And You, Our Triffids,
Please Do Go Gentle Into That Good Night
by June Pulliam
Clark, Simon. Night of the Triffids. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2001. 469 p.
Night of the Triffids is a continuation of the 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids by the late John Wyndham. In this sequel, Simon Clark picks up the tale twenty five years later. Humans have long ago ceased to be at the top of the food chain, having been supplanted by the Triffids (for those of you who did not see the film or read the original by Wyndham, these are ambulatory trees with a collective intelligence and flagellant stingers containing a lethal poison lethal to humans). Created in the cold war era by Soviet scientists, they rapidly evolved to take over the earth, like some form of sentient kudzu, and eventually they topple civilization.
Clark's novel picks up in this post apocalyptic world where humans are struggling to recreate civilization in various pockets of the globe. Pilot David Madsen has recently left the British Isles to join a flourishing colony on the Isle of Wight, when the world is on the edge of yet another ecological disaster: the sun's rays no longer penetrate earth's atmosphere, threatening the existence of human and triffids alike. David sets off on a journey to discover the source of this new phenomena, but his plane crashes, stranding him on another triffids-infested island, and he is soon "rescued" by explorers from the Manhattan colony.
At first, David believes himself to be fortunate, since his own colony's resources were too meager to launch a search for him. But soon he realizes that he is his host's prisoner when the Manhattenites take him to their colony and keep inventing new excuses as to why they can't return him to the Isle of Wight. The Manhattan colony is, at first, a relatively luxurious "prison." Whereas the colonies in the British isles are simple rural units, this colony isn't that much different from the old New York before the triffids took over the world. Food is plentiful, people ride around in cars and wear new clothes, and there's even television. But this plenty comes at a price. The Manhattan colony is a sort of new Old South, where the privileged few live at the expense of others who are enslaved and contained below 102nd street. These people do the menial labor, and the healthy women are kept locked away and repeatedly impregnated in order to increase the dwindling numbers of the human race.
Clark is a natural for continuing Wyndham's apocalyptic tale of Mother Nature's revenge, since he's really been writing the same novel all along in much of his work. Blood Crazy and Nailed by the Heart are the two such examples. In Blood Crazy, everyone over 20 is affected by some strange genetic mutation, which gives them the irresistible desire to kill the young. Civilization as we know it comes to a halt as the surviving young people are left to care for one another while outwitting their former protectors now bent on their savage destruction. And in Nailed by the Heart, a smaller civilization, one found in the village of an isolated British isle, is threatened by some ancient stone warriors from the deep.
Alas, Night of the Triffids lacks the power of these other two novels. I don't think its due to the monsters. Granted, the triffids are rather absurd. I live in the subtropics in the deep south, and have never found large and abundant vegetation all that threatening. The thought of ambulatory trees with lashing stingers just strikes me as laughable rather than terrifying. However, the plots of Blood Crazy and Nailed by the Heart are equally silly on the surface. The monsters in Nailed by the Heart look like those gigantic Easter Island heads come to life. Nevertheless, these two novels were genuinely disturbing, perhaps due to Clark's ability to develop characters whose fear is palpable. Night of the Triffids is a bit too action/adventure oriented to generate this same level of fear. The characters spend too much time flitting about to think much about anything terribly frightening. And David Madsen's nemesis, Torrence, leader of the predatory Manhattan colony, is also not very frightening with his Brave New World plans for the future. Again, this lack of horror is due to a lack of character development. It's difficult to feel disturbed when the character isn't enough of a presence to be sympathetic or truly villainous.
A final problem is introduced with Clark's representation of American dialect. David Masden travels from the Manhattan colony to another in the deep south, somewhere off the outer banks of the Carolinas. While Clark doesn't seem to actively represent dialect at all (for which I am thankful, as few things are as annoying as someone trying to represent a southern accent), Britishisms occasionally creep into the characters' language nonetheless. For example, at one point, a Southerner utters "dashed bad luck" in response to something that doesn't please him. This doesn't make much sense, since these various groups of people have been radically isolated from one another for the past quarter of a century, so they would have more than likely developed ways of speaking that are more distinct, not a pastiche of accents.
Fans of Wyndham's novel will want to read Night of the Triffids, but people looking for something truly frightening will be bloody well cussin' their dashed bad luck.