It starts off with a dream of a city bordering the ocean by a child who has never seen the ocean before. The start of the story takes us to a farm own by a bigot’s family. The religion is an evolution from Christianity, but tarnished. There is an additional text to go with the original bible to keep the race pure, that only “perfect” humans, that is with the right number of limbs and fingers and toes, are classified rightly as humans. The rest are condemned to the “Badlands”, out of civilisation and living like savages.
But the fact that you’ve got an extra toe doesn’t make you a savage does it? After the near mass extinction that is the Tribulation, which we can only imagine as a nuclear holocaust, to be physically human is a premium. Thus, so is purity. This is some Nazi Germany type of shit, but arguably worse, as it uses the mandate of religion. Wyndham is mute on the timelines, on when the Tribulation happened or how long after Tribulation the events in the book took place. But we can imagine that the Tribulation happened during the Cold War.
Labrador is a secluded farming community, heretic and bigoted. The results of your sins is impurity in the body, thus giving birth to monsters is a sin. Every birth must be checked, and it is always a nervous time for the parents. A scene of a woman who gave birth to a slightly embellished child — she begged her sister to borrow her baby to trick the monitor to thinking that her baby is perfect, qualified enough to be a human, was a painful scene to read.
In the heart of it, The Chrysalids is a bildungsroman. We see David Strorm from his childhood to late teenage years, from a child aloof and almost in love with a girl with a sixth toe, to someone who discovered his own telepathic powers. David and his telepathic peers are less human than the impure citizens of the Badlands, but as long as they can disguise their powers they are still considered as “one of them”.
The Chrysalids is a quintessential story of otherisation (and typing this in now, it bothers me a lot that this word is still considered as a spelling error). Communities sometimes don’t imply inclusion, but exclusion borne out of fear of uncertainty. Perhaps it is more base than that — the disgust of a slight difference from our own physical identity — skin colour, shape of the eyes, colour of the hair. Anything slightly off is an automatic red flag to bring our guards up.
Otherisation is exacerbated by doctrines, often passed on through generations. In some ways, this reminds me of a conversation I had with a Serbian I made friends with on the same night, that he told me that he can never be friends with Croatians even though they can share a drink for one night. When I asked him why, he told me that it was because it was what his grandfather instilled into him since he was a kid, something he couldn’t easily forget. In turn, something that he probably passes on to his kids. The older the doctrine, the more inflexible one becomes with his/her own prejudices.
The Chrysalids can be classified as a science-fiction novel. Like many sci-fi novels, it puts us smack bang in the middle of a dystopia and lets us fill the gaps ourselves. And as much as Wyndham’s novels are not the most difficult to read, he writes concisely and often uses dialogue to propel the story forward. There’s a lot of depth and a lot to explore within the simplicity of the novel.
