On "The Chrysalids"

And what I think about New Zealand and John Rawls

1. “In the pause one became aware of the uncanniness of the silence all about us. There was not a sound to be heard now. Not a movement. Even the leaves on the trees were unable to rustle.”

The night after I finished reading John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, I woke at 3am from a nightmare whose content mostly evades me now. What is left in my memory is an unintelligible blur of images from the book—horses trotting through a forest of distorted trees; a woman drowning in a river; a leering man with spider-like limbs. I stared out the window for a while, and watched the branches rock gently from side to side until I drifted into a happier kind of sleep. 

What I think is most unnerving about The Chrysalids is that it is recognisable. A lot of science fiction isn’t really—there are robots and teleportation and aliens zapping people out of the sky. Maybe Wyndham notices this, because he takes great pains to capture ordinary human experience alongside imagined things. In this way, all of the novel’s haunting, dystopian cruelty comes to live uncomfortably close to us.

We can examine the following moment in the text. There is a character named Sophie who has six toes on each foot. She lives in a place called Waknuk, where genetic deviants are hunted down and exiled, and hides her feet from the town to avoid punishment. Early in the novel, David (the narrator) and Sophie wade in a rock pool: “She stood there for a thoughtful moment, looking down through the water at her foot on the washed pebbles.” They sit in the sun afterwards, with Sophie’s digressive limbs exposed on the flat rock. “They’re not really horrible, are they?” she asks David.¹

Sophie is scared of some things that I don’t relate to. She worries about being reported to the government, sterilised, exiled. These are fictional, distant threats to most of us. When similar anxieties are presented in 1984 or The Hunger Games, we empathise with a generalised experience of fear, but not in any specific way with the content of that fear. 

But Sophie, unlike Winston or Katniss, is also scared of many things I do relate to. She worries about being judged or excluded, and about deviating from others in some fundamental way. “They’re not really horrible, are they?” reads perhaps even more poignantly today—in a century of fragility and self-consciousness—than it did in 1955. 

Through whisking together distant anxieties and known ones, Wyndham makes his characters’ interior lives more legible. We can understand Sophie’s experience (and David’s, and Rosalind’s) as an intense permutation of the feelings we experience often. And so if alarming things can happen to Sophie—who thinks and worries like us, who gazes down at her body with the same unease—maybe they can happen to us too.

This careful cultivation of empathy is what makes the novel beautiful, particularly within a genre that can feel jarringly detached from real life. It is also what keeps me up at night. 


2. “But, Uncle, if we don’t try to be like the Old People and rebuild the things that have been lost, what can we do?”

“Well, we might try being ourselves, and build for the world that is, instead of for the one that’s gone.” 

What kind of society does Wyndham think is good? As could be said of many dystopian novels, the opposite question is easier to answer—Wyndham argues against eugenics, dogmatic theology, totalitarianism, unquestioning orthodoxy, probably GMOs. 

And yet, I think the positive version of the question is both more interesting and more useful. Most dystopian writing either doesn’t attempt to construct a theory of what society should be, or does so in such a generalised fashion that we cannot possibly glean anything tangible from it.² The Giver ends with Jonas sledding down a hill, away from the colourless authoritarian dystopia in which he grew up, and into a hazily portrayed land of warmth and noise. The passage defies analysis in a somewhat frustrating way. Are we to assume Lowry is warning us against murdering twin babies, eliminating historical memory, and removing colour from the world? These are not popular policy suggestions. Maybe she is merely illustrating the importance of preserving imperfection and allowing for dissent—though these, in the abstract, are difficult to map onto real political questions. I think probably the least upsetting (though still deeply unsatisfying) way to read The Giver is through an almost Schillerian lens—to appreciate the form and beauty of the novel devoid of any political content.

The Chrysalids gives us slightly more: Wyndham engages thoughtfully, if inconclusively; with the sacrifices inherent to good governance. Each of his three societies contains good, bad, and ambiguous features. Waknuk (the authoritarian mutation-crushing world) is brutal and unthinking, but at least not entirely unfeeling. The mothers, and some fathers, care about their abnormal children and try to raise them well. The Fringes are freer than Waknuk, but equally violent, more disorderly, and more desperate.³ And then there is Wyndham’s fictionalised version of New Zealand—a bright, humming land that David sees in his childhood dreams—from which we crave a kind of moral perfection. This craving is ultimately denied. The New Zealanders, with all their cutting efficiency, treat their less advanced counterparts as subhuman, strangling hundreds to death with floating white filament.⁴ 

I think we are meant to feel ambivalently about each of Wyndham’s civilisations. Order is often oppressive; freedom is often chaotic; modernity can be arrogant and cruel. Wyndham doesn’t offer up a policy prescription that reconciles these problems—how could he?

He does, I think, argue this: At the core of politics is a desire for expression. People adapt over time, and politics should too. We are naturally protective towards our own kind—how we define a ‘kind’ is malleable, but an entirely universal, cosmopolitan concept of obligation is likely not possible. No society is perfect, though some societies are better than others. We ought to try to make the bad places better, even when it is tempting to abandon them entirely.


3. “We do not need laws which treat living forms as though they were indistinguishable as bricks.”

Michael John Harrison’s introduction to The Chrysalids places the book in the legacy of Huxley, Orwell, and C.S. Lewis. He writes that Wyndham “made fiction in an unashamedly ideological space: he made polemics” (v). 

I don’t agree that this novel is polemical. It is more delicate than that—Wyndham grasps beautifully, but hesitantly, at theories of freedom and justice. “We might try being ourselves,” as quoted above, is a touchingly uncertain answer to a heavy question.

What’s more, many important parts of the book are free of political content (to the extent that anything can be free of political content). There are small things—Wyndham’s precise representation of childhood, his thoughtful imagery of “frozen ocean[s] of ink.” And there are larger things—Wyndham’s description of telepathy made me think for a while about how constrictive language can be. He cultivates an unexpected longing to express oneself without words. (“When there is [love], where is the word? There is only the inadequacy of the word that exists.”)

Many of us spend a remarkable amount of time thinking about ideology, both in literary criticism and in life. (Consider, for example, my 500-word speculation on Wyndham’s ideal society just above.) This is not without function. But sometimes politics does treat people as indistinguishable bricks. And sometimes, during these clinical dissections, we forget the most interesting things—the fragments that cannot be assimilated into some unified explanation of what is good, but which are beautiful nonetheless. If you get hold of The Chrysalids, I think it is worth reading a little more slowly than necessary. You might miss the best stuff otherwise.

1. Both David and Sophie are children at this point. The moment is infused with a kind of tender newness—they test each other gingerly to figure out where tolerance ends and judgement begins. Fragile moments, such as this, linger for longer in my mind than the few paragraphs they are allocated.

2. Interestingly, a lot of political philosophy is similarly ambiguous. Marx writes wonderfully incisive criticism, but provides only the silhouette of what his communist utopia would look like. Rawls is a little better. He creates a lot of rules, such as: “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others.” But I think A Theory of Justice takes its title too seriously. It is sometimes pathologically theoretical, and when scrutinised, becomes so abstract that it cannot possibly adhere itself to any policy in the real world. Who counts as a person? How do we know when one person’s freedom infringes upon another’s? If I yell at my child, and he cries, is he free? If the government bans me from yelling at my child, am I free? How do we weigh liberties against one another—and if these liberties can be weighed and conditioned and taken away at will, are we really treating them as liberties at all? The theory doesn’t help us reason through the grey, mutually unsatisfying questions that are at the heart of politics. And then there is Sir Thomas More, the first to use the word ‘utopia,’ who writes an incredibly thorough account of a fictional society. But we aren’t sure whether More thinks this society is good or bad or somewhere in between, which seems to defeat the exercise entirely. I find these ambiguities are more problematic in the context of political philosophy than they are in literature given what the first genre claims to achieve.

3. One of the most interesting parts is when David discovers that some deviances aren’t as clean and palatable as he might like. He too is disturbed by misshapen trees and angry people. We begin to question, as liberal readers, whether our alleged comfort with difference derives from genuine tolerance or merely from the fact that we don’t view different religions or races or bodies as sufficiently different from our own.

4. “They failed to move in the breeze as webs would,” Wyndham writes, as his narrator observes the hundreds of dead people, wrapped in deadly fibres and frozen still. In my mind, this image captures the unmoving horror—both of violence and of moral disappointment.