plan for chaos
by uzwi
I experienced queasy deja vu when I opened this recently rediscovered John Wyndham novel. The prose was cheap. The concepts were cheap. The paper was cheap. The glutinous wordplay in the title made me feel cheap for having read it. For a moment I might have been back reviewing cheap sf, 1969. I promised myself I would never do that again, but here you go. Knock yourself out.
the m john harrison blog 
Yesterday I was the nerd, today the cynic. I think you have to take even the Day of the Triffids with a pinch of salt as far as language and plot are concerned, as much as I enjoy what the work represents or aspires to be. Some of the same confusion and grand perplexity in his other stuff is also appealing: I quite like “Consider Her Ways” for those reasons – I even find the distinct lack of orientation in the protagonist done in a far better way than that of, say, “Pincher Martin” by Golding, for all Golding’s literary plaudits. As to Christopher Priest, well, I have always wanted to see him as somehow the forgotten god of English sci-fi or metaphysical/slipstream fiction but unfortunately I find him unreadable, it’s all so textually under-heated that the ideas become friable. He reminds me of Ian McEwan: a writer with apparently all of the credentials but none of the talent you’d expect as a result.
Hi Orfanum
I think I’ll stick by what I said towards the end of the review–
My point, really, is that the kind of writing he does in PFC, which was central to sf then & for a long time afterwards, had no general appeal. Whereas the Triffids was written in a language that appealed to a broad readership, about concerns they had and emotions they could share. Whatever you think about the cosiness of the catastrophe (the evasion of the very reality principle it invokes), it connected with people. My template for that kind of connection would be On the Beach or, these days, The Road. I was utterly shocked by the degree to which PFC was sf-parochial, & I remembered with no joy at all having to read example after example of that even as late as 1969.
But don’t take my word for it. Pop into a bookshop & try to read the first two pages of PFC. I mean read in the very basic sense of “understand what’s being said”. Survivors from that time will know what I mean when I remind them of Badger Books.
I would rather read Pincher Martin than Consider Her Ways, any day (although I’d rather read The Spire than either).
Though I agree that Ian McEwan becomes more & more disappointing, I don’t agree with your assessment of Christopher Priest. Indeed I feel that Chris’s “under-heatedness” precisely acts to foreground his ideas; like Bolano, & many of the “new” South Americans, Chris has a distaste for self-foregrounding language. This makes him a much more contemporary writer than a blowsy old tart like me.
Sorry, I meant to write “The Pyramid”, not “The Spire”.
Haven’t read any JW in a very long time but that hasn’t stopped his books – or ” The Day of The Triffids”, really – from coming to represent for many of us a kind of archetypal British SF disaster novel. A template really but one which, for readers of a certain age, has perhaps become concatenated with memories of other things from Ballard to Quatermass .
This certainly happened for me, I think, and without me really thinking about it at all.
Looking at it now, I wonder if I haven’t always ascribed qualities to Wyndham that actually came to me from the novels by the likes of Keith Roberts, John Christopher and, yes, Christopher Priest that I read at roughly the same time. I’m not even going to mention Ballard.
Mike, there’s no way you’re a “blowsy old tart”! Still, I think your assessment of CP and his “distaste for self-foregrounding language” is spot on. I think of his his work as ferociously intelligent and disciplined and this discipline is a neccessary feature of the prose as well. Nicely put.
thinking of the Triffids reminded me of an idea for a short piece that I’d been thinking of, where a youth in some bleak industrial town discovers an insect whose sting has a mind-altering effect. In parallel chapters there is a narration of a strange village where an old lady is expecting something to sprout on an electrified patch of land surrounded by bizarre gardening apparatuses, carroll-esque mutated flora and fauna.
In the end the youth is joined in his addiction by a number of friends, and gradually they become so drawn to insect venom their perception bends permanently. Final scene – the sprout is born on the old lady’s patch: it is a fetus.
I wonder if MikeM has tried ‘The Glamour’. It’s my favourite Priest and would definitely make my top 50 novels. And early McEwan would easily make my top 50 short story collections – possibly twice. And either ‘The Cement Garden’ or ‘The Comfort of Strangers’ might creep into novels. Perhaps both. And then there’s ‘The Innocent’. Come on. This stuff’s brilliant.
Oh, there’s no doubt that, up to & including The Innocent, something was there. It’s just that there’s less & less of it…
Hi nicholasroyle: thanks for that; I’ll give Priest another go, bearing in mind what uzwi said about reading: “…understand what’s being said”. It’s pretty basic but I am not very good at it, on the whole.
With McEwan, yes, I got caught up in the hype of The Cement Garden, I remember the time quite well. I’d have to go back and look at it again but in remembrance I have the impression still that it was too butcher’s shop-window; it’s meat, but there’s hardly any blood, and the faintness of the abattoir bellowing is largely your own imagination, while the butcher is a very prosaic chap, really, who likes sometimes to mix it up by putting the offal next to the filet mignon. It gets the customers in.
I recently read Machen’s The Great God Pan and I felt pretty much the same, although it’s not a sci-fi novel. It had a couple of bright moment, but in the end it left me with a bitter aftertaste. So much hype.
Actually, a Nazi aunt in charge of a mob of suicidal clones has vast possibilities, most of them goth-comic: but Wyndham was writing long before Kyril Bonfiglioni or Jack Trevor Story showed us how to do that kind of thing.
I’m not sure they are possibilities, though, Martin–especially after the last of the comedy was squeezed out. It isn’t postCrap: it’s Crap. It’s nothing clever unless you make some strained hindsight act of revision, which would, by now, be several layers removed from a worthwhile pisstake or interesting pastiche. & how, anyway, can you be smartass about smartass ? That would be an act of even more comprehensive (& incomprehensible) nerdism than the original; its distance from any actual human feeling or experience would be one turn up the spiral further away. I can’t be doing with it.
Could be. This has to be worth a cold and cheesy grin, though: the reincarnation of Lovecraft, back in Providence and upsetting the locals.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6917113.stm
Hmm. Interesting. I do recall a situation like this years ago when my mother was in a home. There was a cat there that displayed similar abilities.
Of course, the location in this case makes it all rather more compelling; “Oscar’s gettin’ restless. Looks like old Wilbur Whateley’ll be gone by tonight…”
[…] Reviews of Wyndham’s Plan for Chaos by Leo Mellor in the Independent, Nick Rennison in The Sunday Times, Jake Kerridge in The Telegraph, and M John Harrison in The Guardian; further discussion of the latter here. […]
There are a couple of comments on this review at the Guardian now, if anyone wants to add anything.
Great concept for Plan For Chaos – perhaps it should have been written by Paul Auster.
Chris Priest will eventually get the recognition he deserves. I agree with Nick Royle The Glamour is very special.
I reviewed the Prestige and that was up there too. Shame about the film though.
It is the resonance, the afterburn, that makes Chris significant for me, as with much of Unc’s work – daylight -hauntings.
Anyone remember Keith Roberts? He still with us?