| Popis: |
Because the name of John Wyndham is widely known in Britain and because Michael Joseph and Penguin have kept his works in print, the manner in which both British and American critics have dealt with his fiction comes as a surprise. In a two-page commentary Brian Aldiss, while acknowledging the ‘magic’ in The Day of the Triffids (1951), labels Triffids and The Kraken Wakes (1953) ‘cosy disasters’, declaring that both books are ‘totally devoid of ideas but read smoothly’.1 He covers the other three novels of the 1950s in a sentence for each. The American John Scarborough relies heavily on Aldiss, even to the ‘magic’ in Triffids, although he names The Chrysalids (1955) as Wyndham’s finest book but remains uncertain as to Wyndham’s stance regarding the mutations so necessary to the story.2 He finds Wyndham ‘deeply committed to comfort and reliability in existence’, a man who ‘speaks clearly about a desired complacency … a widespread desire to return to the “good old days” ’.3 The academic use of his books continues ‘because they are quite clean [sexually] and generally free of controversy’.4 In a brief overview in Peter Nicholls’s Encyclopedia, John Clute notes that Wyndham gave an ‘eloquently middle-class English response to the theme of disaster’ and wrote for a specific market at a specific time.5 Perhaps the critic who gives a reader the greatest help is Julius Kagarlitski, who names Wyndham the ‘truest disciple of H. G. Wells in English literature’.6 |
