Chocky by John Wyndham

John Wyndham was quite a proflic author, and Chocky is considered to be one of his major works, although it is less well-known than the likes of The Day of the Triffids. I suspect that most people presently seeking out the novel are doing so because of their memories of the ITV children’s television adaptation from the 1980s. My own nostalgia of that six-part drama has been prodding me for many years to read the original novel. Finally I have.

The story is told entirely from the perspective of the father of eleven-year-old Matthew Gore. We begin with Dad overhearing Matthew speaking to what appears to be an imaginary friend. It’s a little worrying that a boy so old should be indulging in such a fantasy, but what’s even more worrying is the bizarre subject matter of the conversation. Matthew is attempting to form answers to questions like “Why are there seven days in a week?” and “Why 31 days in a month?” Later, Matthew learns to count in binary, using the symbols Y and N for positive and negative. If he had read it in a book he would certainly be using 1 and 0. This imaginary friend also seems to have no concept of the time of day, insisting on quizzing Matthew at various hours of the day and night. When confronted by his parents, Matthew tells them about Chocky. Matthew’s father is uncertain about dismissing Matthew’s fantasy, so he calls in the help of a psychiatrist, Dr. Landis. As a reader, I have a pet hate for the kind of stories where a child has something fantastic happen to him, and all the adults refuse to believe him, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence. To my delight, Chocky does not go down this road. The adults realise that Chocky is objectively real. But who is this entity and what is his/her/its purpose? Is it friend or foe? The real threat, however, comes not from an alien presence, but from ordinary men willing to exploit a young boy in the pursuit of knowledge.

The book is very male-centred, which makes it a product of its time (the 1960s), but story also contains an environmental message so relevant to today’s ever-growing awareness that it makes you think the book was written in the present. It’s to John Wyndham’s credit that way back then he was so clued into how much we’re polluting the planet. Chocky is actually the very last book that Wyndham ever published, just one year before his death in 1969 (although the Wyndham Estate later published Web posthumously). I can think of no finer way to finish a life of writing than with the theme of Chocky.

The television series is also notable. I chased it up after reading the novel. It’s a very faithful adaptation, and according to an interview with series creator Anthony Read, the Wyndham Estate said that out of all the adaptations of Wyndham’s work, Chocky was the only one they were delighted with. The series spawned two sequels, Chocky’s Children and Chocky’s Challenge. I enjoyed the former; it was the perfect sequel in many ways. But by the third series, the story is clearly losing its way, stretched to the point where it contradicts the original ending.

But this is a review of the novel, and it’s excellent. Wyndham on top form.

Logan’s Run by William F. Nolan & George Clayton Johnson

Which came first, the movie or the book? In this case, the book. Usually, an original is superior to an adaptation, but this one’s a bit hard to compare, because the two are quite different. It’s as if the film writer merely used some general elements from the novel as the framework for his own creation. Here are the most notable differences.

The movie takes place post-apocalypse, and is concerned with a surviving city, the City of Domes. It is sealed off from the outside world and is run entirely by a super-computer. When a person reaches the age of thirty, they are required to undergo a ritual called Carousel, where they are vaporised, believing themselves to be undergoing “renewal.” Nobody knows any better, and the citizens lead a lives of hedonism in blissful ignorance of the possibility of old age. A few reject this philosophy and go on the run when it’s their time for Carousel, searching for a legendary place called Sanctuary. They are termed “runners” and they are hunted down and killed merciliessly by the city’s police force, the Sandmen. The computer wants to know more about Sanctuary, so it turns Sandman Logan into a runner and tells him to go find the place and report back. In the end, it turns out there is no Sanctuary, and this information sends the computer into overload, freeing the citizens from the confines of the city.

In the novel, there is no apocalypse, no City of Domes, no Carousel, and people are killed at age twenty-one. “Sandman” is merely a colloquialism in the book, which is a pity, because it’s an excellent term. The book usually calls Logan a “DS man” - Deep Sleep operative. There is no city-wide prison in the novel; people are free and the whole world accepts the twenty-one-year life-span rule. How this happened is explained briefly, if somewhat unconvincingly, in a prologue.

“The seeds of the Little War were planted in a restless summer during the mid-1960s, with sit-ins and student demonstrations as youth tested its strength. By the early 1970s over 75 percent of the people living on Earth were under 21 years of age. The population continued to climb — and with it the youth percentage.
In the 1980s the figure was 79.7 percent.
In the 1990s, 82.4 percent.
In the year 2000 — critical mass.”

Logan’s companion Jessica features in both movie and book, as well as Francis, the Sandman who pursues them, although Francis’s ultimate role turns out to be quite different from the screen version. Logan and Jessica spend a good portion of the novel travelling from place to place by means of a nationwide underground network of “mazecars.” Interestingly, Logan spends most of the story as a bad guy, a true DS man only pretending to run, secretly intent on finding and exposing Sanctuary. In the end, Santuary turns out to be a real place after all.

The novel is a bit trippy. I never quite grasped how Logan and Jessica ended up in all these bizarre locales. One chapter they’re in an undersea biosphere; next they’re in a freezing cold wasteland; then they’re on something akin to an indian reservation; then they stumble into the middle of an android reenactment of the American civil war. I never understood how the mazecar could take them to all these places, or how they navigated their way towards Sanctuary through all the craziness. Although I have to admit, these adventures were pretty enjoyable nevertheless.

The book is very small. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but this time I think the story was larger than the authors allowed room for. Especially the closing chapter; everything is wrapped up with disappointing brevity. Still, there’s no denying this book has something. This is evidenced by the fact that it spawned a movie and a television series. In recent years, the right to a remake have changed hands a few times. William F. Nolan has also written two sequels to the novel. I’m not sure I’ll try them. Logan’s Run is a self-contained novel, and the others smell like cash-ins on the success of the movie, especially when you read the plot of the third one, which you can do via the highly informative page about Logan’s Run on Wikipedia.

Overall, an entertaining above-average read. Fans of the movie should definitely read it, on the grounds that there’s so much that’s familiar and yet so much that’s different.

The Tripods by John Christopher

This volume contains four short novels which are also available separately. It used to be regarded as a trilogy (The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire), but the inclusion of a fourth book, entitled When the Tripods Came has changed things a little - for the worse, in my opinion, chiefly because it is referred to as book 1 of 4.

If you are new to this series, I insist that you ignore the prelude book and jump straight in at The White Mountains. The author originally wrote this as book 1, and that’s how it should stay. I’d better tell you why I feel so strongly about it. When you begin The White Mountains, you are presented with a strange world. It appears to be mankind’s past, a couple of centuries ago. People use a horse and cart to get around, work in mills, etc. Everything is as it should be, except for the presence of immense metal machines taller than houses, which stomp about the countryside commanding the worship of mankind. Strange artifacts from man’s past make an appearance, familiar to us but not to the people in the book, giving use a clue that this is perhaps not the past at all, but a very strange future, where most of our technological advancements have curiously disappeared. The mystery of the past is one of the things that makes The White Mountains such a great read. Deal with When the Tripods Came after you’ve read all the others, just to fill in the blanks.

I was first introduced to The Tripods through the BBC television series that was made in the mid-eighties. I absolutely loved it. Sadly the BBC only ever filmed, The White Mountains and The City of Gold and Lead, but I was glad to be able to read the final volume in print, to find out what became of the heroes and their world. I don’t want to say too much about The City of Gold and Lead and The Pool of Fire, in case I spoil anything. But I will say that this is the perfect adventure story, and despite the fantastical elements, it has a very mature and thought-provoking ending. Currently the most read book on my shelf.

Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny

If you’ve seen the pathetic movie they made of this, put it out of your mind. If anything, the book has more in common with Escape from New York, not only in the plot but also in the protagonist Hell Tanner. Like Snake Plissken from Escape, Hell is a likeable criminal with a cool-guy manner, on a near-suicidal mission for the government in order to earn his freedom. The setting is a future earth after some kind of global war that had a lasting effect on the atmosphere. Air-flight is impossible due to a carpet of debris in the sky, continually churning around the world, sporadically raining down huge rocks and sucking them up elsewhere in whirlwinds. Human life is mostly confined to cities and towns, which are isolated from each other by wastelands crawling with mutated animals and vegetation. This is the story of Tanner’s adventure across America in a computerized, shielded super-car, carrying a vaccine with which to save the dying people of Boston.

One of the things I liked about this book is that there are no chapters. It’s just a great, short, pleasantly superficial roller-coaster ride from start to finish.