Week Forty-Six - Jeanette

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham (1955)

Recommended by Sharron

The Cuckoo Sister, The Secret Garden, Moondial, The Children Of Green Knowe, the decidedly patchy Dramarama… I loved the one-off and short-run children’s TV dramas of the 1980s. Even the ‘school programmes’, the ones ruined by puppets teaching you what a consonant was (How We Used To Live, Dark Towers, The Boy From Space) – all amazing.

Many of these shows had a spooky sci-fi element to them, so it’s no surprise that John Wyndham had a foothold in this market. While The Day Of The Triffids was a big(gish) budget thing on the BBC at 9pm that I wasn’t allowed to watch (‘Muuuuuuum… how scary can it be?’ ‘You won’t like it. You’re scared of the Smash advert aliens’), Chocky, and its sequels, Chocky’s Children and Chocky’s Challenge, were on at squash-and-Club-biscuit time. I watched all three.

It’s surprising that The Chrysalids never got made into a kids’ TV drama, too. It has all the golden elements of that era – psychic power, a future dystopia, social comment about tolerance – and a very believable boy hero. I can picture the title sequence; a neon green BBC Micro font over a Lidl Delia Derbyshire soundtrack.

The Chrysalids is set generations after the world has suffered Tribulation (a Nausicaä-style environmental crisis). Much of the earth is now uninhabitable; the Badlands are barren, while the Fringes are full of semi-feral beings. In the supposedly civilised areas, society is strongly theocratic. People believe (or at least are told) that the Tribulation was dealt directly by God.

This God is a vengeful God, and nothing apparently riles Him more than irregular flora and fauna. Genetic deviations occur far more frequently now than they did before Tribulation, and this brave new world is anti-evolutionary and eugenic. If any animal, plant, or person, is deemed physically nonstandard then it is immediately culled. The reasons for this are never explicitly stated, but it seems partly as a method of societal control, partly out of a pragmatic but misplaced concern that allowing different takes on humanity will weaken it, and partly out of a genuine religious impulse.

There is a Definition of Man that every citizen is expected to know off-by-heart.

‘…and each leg shall be jointed twice and have one foot, and each foot five toes, and each toe shall end with a flat nail…’

I was reminded of H.G. Wells’s The Island Of Dr. Moreau. In that, sad vivisected animals have it drummed into them that they are human. In The Chrysalids, recognisable humans have it drummed into them that, because of something as minor as a hairless head, they are not. In both of these books, humanity is fluid. It is in itself a man-made concept, defined according to the requirements of society. What we may think of as fundamentally natural – our very status as people – can be successfully cast aside by ideological regimes.

As with real-life fascism, the most powerful tools of government are not its soldiers. It’s the everyday zealots and the quiet majority. Joseph Strorm, father to the book’s sensitive boy narrator Davie, is all Piper-Laurie-in-Carrie: a God squadder who skirts over the be-kind-to-the-unfortunates aspect of religion and uses his faith to dominate his family. In one memorable scene, Davie is struggling with a task, and shouts in frustration.

                             ‘I could have managed it all right by myself if I’d had another hand.’

My voice must have carried, for silence fell on the whole room like a clap.

[…]

I was aware that the rest had stopped gaping at me, and were now looking apprehensively at my father. His expression was grim.

‘You – my own son – were calling upon the Devil to give you another hand!’

Joseph Strorm soon has bigger problems on his (two) hands. Genetic mutations are not only physical, it seems. Davie and his baby sister Petra have extraordinary mind powers.

                              ‘You hear the words inside your head?’ he asked.

‘Well, not exactly “hear”, and not exactly “see”,’ I told him. ‘There are – well, sort of shapes.’

Those with this mental variation are able to communicate with each other, undetected by others. The second half of The Chrysalids concentrates on the relationships within this group of psychics, and of the increasing danger of discovery.

I liked the second half less than the first. I wonder why.

It’s nearly as well-written, however there do seem to be a few more portentous speeches, and some tiresome dashing around the Fringes, which didn’t hold my interest. But I think it’s more to do with the way the telepathy itself is brought out.

I’ve discussed the unexplained a little with Sharron, who goodness me is only Sharron Kraus, one of the country’s finest and most consistently evolving folk artists.

When I first met her, it was in an Oxford graveyard. I interviewed her there for Seasons They Change. As we discussed the influence of cinema and literature on her music, she talked about magic in everyday life. This wasn’t in a Harry Potter­-esque childish fantasy way, or couched in spaced-out hippy lingo, both of which are easy to dismiss. Rather, she has both an academic philosophy background, and a reflective nature which is happy with ambiguity. She is interested in the way that the dark mysteries of thought processes, of the natural world, of emotional connections, manifest themselves. Some things, she said to me, they just may make the most sense as a magical phenomenon. This is an influence on her, and funnily enough I hear it most in her wordless songs.

I remember the next time I saw her, which was just after submitting the Seasons manuscript. I went to Wales to stay for a wonderful few days. Our natters really rambled free. For instance, we discussed Lady Gaga at length. Her manipulation of image – did it mean anything? Did its very hollowness mean anything? Was the sexual element really that confrontational, when Gaga has a very conventional celebrity body type? After eighteen months of using my brain almost exclusively for psychedelic folk, this conversation was the mental equivalent of a weekend away in Paris. And that it was with someone else who dealt in psychedelic folk made it even sweeter.

Sharron lives in Sheffield, now! I get to be both her friend and her fan. We talk and drink red wine and listen to music lots, plus I get to see her perform live regularly. The picture below was taken a couple of months back: as part of the Sensoria festival, Sharron sang with the lovely Nancy Wallace, and Sharron and I were on a panel discussing folk music. The event took place in a disused department store! We saw a mummified bat, arsed around pretending to be mannequins, and then I kicked a hole in a wall.

Anyway. Away from spooky abandoned shops and back to spooky dystopias. The Chrysalids depicts people with real telepathic ability, and the other characters accept this power unquestioningly (they are either afraid or in awe of it), even though, for the most part, they don’t see it. In some ways, this fits squarely with a monotheist religious society: any competing mythical concerns are rooted out as viciously as a potential earthly rival. However, I think the odd skeptical voice would have worked well with Wyndham’s realistic depiction of human behaviour. You try telling a neighbour you’re telepathic; chances are you’ll not be deemed a deity or a devil, but get a derisive snort and a cup or tea to sort yourself out.

I also think it was a bit of a missed opportunity, given how Wyndham explores evolution and human mutation, to explore why this ability has developed in this society. Let me tell you something, and promise me you won’t respond with a derisive snort.

I have – only once – had an ‘out of body experience’. I felt myself lifting from my flesh, whirring away to somewhere else, seeing that somewhere else as if I was actually there, then bumping back into my bones. Now, I don’t think anything supernatural actually happened – for instance, I don’t think that my soul left my body and travelled, or that what I saw in the ‘travelled-to’ place was really occurring – but I do know that I experienced this at a unique time in my life. It was at a point when I literally wanted to be in two places. My mind was split like never before, and therefore it powerfully hallucinated, making me momentarily feel that my body was split, too.

And that’s I suppose what I’m interested in in terms of psychic phenomena, and what I would have liked to have had more of in The Chrysalids: Wyndham exploring telepathic ability as a potent reaction of the mind to a situation, rather than as a randomly bestowed paranormal gift. Davie and his cohorts live in an oppressive society, and it would be fascinating to consider whether this ability evolved as a result of that tyranny. Perhaps it’s there implicitly – Davie and Petra have it, and they are particularly subjugated by their father – but developing this strand more would have been very satisfying. As it is, the telepathic component of The Chrysalids seems similar to a number of other works that deal with the subject.

Having said that, this is a very brief book that tries to do a lot, and the amount it does squish in is impressive. It’s almost Orwellian in its success as both a powerful critique of conformity, and as a great read. It is unafraid to comment on destructive regimes and powerful vested interests.

‘They have become history without being aware of it. They are determined still that there is a final form to defend: soon they will attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is granted – a place among the fossils…’

Dystopian books. We need to pay attention to them, for they are never about the future.

Week One - Jeanette

The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)

Recommended by Gary

In the autumn of 2000, I visited a four-person house in Crookes, Sheffield for the first time. Gary lived there. He once put the housemates in order of geekishness: he, modestly, ranked himself second.

During my frequent weekend stopovers, we watched Charmed and Alias, and played computer quiz games such as You Don’t Know Jack, while the housemates tried to explain things like ‘NaN (not a number)’ to me. Gary and I also forged a pop alliance that continues to this day. He had a Freeview box, something of a delicacy in the early century, and I’d sit in his room: we’d flick between music channels The Hits and TMF, cursing when the adverts coincided and we were denied seeing the t.A.T.u. video for the millionth time.

Gary has told me on numerous occasions that he ‘doesn’t read’, but I still asked for a book recommendation, offering him a get-out clause if he didn’t fancy it. But he did. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is his favourite book and, I’ve since discovered, a text held in huge affection by numerous other friends.

The initial concept of H2G2 is strong: Earth is demolished because it is an inconvenience to the rest of the Universe. The Visigoth-ish race, the Vogons, make a perfunctory announcement and the deed is done. This propels the human Arthur Dent, and the undercover alien Ford Prefect (who is ‘from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he usually claimed’) hitch-hiking through the Galaxy. They meet various life forms and have several near-death experiences; they even discover the answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything.

The overall plot becomes increasingly irrelevant as the book progresses, with the wacky adventures aggressively taking the foreground. This is my only real complaint with H2G2: I could tell that Adams initially wrote it as a series of radio plays, and the transition to a cohesive novel was not completely successful.

H2G2 deserves its reputation as an extremely funny book. It snuggles neatly between Pythonesque gentle surrealism, and the sharper edges of 1980s alternative comedy. This kind of intelligent British wit was absolutely wonderful when done well, as it is in H2G2. Yet humourous as the book is, one can easily get this kind of thing elsewhere; if that’s all H2G2 had going for it, it would simply have been a pleasant time-waster. But I found the book satisfying on a deeper level. Time and again, Adams evokes an absolute sympathy for the human condition. In the preamble, he writes:

This planet [Earth] has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

Adams expresses this humane pity brilliantly through Marvin The Paranoid Android. Marvin is lovingly described; yes, sometimes he’s played for laughs, but usually he invokes a touching frustration in the reader. He’s lonely and those he talks to despair of him. He’s self-aware enough to know this, and it makes him even lonelier. Adams nails a description of how depression manifests itself in speech:

            ‘Alright,’ said Marvin, like the tolling of a great cracked bell.

I was interested enough in Marvin to investigate how he’d been portrayed onscreen, in both the 1981 BBC TV series and in the 2005 Hollywood film. Sadly, the clips I’ve seen don’t award him the same complexity that he has in the book. However, it seems the TV character was very popular; he even cut a record, which is actually quite good, even if it rather undermines the book’s take on Marvin’s despondency.

My other favourite character in the book is the little Babel Fish. When inserted into the ear, the Babel Fish reacts with brainwaves and automatically translates languages for its host. It’s a genius plot device to ensure Arthur Dent understands numerous alien dialects, but Adams goes far further with it, playing around with the cultural implications of such a creature. For one thing, the Babel Fish leads to more wars, because all barriers to communication between races are removed. And, because the Babel Fish is so phenomenally useful and it is difficult to believe that it evolved by chance, it sparks off a philosophical debate on divine existence (summarised in the best-selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God).

H2G2 was a perfect starting point for this project. Short and easy-to-read, it nevertheless surprised me how cleverly and pithily Adams writes. Without Gary’s recommendation, I doubt I would ever have read H2G2, and that would have been a huge shame. Because…

‘My father eventually died of shame, which is still a terminal disease in some parts of the Galaxy.’