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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not Wyndham, but it is still Triffids, April 2, 2003
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.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Brave New Gardener's World, April 23, 2002
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
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
amazing start, danmable finish, September 17, 2004
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.
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