Sean Barrs 's Reviews > The Day of the Triffids

The Day of the Triffids is an intelligent novel with many notable themes, but it's let down by its bland characters.

It discusses ecology, the importance of environmental circumstances in the formation of differing societies and the corruptibility of humans. At the heart of things though, it is a novel of survival in a world overrun with deadly and murderous plants (the Triffids.) It’s an iconic piece of writing, and it has a lot going for it; however, it fails to deliver a certain sense of feeling within the story.

It all feels rather cold. Now I’m not talking about the more cunning characters who have set up their own post-apocalyptic society upon the labour of the impoverished and the blind, but the central cast: the protagonist especially. I found Bill to be rather detached from the events that were happening, and at times he felt like a bystander. Sure, he is a rather ordinary person though he drifts from group to group, and situation to situation, as a matter of circumstance. He certainly does not drive the story forward and I found it rather difficult to invest in him or to care about his actual fate.

This is a common criticism of mine for science-fiction of the era; it just lacks this vital ingredient that makes effective storytelling so compelling. The balance is often off between great ideas and well written characters. Indeed, it’s the narration on the follies of humans and the collapse of society that made the novel engaging. And it’s why the book is so famous. The Triffids are the immediate and obvious threat to the survival of mankind, but the real enemy lurks within because it is humans that are the real threat to their own survival. They were unprepared for something so monumental, and if history teaches us anything, they will fight each other for just about any reason.

“It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.”

There is a certain sense of realism within this with its feudal societies and distinct personalities that establish ideas of how man would actually behave in such an apocalypse. And I think this idea has been copied (or at least mirrored) by consequential works that clearly have drawn inspiration from this story. I see a lot of this book in survival horrors such as The Road, The Death of Grass and even in The Walking Dead. It clearly is an important piece of writing that has been crucial in helping establish a genre.

It's an interesting read and I am glad I finally did read it, but there is something important missing within its pages. And although I enjoyed reading about the themes and ideas it discusses, I know I would have enjoyed it more had the protagonist been a little bit more compelling.

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