Galaxy reviewer Groff Conklin praised the novel as "so skillfully done that the fact that it's not a shiny new idea makes absolutely no difference". [14] Anthony Boucher similarly found the novel made "something completely fresh" out of a familiar theme, commending Wyndham's "accumulation of minutely plausible detail" and "greater depth and maturity than he has shown in previous novels". [15] Writing in Astounding, P. Schuyler Miller reported that Wyndham "has made the Mutant theme believable in a way that Odd John, Slan and the stories of the Baldies never quite were". [16] Well let's be honest, who reads the same book twice in one year, erm me, it appears. It seems like déja vu but I had no intention of reading it again this year, until the group Apocalypse Whenever nominated it as their (our) December Book Club Read. While The Day of the Triffids is Wyndham’s best known work, The Chrysalids is often cited as his best. It is not hard to see why. Beside being a fast paced thrilling story the underlying message of the story is also heartfelt. The book is clearly a metaphor for the plight of ethnic minorities and the disenfranchised. Compared to the other Wyndhams that I have read The Chrysalids is the most compassionate. The plea for tolerance is already evident early on in the book where the narrative focuses on a charming innocuous friendship between the outwardly normal David Strorm and a nice little girl called Sophie. Sophie is almost normal except for a small extra toe on each foot. Once her “deviancy” is discovered the friendship has to come to an abrupt end and she has to go on the run with her family. The inland village of Waknuk ( Wabush) is in southwestern Labrador. Labrador has become a much warmer place in the fictional future, with large tracts of arable land. Rigo ( Rigolet) is the capital of Labrador and the fictional government in the book, a fairly large river town near the east coast. The port of Lark ( Lark Harbour) is mentioned as a way-point on the west coast of the island of Newf ( Newfoundland) where sailors may obtain provisions.

While David has been taught this definition, he has not internalized it, and he sees no problem with the fact that Sophie has six toes. He does his best to protect her, but eventually a boy named Alan sees her six-toed footprint and reports it to the authorities. Sophie and her family are forced to flee, and David learns to take deviations from the norm seriously. It is easy to imagine how this apoplectic setting could have created controversies at the time of its release because after all only a decade earlier the world had suffered World War II, and the horrors were still fresh. But what appalled me most is that even after five decades nothing has changed and people are still trying to overpower each other, still committing heinous crime against each other in the name of religion and superiority. So everyone in this community has a stamp of approval that they fit the image of god in all their looks. But what happens if there is a variation that an inspector cannot see? David learns from an early age that he can communicate with a small group of others telepathically. This small group of children band together in their fear and strategise to hide their differences in fear for their lives. But all is changed when people notice their strange behaviour when one of their kind is hurt and they come to their rescue with no seemingly way of knowing that the person was injured.David tells his telepathic community of friends, via thoughts, about the incident with Sophie. In a conversation with the Inspector, David finds out Sophie and her parents were caught. Later, David confides in Uncle Axel and tells him that he wants to run away because he feels scared about his own deviance from the norm. Uncle Axel convinces David not to run away until he is older, and reasons that no one really knows what the real norm of humanity is. Axel bases this knowledge on his experience as a sailor, where he heard about numerous other societies with mutations that they thought were the norm. Uncle Axel also talks of the geographical aspects of Waknuk and the surrounding badlands. Many years have passed since a devastating nuclear war left much of the world in ruins. A small village in northern Labrador comprised of religious fundamentalists is on the lookout for what they call “deviations” - food, animals or even people who deviate from the socially acceptable norm. Once these deviations have been discovered, it is either to be destroyed on the spot or if you’re one of the few people born with a deformity, sterilized and banished from the community, destined to live in what they call “The Fringes”. When the community discovers that David and Rosalind together with a small group of other young people have developed the ability to communicate telepathically, they are forced to flee for their lives. They are re-united with their friend Sophie, earlier banished to the Fringes for the disgusting aberration of having six toes instead of the normal five. David's younger sister, Petra, able to communicate her thoughts with a power and at a distance far beyond any of the other children discovers the presence of others like them in a distant community who mount a campaign to rescue the children from their persecutors. David, Rosalind, and Petra have been kidnapped by the Fringes people and are being taken to meet the Fringes leaders. The Fringe people are not all as strange-looking as David expected: they mostly just look dirty. Michael is with the army of people from Waknuk and is updating David on the army’s whereabouts. According to Petra, the Sealand people are going to rescue them, but Michael is skeptical. David meets Gordon Strorm/the spider-man again, who is the leader of the Fringes group. David fights Gordon because Gordon wants to take Rosalind to bear his children. David is thrown out of the Fringes encampment; Rosalind and Petra are kept there as prisoners.

The Chrysalids is set in a future world some centuries, perhaps even millennia, after civilisation has been destroyed in a nuclear war. We aren’t specifically told what happened, but it’s clear from numerous references in the book. When Wyndham wrote this novel in the mid-1950s, nuclear war was the favoured means by which the apocalypse was delivered in literature. Nowadays of course it has lost popularity to pandemics and climate change.Aside from the disparaging remark about animals, whom I tend to respect more than I do humans as a species, this is such a damning view of us Old People, yet so spot-on. Even written in the 50s, it's clear that we as people and societies and other groups, are not learning. Most post-apocalyptic fiction, that I've read anyway, is entirely plausible (though Day of the Triffids is a bit odd in that respect): it's easy enough to follow the path we are on, all the paths, to their worst conclusion. What the people of Zealand are really saying is that communication leads to understanding leads to co-operation and can avert catastrophe. The story is set in Labrador, Canada, which in the book has a warmer climate than today. The inhabitants are famers with a technology roughly equivalent to early 18th century Europe. They are aware that “the old people” once had a more advanced civilisation but believe God sent “tribulation” to punish humanity for its sinfulness. They are also ruled by a harsh form of Christianity that is focused on the destruction of “deviations” or “mutants”, whether human, animal or plant life. Radiation residues cause genetic abnormalities which the Church believes are the work of the Devil. The women of Labrador sew large Christian crosses onto their dresses, in the hope they can ward off the Devil and give birth to children “in the true image of God.” As might be expected in such a society, it is women who get the blame when things don’t go to plan. To the south of the settled area lies “The Fringes” where genetic variations are more common, and further south again are “The Badlands”, which are still uninhabitable as a result of the nuclear holocaust. Perhaps the best sound-bite from the anti-evolution camp is the one about the tornado. If a tornado hit a junkyard, how likely is it that it would randomly create a 747? I was surprised to learn the other day that the line originally comes from Fred Hoyle, the brilliant but eccentric astrophysicist who also coined the phrase "Big Bang". Of course, it's not a fair comparison. The whole point, as everyone from Darwin onward has explained, is that evolution isn't a one-shot process; it's the result of a gigantic number of tiny incremental steps, where Nature each time throws away nearly all the results as unpromising and keeps only the few that gave something worthwhile. David introduces John Wender, Sophie’s father, with whom he has a serious “man to man” understanding. David reflects that years later he could appreciate how grave the situation was for the Wenders, given that David knew their secret and was the son of one of the most powerful men. On the way home, David suddenly realizes that in his religion’s texts, it states that any person who falls outside of the guidelines of the correct number of body parts, etc., is not considered human and is considered a “Blasphemy against God.” David is puzzled and perturbed: he does not understand how it would be possible that Sophie is not an ordinary little girl.