Customer Reviews

NIGHT OF THE TRIFFIDS

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I am always saddened when a good author passes. Sometimes another author will take up some of the ideas. Sometimes that is a good author like Simon Clark.

One night the Earth is plunged into darkness and triffids can once again get the upper hand on humanity.

Our hero, son of the previous hero, immediately finds himself in the middle of things twenty-five years after the original tale.

After crashing a plane while trying to discover the extent of the darkness, he discovers floating mats of vegetation that can transport triffids to island communities, some people are immune to triffid poison, there are some major settlements in the Americas (including Manhattan), triffids are adapting to changing environments, and all is not as it seems.

He is rescued and taken to Manhattan where tens of thousands of people live in pre-blindness splendor. The Manhattan power structure is very interested in some of the developments from our hero's colony. He quickly becomes a pawn in some major power plays that could have serious repercussions for his home community.

A very wonderful extension of the triffid story. My only problem was the appearance of the giant triffids. While there size is not out of the scope of plants, I felt they should have suffered some in the mobility department.

Much longer than the original, this tale is full of action, discovery, human interest and hope for humanity. A must for triffid or Clark fans.

Sequelising established classics of fiction can often cause an apocalypse on a critical scale within the media not unlike the global one in John Wyndam's 'Day of the Triffids'. Fan and reviewer engage in a tug of war; one side citing the sequel a 'celebration', the other side 'desecration'. With this in mind (not to mention the £18 price tag), I decided to give Simon Clark's 'Night of the Triffids' a miss last year, ardent 'triffidite' though I am. I was certain that if I read it I would be unable to block out the sounds of a dead horse being flogged, but after re-reading Wyndham's peerless original I caved in and bought it. Leaving aside the revolting cover, painted by somebody who is clearly only vaguely familiar with the Triffids, it's better than you might think.
Simon Clark had an unenviable task in capturing Wyndham's austere 1950's prose, one which could have left the characters stilted and the dialogue trite. And although some cliches do abound (plenty of 'gee's!' and 'hot diggety's! to keep you cringing here) Clark pulls off the task manfully, not unlike Wyndham's 'where men are men' narratives. The plot, where the original novel's protagonist's son David finds himself in a post holocaust New York, rolls along engagingly if a little roughly, but if nothing else this is assuredly the same world we left at the end of 'Day..'. However, where the goal of that novel was for mankind to drag itself from the ashes, here the goal is for the remaining scraps of civilisation to keep it's head above water. This is treated logically in NOTT, with conflicting and increasingly xenophobic communities tentatively making contact with one another whilst keeping the ravaging Triffid's at bay. Naturally enough, as with all the great empires of antiquity, the most prosperous community in New York, with it's electricity, TV's and cars has been founded on slavery and brutality. There the novel interestingly postulates an alternative future where the civil rights movements of the sixties did not take place, but the re-emergence of Torrence, the evil 'red headed man' of the first book is un-neccessary. The idea that he could have made it back to Brighton from Surrey through a Triffid infested England and then sailed to New York and rebuilt it is just plain silly. A new character with the same motivations would have been more believable, but then I suppose DOTT was not without it's own unlikely meetings also (the way in which Torrence himself appears both at the beginning and at the end for example).
Presumably though, one of the trickiest challenges Clark would have had to have faced was that his novel was always going to lack the central intrigue of Wyndham's; that an unthinkable catastrophe has befallen the global community without warning,and he kind of solves this by employing a wry reversal of the circumstances that opened the first book. In the beginning David awakens into a pitch darkness that has been caused not by a lack of vision but by the sun's light being blotted out by a mysterious cosmic cloud. It's a disturbing calamity that had great potential story-wise, but sadly the author seemed to have gotten bored of it and a few hundred pages later it just drifts away into the background. The original novel's second great intrigue, the Triffid's themselves, are also expanded upon here, but yet again the potential for the Triffid's hyper evolution and mutation is fumbled. Mercifully, a monster that can and has been the stuff of the most ludicrous B-movie treatment is written intelligently, but by the time we come to the end, well, I don't want to spoil it for you but imagine if Godzilla had been an enraged asparagus instead of a radioactive lizard.
What about the sinister satellite weapons that David Masen postulates as the cause of the 'Blinding' in DOTT? Could another malfunctioning weapon of mass destruction not have been the cause of the eerie blackout? And if you're going to augment the triffids why not have them interbreeding with other dangerous forms of plantlife for added nastiness? I wouldn't like to come face to face with a giant Triffid thorn bush in the dark I can tell you! Wyndham was careful to create a monster that had some footing in the science of genetic modification. Giant killer plants lumbering through Manhattan deaden that realistic quality.

Reeling in my poisoned stinger for a second though, it has to be said that on the level of sheer blissful entertainment NOTT delivers splendidly. It's an archaic novel, but deliberately so, and recaptures a halcyon age of unpretentious sci-fi, the kind that makes you want to stick a fish bowl on your head, plant a flag in the surface of your garden and claim it in the name of the Earth. In an odd sort of way, the book is freed from certain modern literary constraints in it's imitation of a pre 1960's style- there's no tedious introspection here or trendy narrative chopping back and forth. Every page counts, and for that alone it's worth the four stars.
To anyone who loves the original but was in two minds about this book as I was, buy it, and approach it in the same way that the author probably did; that it's not going to be possible to beat DOTT, but it's

This book started off damn well. I have to say that the first 100 pages or so clipped along at a very enjoyable pace. As the reader you will be unsure as to what is going on. The world is tumbled into a blackness that is unexplainable and the plot takes on a charm that snakes you in. What I want to do is take the author by the lapels and slam his head into a post or dense wall. His prose is elegant and engaging far past expectations. In fact I'd have to say that for the style of writing he is engaging in, his skills in this regard are enormous. What I cant stand, literally want to yell at the guy over, is that this book became one of the most tired, predictable, unimaginative works of fiction that I have come across. Maybe I am being too hard on the author, but to take such a grand start and end up with a novel that I have read a thousand times before is almost inexcusable. I am rating this book at three stars, mainly because it starts off like a Kafka or Philip K Dick gem. Once the protagonist is rescued from his island it all goes down hill fast, so you might want to read this as a short story and leave well enough alone at this point.

I loved the original "Day of..." having read it many times, I would go as far to say its my favourite book. I've always hoped someone would write something else in the "Triffid" universe and thankfully Simon Clark has come through.

Don't be put off by the "oh its not John wyndam" etc etc posts, this really is a good read, the characters are developed well and you get that sense of discovering "alternate societies" that I liked from the original.

I enjoyed the fact that Simon Clark has stuck with the same style of writing as Wyndam, one reviewer commented on the the lack of swearing being unrealistic, I just saw it as a continuation of the original style which was very old world IMHO.

Overall I would thoroughly recommend this book to any fan of the original and I hope that Simon Clark continues to write more novels in the Triffid universe!

As someone who has read most of John Wyndham's (the author of the original "Day of ...") books, I hoped to find something similar in this book. I did. The writing style of it looks the same as the original, but several things are different/wrong: All of Wyndham's books were short, clear and concise. This one is much too long and verbose. Each of Wyndham's books showed how human society is fragile by changing some "little" thing and then telling what the catastrophic consequences would be. This allways gave food for thought. This one tries a little with the darkness and the "new" triffids, but it fails IMHO to do it in a believable way. Wyndhams books were believable even though they introduced strange things like walking plants. The reason behind the darkness (the night) in "Night of ..." seems silly and out of place. And then there are the "new" triffids. In the end you start asking yourself when there'll be triffids driving cars, or flying aeroplanes.

The book started well, feeling like a new Wyndham book, but in the end, after too many pages, I was left with an empty hollow impression and the feeling of having wasted my time. This was the first and last book I'll read by Simon Clark.

This is an entertaining enough novel, but it's not a classic.

The original John Wyndham novel was a marvel of understated adventure; Wyndham's prose was elegant and lucid. This, on the other hand, is little more than pulp adventure. Where Wyndham took two basic ideas - the introduction of the man eating triffids into a world where nearly everyone had gone blind - and mixed them together and pushed them inside and out and explored them thoroughly, Clark introduces new farfetched plot contrivances in almost every chapter, many of which go nowhere. There is at least one interesting idea; the rapidly evolving, possibly intelligent triffids, but these are almost incidental to the main story.

There are some good things. The novel is refreshingly old fashioned, very readable, and occasionally exciting. None of the characters have post-modern angst, and there's little that's objectionable here.

In any case, it would be hard to live up to the original, but, unfortunately, this novel doesn't come close.

This book starts a generation or so after "The Day of the Triffids" ends, with the world again being plunged into darkness, this time because the earth has passed through a cloud of cosmic dust, or something. The cloud conveniently doesn't cut off the heat as well, so we don't just freeze to death. The triffids, of course, take advantage of the situation, and have to be survived all over again.

The hero, son of the original hero, Bill Masen, investigates the event and finds himself taken to America, where another community is holding out on Manhattan Island (why there, for Pete's sake? It would seem even less promising than London, and far less so than America's own Southwest or Great Plains states). In New York (small world isn't it?), he runs into his father's old enemy, Torrance, who was setting up feudal baronies in the last chapter of the original novel, and has now tried his luck across the pond. Torrance hasn't changed much. While the status of the blind is less of an issue now, it seems that Blacks are kept pretty much in their 1950s place. The sequel then runs off into various adventures with new varieties of triffid, and rival groups of human, which I can only hazily recall, and probably won't bother going back to.

In short, a thorough disappointment, and for me at least an infuriating one. I would have loved a decent sequel to Wyndham's book, which is up there with "Earth Abides" as one of my favourite disaster novels, but which left so much more to be told. But this doesn't even come close.

Incidentally, another reviewer asked when "The Day of the Triffids" was supposed to have taken place. Fortunately, we were told that Masen removed his bandages on Wednesday 8th May, which narrows it down a bit. My perpetual calendar shows the following years, subsequent to the book's publication in 1951, when such a date existed - 1957, 1963, 1968, 1974, 1985, 1991, 1996, 2002. Since it's clearly set in the present, or at least very near future, we can probably forget the last four, and a reference in "Night" to the Berlin Wall eliminates 1957. My bet would be 1963, with 1968 and 1974 as possible but less likely. But others may have their own opinion.

This is a fair story but lacks the soul of the original. Personally I am amazed that it was approved because it is somewhat tacky and trite compared to its ullustrious predecessor. Of course if you're not a conservative when it comes to preserving the memory of 'Triffids' then you'll probably find this story is readable.

I think the thing that bothered me the most was there was nobody in the book I could care about. They were caricatures- cardboard plot devices to move the story. And the mutation angle is quite absurd. Genetic drift, even in plants as highly 'evolved' as the triffids would require more than 15-20 years and mnay false starts to produce the particular type of triffid encounted in the book. And the human immunity at the end is laughable in its convenience!

WHile I thank Simon Clark from leaving the hero of the first book out of his second work, David, his son, is the main character in this one. Again, he should have avoided links- thus comparisons- with the True novel because this is found very wanting. The story doesn't focus so much around battling triffids as david and co battling the General (re. the major in the original) with the triffids more coloring then texture.

In short: an ordinary tale with little to recommend it or redeem it and the tacky cover art says it all: pulp fiction! SHould have never been published and shouldn't have the name Triffid in the title.

The Triffids definitely requires you to suspend belief for full enjoyment... carnivorous plants rule the world?

Wyndham wove a superb tale in the Day of The Triffids and Simon Clark does a surprisingly good job of continuing the tale in his book.

By taking the story across the pond to America, Clark is able to let his own imagination run riot and create his own human reactions to the global disaster and for the most part it works completely.

For me there were a few stumbles along the way.. just one example being the super speed development of a Triffid which can breathe underwater (Doesn't natural selection take hundreds or thousands of years to effect that kind of change?).

But don't let that dissuade you from giving this book a chance. If you enjoyed Wyndham's Triffids, the chances are you will enjoy Clark's efforts too. He could even continue on and write a third Triffids book, if he writes it, I'll read it.

Over 40 years ago, I read the original (and GREAT) "Triffids" book. The "Blinding" scared me so much that I didn't look at a meteor shower until only recently!

Many times, in my youth, I looked for the "suggested" continuation of the original novel. I didn't know that the book had not yet been written.

Last week, on a whim, I checked if my "imagined" book could be found on Amazon.

Sure enough, they had what I wanted!

I finished the novel a few hours ago and I was NOT disappointed.

The story was as exciting as I remember the original to be!

I only hope for two things:

1) That there will be another sequel and/or a TV Series (Like "V").

2) That there will be a movie version (which, I hope, will be better than the 1st one).

If you like Science Fiction, then "Night of the Triffids" is a MUST READ!!!!!!!!!