I don't often go back and read books from school curriculum, but The Chrysalids by John Wyndham (1955) is one that I had to try again because I remembered bits and pieces and its either liked or utterly hated by readers. My husband absolutely hates it, and some of the girls in my book club remember liking it, except the ending.
I found I enjoyed it this time when I read it. I think it also helped reading it more than one or two chapters at a time over a long period of time. I was able to think about the story more as an overall arch, than just analyzing bits and pieces here and there as dictated by a curriculum and focusing on specific details instead of ones that actually stood out to me.
Unless you've read the book, or had someone explain it to you, the largest and most driven-home theme in it is intolerance, and in this book, particularly religious intolerance based around looking and being different. "Mutants" they call them in the book. However, this is not an aspect of the book I really want to focus on, because let's face it, its been done to death and I'd rather focus on other things about the book that affected me more reading it as an adult.
Main character, David, and some of his friends are SPOILER: telepathic. When his Uncle Axel discovers this and warns David, 10 years old at the time, to keep it a secret, he tells David: "You'll understand when you're older how important it is." (pg. 31) His uncle is trying to protect him from the mutant 'cleansing' because David is just a child. But child or not, it does not matter to the religion of the 'True Image' in the book. I think Uncle Axel is trying to preserve a little of David's childhood innocence while he still can before the reality of his situation sets in too much. He thinks the truth might spook David and Uncle Axel doesn't want him to run away and get chased down and so on and so forth. Elaborate from there. Its not good to be frank.
Protecting the innocence of children is something humankind practices both consciously and unconsciously to varying extents. There are some very "sheltered" children and then there are those who sometimes know too much of the world than most would deem acceptable. There is a fine balance between keeping them too sheltered that they have trouble coping with the 'real world' as teenagers and adults and them knowing too much that they take too many risks with themselves and others or can't determine what is decorum and polite versus abrupt and abrasive. I have my opinions on child-rearing and I know which side of this spectrum I fall on, but just so we're clear: there is no right or wrong way to protect the innocence of a child, just a fine balance that parents have to battle with every day while raising their children.
As the religion of 'God and the True Image' is such a large part of the story of The Chrysalids, there was one part about the birthing of new children that struck me with an interesting similarity. When a new child is born, an inspector must be summoned to determine the child as "normal" and issue it a Normalcy Certificate. Until this is done, the family cannot even acknowledge that a new baby has come or inform any of the family of its arrival. The similarity came to me between this "Normalcy Certificate" and how history has displayed mankind's prejudice to the Jewish and Japanese people during the second world war. In the book they have to be declared as normal by the governing body, but our ancestors went out of their way to declare and issue documents to those who were deemed different from the rest of the population. Its just an interesting turn of the tables in a way I never thought of before.
It is established in the book, that dying rather than being caught hiding that you're a mutant/deviant/different is significant. There are several mentions to characters killing off others to protect them rather than letting them get caught by the authorities for being as they are. In particular, after David's little sister Petra is discovered to be a telepathic like him and a few others, she is deemed to be protected at all costs or killed to prevent her from being taken into custody. Even David and Rosalind, his cousin, have to discuss it with one another and David resolves to kill her if they get get caught even though he loves her.
I have noticed this has been a theme in things I have been watching and reading over the past few years. That dying is preferable to being caught and then, I would assume, tortured, beaten, broken physically and mentally. I can see the appeal to this theme and how others would come to this conclusion, but its still strange to me the prominence it has come to be represented in entertainment I have been enjoying lately. Maybe there is a subtle acknowledgement creeping into our collective minds that death is a preferable choice compared the the horrific and devious things people can do to one another when we think/believe someone else is in the wrong.
On a lighter, side note: I just realized the person on the cover of the book is the 'mutant' girl Sophie that David meets when he is a kid. She has six toes, which David knows is supposed to be wrong, but he doesn't understand why something so small would make her evil in the eyes of everyone else he knows. Can't believe I didn't catch on to that until now.
Anyways, sorry if that was TL;DR, but it is another one of the Reading Challenge list and I'm excited about that. I now have to switch gears again and get the Book Club February choice read before the end of the month. After that is The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides.
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