A word again... When the minds have learnt to mingle, when no thought is wholly one's own, and each has taken too much of the other ever to be entirely himself alone; when one has reached the beginning of seeing with a single eye, loving with a single heart, enjoying with a single joy; when there can be moments of identity and nothing is separate save bodies that long for one another... When there is that, where is the word? There is only the inadequacy of the word that exists.
As a child, David is taught by his father that genetic aberration is a sin. When a crop shows signs of mutation, it is burned, and the same is done--in secret--when genetic aberrations appear on infant children. This belief is woven into the society in which David and his father live: according to their Bible, because man is made in the image of God, those things which seem to differ from the standard image are works of the Devil to be feared and destroyed. "Accursed is the mutant," goes one verse, "in the eyes of God and Man."
These ideologies, Wyndham suggests, are the result of some kind of nuclear cataclysm. David and his family live in post-apocalyptic Labrador (sweet), ringed in by "Fringes" where mutants are exiled, which themselves bleed into the horrible "Badlands." Nuclear disaster, it seems, has caused these "aberrations," but so too has it created a religion in which the pre-disaster "Old People" are revealed and genetic purity seen as the route back to a pre-lapsarian state. Truth be told, it's an idea that's been done to death, from X-Men to Divergent: mutants are always symbolic of the repressed other, but Wyndham did it early and well; nothing about The Chrysalids seems hackneyed or shallow.
There's only one way this kind of story can go: David slowly comes to realize, by befriending a mutant, that not all difference is bad. Here that's Sophie, a young girl who David plays with before noticing, after she gets her foot stuck in a crevice, that she has six toes. But as David grows up, he realizes that he himself is a kind of mutant: he shares a telepathic link with six other young people in his community, including his cousin and lover Rosalind and his little sister Petra. What feels natural to him turns out to be a genetic aberration so severe that its discovery could send his entire community into uproar and lead to his own destruction.
The link between David and the others seems like a classic symbol for radical empathy. I've been thinking about that, empathy. You see it in books everywhere. Is it a copout? You could make a case, I think, that a science fiction novel like The Chrysalids offers an insufficient solution to social diseases like nationalism and racism. Individual empathy is good, but only to the extent that informs structural and systemic reform. But there's a reason, I think, that the most dogmatically social realist books seem so forced: a novel can reflect social structures and propose new ones, but it can't enact them. A novel, however, enacts empathy by putting us in someone's head; here, it puts us in several heads, minds that are so closely tied together they become one mind. As a political solution, it doesn't help, but it makes The Chrysalids something more than a mere allegory or fable.
The Chrysalids hit a real sweet spot for me. It's not afraid to go for broke: Petra's telepathy skills turn out to be so powerful she can communicate with a colony of telepaths in New Zealand, who come to the rescue of the protagonists. It seemed to draw from some of the best parts of mid-century pulp science fiction, but it was written before those aspects had to be done with a tongue in cheek to seem relevant. The worldbuilding is smart, but not too smart or complex, and the simple chase narrative of the second half really worked.
No comments:
Post a Comment