John Wyndham: The Trouble with Lichen (1960)

John Wyndham's most famous books, The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed as Village of the Damned) are fairly serious stories of disasters, a theme also followed in The Kraken Wakes. The Trouble with Lichen, a later novel, is not quite in the same line, being an examination of the negative social consequences of a scientific discovery which initially seems to be a great boon to the human race. There is also a fair amount of arch and faintly satirical humour, more apparent here than in the earlier novels (even if touches of it can be discerned).

The central characters of The Trouble with Lichen are two biochemists, newly graduated Diana Brackley and the head of the research company at which she finds work, Francis Saxover. While working on a collection of lichen samples from an expedition to the Far East, Diana serendipitously discovers that one of the samples prevents milk from turning, in a narrative directly lifted from the story of Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin. She and Francis work on this independently, and discover that the lichen does not in fact contain the expected antibiotic agent, but instead acts to slow down the aging process, acting well enough to give a human being a life expectancy of maybe 200 years.

The problems, when they think them through, turn out to be many and complex. Firstly, the lichen is only found in one small area, so the supply is extremely limited, only enough to treat around a thousand people. Then there are the social issues: what happens when there is no "natural wastage" to speak of, so that two hundred years of active life will be spent in a job which is a dead end, as the senior people will effectively never retire? Or when there is no chance of inheritance, or when the world becomes overcrowded?

Some of these problems are much more in the air than they were in the early sixties, as populations age (especially in the West) and the number of people in the world reaches seven billion (from about three billion when the The Trouble with Lichen was published). As a science fictional exploration of the issues, it is as relevant now as it was in 1960, if not more so. Many countries are reacting to these problems now - by redefining what retirement means and when it starts, for example. But in The Trouble with Lichen this is emphasised rather less than some of the other issues, and it is the over-arching theme of the double-edged nature of scientific and technical advances which really resonates today, in the age of global warming.

Wyndham starts with a prologue describing Diana's funeral, so the reader knows that the novel will not all be cheerful, but he ends on a positive note, as his novels usually do. Like many science fiction writers of his generation, he seems to have been convinced that human ingenuity will be able to solve any problem, even ones which have been caused through science and technology. As in, say, The Day of the Triffids, the upbeat nature of the ending is dependent on hard work over many years, and Wyndham is unable or unwilling to suggest solutions to many of the problems he raises. They are hard issues, so this is not particularly surprising; nor is it necessarily a bad thing, as ideas produced by science fiction writers over fifty years ago are quite likely to seem naive in 2011, no matter how seriously intended at the time.

Of Wyndham's novels, this is the only one which I can recall as having a major female character who is not basically a wife and companion to the man who is the main centre of attention. This is probably more because the nature of the discovery lends itself to the idea of the use of the beauty industry to exploit but at the same time hide the discovery of the properties of the lichen than from any conversion to feminism by the author. After all, the campaign she mounts after the lichen becomes public knowledge is based on the use of her clients as the wives of important figures, rather than on any importance they might hold in their own right. The UK in 2011 may still have a male dominated establishment (just look at the Cabinet, or the board of any large bank), but I think that today's reader would probably expect some at least of these women to have important careers of their own, rather than having no role other than that of wife and mother.

Old fashioned, but still in many ways relevant; well written with touches of humour, The Trouble with Lichen is an excellent novel which deserves to be as well known as Wyndham's most famous works - 8/10.


Edition: Penguin, 1963
Review number: 1436

John Wyndham: The Day of the Triffids (1951)

Edition: Penguin, 1954 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1084

"When a day you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere." The opening sentence of John Wyndham's famous novel is one of the best in the whole science fiction genre. It is, unfortunately, one which is getting out of date, as Sunday becomes more and more a day just like any other. In the days when shops were closed in England on Sundays, when there was nothing to do except to go to church, then a Sunday would be marked by comparative silence, a lack of traffic noise in particular. The reason that the sentence is so good is that it establishes not just the situation - clearly some catastrophe has taken place overnight which has affected somewhere (possibly just post-) Christian, and it is a disaster survived by the narrator - but the tone of the novel.

By the 1950s, the nuclear holocaust was the catastrophe which would have been on people's minds, but Wyndham chose a different one as the trigger for his novel. This has accidentally proved a bonus, as any depiction of a nuclear war would now almost certainly seem much more out of date, given the limited public knowledge about the atom bomb at the time. (I've seen a film of the time which seriously suggested that sunglasses were sufficient protection from a blast only a few kilometres away.) The nature of the catastrophe has more modern resonances: the blinding lights from space are thought by characters to be a weapon rather like an aggressive version of Star Wars, and the triffids themselves are products of modern farming technology and laboratory experiments with unforeseen consequences.

In other ways, however, The Day of the Triffids now seems rather old fashioned. The first important science fiction novel about surviving a catastrophe is of course H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, and there are several similarities between the two novels. The most striking of these is the restriction of both stories' geography to southern England. Wells completely ignores the rest of the world (all the cylinders containing the invading Martians land in Surrey), but Wyndham has a running motif where people expect rescuers to arrive imminently from America. (This is actually rather likely, since the light show seems to have had to be at night, and so was not at the same instant across the globe, and it is inconceivable that warning would not spread faster than the rotation of the earth, even if only as radio transmissions ceased.)

A less superficial similarity is to do with the nature of their style, as first person narratives by upper middle class Englishmen under exceptional circumstances. They are also both much more about surviving the catastrophe, as opposed to rebuilding afterwards (as is the subject of, say, Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Wyndham is better at involving the reader in what is happening in his novel; Day of the Triffids is far more vivid than War of the Worlds. Wells writes in a very journalistic manner; few of his novels pay much attention to character. Wyndham is much more interested in this than in the description of events, which marked him out from other science fiction writers of the time, particularly Americans, whose major concern was the sense of wonder at scientific and technological marvels. This is probably the reason that Wyndham has remained a science fiction author popular with those who are not fans of the genre.