Bill Masen wakes up in the hospital on the day the bandages are set to be removed from his eyes only to discover that there is no one coming to help. The call button does nothing, nor does screaming at the top of his lungs. Eventually, Bill removes the bandages himself to find that his vision has returned, but the world as he knew it has completely changed. A meteor shower the night before has seemingly left everyone who saw it permanently blinded. Now, they roam the streets of London uncertainly, groping and grasping for food and other necessities, desperate to survive. Bill’s sightedness is both the ultimate advantage and a difference that makes him a target, as the blinded will do anything to attach themselves to a sighted person and make them help.
Bill and the other sighted people he encounters, including a reformed party-girl author he quickly falls in love with, have some difficult decisions to make. What is the best way to ensure their survival? Is it to abandon the blinded and save themselves, or to do their best for all of humanity? Should they rebuild a society along the old lines, or try to come up with something better?
In his old life, Bill was a biologist who studied a new, invasive plant species called the triffid. These plants have the ability to walk and seemingly communicate with each other, and they possess the ability to sting people in ways that can disable or kill them. (A triffid sting is what landed Bill in the hospital in the first place.) Humanity was only able to control the triffid population (which was tolerated because of a valuable seed oil extract) because it had the advantage of sight. Now, in the new way of the world, Triffids are infinitely more dangerous, a warning that Bill keeps making and which few others heed.
The Day of the Triffids is carried along by an intriguing premise and the engaging first-person narration, but even at only 235 pages, the story seems to drag on a bit too long. There is a lot of repetitive business about Bill encountering one small group of survivors or another, and seeing how they plan to get on with things, etc etc etc. And for all it’s frank talk about sex and the need for reproduction, the relationship between Bill and his new-found author girlfriend Josella is very rushed and underdeveloped.
I also couldn’t help but wonder how blind readers of the novel would feel about the book. Obviously, there’s the caveat that the blindness in this story happens suddenly and to so many that it becomes overwhelming, but Wyndham’s constant description of blindness as a terrible fate rendering people helpless is a bit much, let’s say.
Still, there is enough in Wyndham’s novel for the modern reader to recognize and sanction its status as a classic work of apocalyptic fiction.
