talent of empathy for considering the subtle mechanics here thoroughly.
Second, much of the text features a warmer voice. Some decidedly romantic / erotic sentiments emerge in passages like this:
I loved the girl one could see. I loved her tall slim shape, the poise of her neck, her small, pointed breasts, her long, slim legs: and the way she moved, and the sureness of her hands, and her lips when she smiled. I loved the bronze-gold hair that felt like heavy silk in one’s hand, her satin-skinned shoulders, her velvet cheeks: and the warmth of her body, and the scent of her breath.
Third, and perhaps most important when considering Wyndham’s place as an “important” writer of sci-fi: with this book, I could now argue for him to be one of the earliest, biophilic sci-fi authors of change within nature as cosmic horror. This would put him as a conceptual predecessor to Jeff VanderMeer whose Nature-as-Lovecraftian-Cosmic-Horror in The Southern Reach. This comment should, in no way, diminish the originality that both authors brought through their works. Rather, they are both embracing, advancing, celebrating, and showing the adaptability of Ovid’s song of change, The Metaphorphoses — the original body horror — insofar as it tells of “change being in new forms” battling against eldritch, unassailable forces (e.g. the gods).
Lastly, I think this book works very well as a novel a clef. In a story of youth dealing with mutation that doesn’t conform to their parents’ or society’s expectation, it’s great to have more books offering fictional escape for those who are different in faith, gender, or passion.
All told, I very much enjoyed the book and would recommend it as a perfect book for a summer outing to the shore, lake, or couch.
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"title": "The Chrysalids",
"author": "John Wyndham",
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"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "This was a time when I passed out of a placid period into one where things kept on happening. There wasn't much reason about it; that is to say, only a few of the things were connected with one another: it was more as if an active cycle had set in, just as a spell of different weather might come along.",
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"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "It was our first act as a group; it made us a group by its formal admission of our responsibilities towards one another. It changed our lives by marking our first step in corporate self-preservation, though we understood little of that at the time.",
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"highlight": "The expression on his face made something clutch suddenly in my chest. I had never seen hatred naked before, the lines cut deep, the eyes glittering, the teeth suddenly looking like a savage animal's. It struck me with a slap, a horrid revelation of something hitherto unknown, and hideous; it stamped itself on my mind so that I never forgot it.",
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"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "me. \"What can it have been - this terrible thing that must have happened? And why? I can almost understand that God, made angry, might destroy all living things, or the world itself, but I don't understand this instability, this mess of deviations - it makes no sense.\"",
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"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Three or four miles farther on we came out into more open country, but not like any region we had seen before. It was dotted with bushes, and brakes, and thickets. Most of the grass was coarse and large-leafed: in some places it was monstrous, growing into giant tufts where the sharp-edged blades stood eight or ten feet high. We wound our way among them, keeping generally south-west, for another couple of hours. Then we pushed into a copse of queer but fair-sized trees. It offered a good hiding-place, and inside were several open spaces where there grew a more ordinary kind of...",
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"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Rosalind was calling me; the real Rosalind, the one who dwelt inside, and showed herself too seldom. The other, the practical, capable one, was her own convincing creation, not herself. I had seen her begin to build it when she was a sensitive, fearful, yet determined child. She became aware by instinct, perhaps sooner than the rest of us, that she was in a hostile world, and deliberately equipped herself to face it. The armour had grown slowly, plate by plate. I had seen her find her weapons and become skilled with them, watched her construct a character so thoroughly and wear it so constantly that for spells she almost deceived herself.",
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"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "I loved the girl one could see. I loved her tall slim shape, the poise of her neck, her small, pointed breasts, her long, slim legs: and the way she moved, and the sureness of her hands, and her lips when she smiled. I loved the bronze-gold hair that felt like heavy silk in one's hand, her satin-skinned shoulders, her velvet cheeks: and the warmth of her body, and the scent of her breath.",
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "But now it was the under-Rosalind calling gently, forlornly, all amour thrown aside, the heart naked. / And again there are no words.",
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"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "They weren't God's last word like they thought: God doesn't have any last word. If He did He'd be dead. But He isn't dead; and He changes and grows, like everything else that's alive. So when they were doing their best to get everything fixed and tidy on some kind of eternal lines they'd thought up for themselves, He sent along Tribulation to bust it up and remind 'em that life is change.",
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"highlight": "they were shut off still more by different languages, and different beliefs. Some of them could think individually, but they had to remain individuals. Emotions they could sometimes share, but they could not think collectively. When their conditions were primitive they could get along all right, as the animals can; but the more complex they made their world, the less capable they were of dealing with it. They had no means of consensus. They learnt to co-operate constructively in small units; but only destructively in large units. They aspired greedily, and then refused to face the responsibilities they had created. They created vast problems, and then buried their heads in the sands of idle faith. There was, you see, no real communication, no understanding between them. They could, at their best, be near-sublime animals, but not more",
"annotation": "'near-sublime animals' is stellar for our phase of mankind. And i daresay we're not all that sublime",
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"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "...we worry them more than the usual deviants because they've no way of identifying us. I fancy they must be suspecting that there are a lot more of us that they haven't discovered, and they want to get hold of us to make us tell.",
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"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "To be any kind of deviant is to be hurt - always...",
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"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "'Let him be Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They are the crown of creation, they are ambition fulfilled - they have nowhere more to go. But life is change, that is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature. Who, then, were the recent lords of creation, that they should expect to remain unchanged?'",
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "'The living form defies evolution at its peril; if it does not adapt, it will be broken. The idea of completed man is the supreme vanity; the finished image is a sacrilegious myth.'",
"location": "184"
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "'The Old People brought down Tribulation, and were broken into fragments by it. Your father and his kind are a part of those fragments. They have become history without being aware of it They are determined still that there is a final form to defend: soon they will attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is granted - a place among the fossils'",
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "'There is comfort in a mother's breast, but there has to be a weaning. The attainment of independence, the severing of ties, is, at best, a bleak process for both sides; but it is necessary, even though each may grudge it and hold it against the other. The cord has been cut at the other end already; it will only be a futile entanglement if you do not cut it at your end, too.'",
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "We have a new world to conquer: they have only a lost cause to lose",
"location": "185"
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "'It is not pleasant to kill any creature,' she agreed, but to pretend that one can live without doing so is self-deception. There has to be meat in the dish, there have to be vegetables forbidden to flower, seeds forbidden to germinate; even the cycles of microbes must be sacrificed for us to continue our cycles. It is neither shameful nor shocking that it should be so; it is simply a part of the great revolving wheel of natural economy. And just as we have to keep ourselves alive in these ways, so, too, we have to preserve our species against other species that wish to destroy it - or else fail in that trust.'",
"location": "198"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "'The unhappy Fringes people were condemned through no act of their own to a life of squalor and misery - there could be no future for them. As for those who condemned them - well, that, too, is the way of it. There have been lords of life before, you know. Did you ever hear of the great lizards? When the time came for them to be superseded they had to pass away. 'Sometime there will come a day when we ourselves shall have to give place to a new thing. Very certainly we shall struggle against the inevitable just as these remnants of the Old People do. We shall try with all our strength to grind it back into the earth from which it is emerging, for treachery to one's own species must always seem a crime. We shall force it to prove itself, and when it does, we shall go; as, by the same process, these are going.'",
"location": "198"
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "'In loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our rise; in loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction.'",
"location": "198"
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Your minds are confused by your ties and your upbringing. You are still half thinking of them as the same kind as yourselves. That is why you are shocked. And that is why they have you at a disadvantage, for they are not confused. They are alert, corporately aware of danger to their species. They can see quite well that if it is to survive they have not only to preserve it from deterioration, but they must protect it from the even more serious threat of the superior variant. For ours is a superior variant, and we are only just beginning.",
"location": "199"
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