The Chrysalids

"Yes, The Chrysalids is essentially the same kind of story. There’s a society that’s dealing reasonably well with its own affairs – not particularly well – and some children are born who appear physically normal, but who can communicate with each other. Now, John Wyndham really hated religion. He thought it was another of the things that kept people stupid, kept people from thinking, kept everybody backward; and that it was particularly destructive to women. When you read The Chrysalids , you think, “God, this is The Handmaid’s Tale ” – which came out in 1985, and again Chrysalids was very early, first published in 1955. There’s an extremely religious, puritanical society, set in a post-apocalyptic world many generations after a nuclear war, which has led to mutations. Typically, animals with mutations are destroyed, and humans with mutations, if they are healthy enough to live, are sterilized and excluded from society. The Chrysalids is about a group of young people who are born physically normal but mentally different, and how they survive in this appalling world, this brutally religious world, this very self-righteous self-regarding world where purity is worshipped, knowing themselves to be impure. These young people are clearly a very threatening type of mutation to the old order. They’ve been walking amongst normal people, and people did not know – and I think that’s another idea that goes with John Wyndham constantly, this idea of the other walking amongst you but not of you, the other that appears to be normal. It’s a feeling a lot of us have, that other people don’t really understand us, and we’re walking through a crowd of people but not really connecting with any of them. There was a poem that he was obsessed by, The Jolly Company by Rupert Brookes: he writes about looking up at the stars, which all appear to be a lovely constellation, but if you were in the stars you would know yourself alone – and when they look down on us, they must see us as a crowd or a society, but within it are individuals that feel alone. That’s an idea that Wyndham comes back to over and over again, the idea of being part of something that you don’t actually feel part of – being an outsider, even though you don’t appear to be an outsider. It’s never been filmed, and yet if you ask people of a certain age, “What’s your desert island book?”, lots of people will say The Chrysalids . It’s relatively short – my Penguin copy is about 190 pages, easy to read. It was commonly given as a book for teenagers to read in schools, because it’s got lots of issues that young people are interested in, the idea of the new generation. And it’s a great adventure story as well – with all these stories, we talk about the emotional resonance, but they’re all adventure stories. It was very, very widely read, and I don’t really understand why it’s never been filmed."