Plan for Chaos

I enjoyed this it is classic Wyndham paticularly toward the end. I would say don't read the introduction by Christopher Priest until afterwards as he gives away a bit to much. The remarks linking this to Day of the Triffids are just wrong the two books were written at the same time and that one got into print. ( )

Interesting- but only so so by comparison with his mightier works. Shades of brave new world in the cloning. the nazi empire theme continuing in the jungle was never really plausible enough - and too much time was spent with nothing happening. Not great to be honest. ( )

An odd book. Supposedly the prequel to "Day of the Tiffids" but that was hard for me to see.

Johnny Farthing, a magazine photographer, noticed that women who look just like his fiance show up dead all over town. Then, he starts getting recognized at places he has never been before. What is going on?

I really enjoyed the first part - suspenseful and went quickly. But the second part just dragged and dragged.

Dated, sure, it was written in the 1950s, but I don't think one of Wydham's best. ( )

(Plot spoiler) This is interesting as a companion novel to ‘The Day of the Triffids’, a novel hat struck me as being highly sexist with Bill continually looking after Josella. For a while I felt that in this novel Wyndham was reversing this, making women the dominant ones, but the fact that The Mother is a Nazi trying to recreate a victorious Germany makes women’s power appear to be dangerous, something confirmed later by Freda appearing to want to create a super-race too.

This was not a pleasurable book to read. While it contains characteristic elements of his other writing such as his ability to create provocative ideas, it is a book where these ideas are expounded at some length by different characters (reminding me that when you start a new paragraph in direct speech you keep opening the quotation marks) so that these ideas seem artificially injected into the text creating a hiatus. The main character is more someone who just keeps hanging around getting confused and the plot is drawn out and unconvincing. Wyndham was right to abandon his struggles to get this one published. ( )

It's a bit of an odd fish this: the prose is more akin to Wyndham's later novels, but the plot is straight from his Beynon days. The characters are a bit of both. It's been slated in professional reviews, but reading it myself I think a lot of them have been rather unfair on this franken-novel.

Overall, I enjoyed this novel. The plot is well thought out and suitably creepy, and it moves along pretty quickly. The heroine is typical of Wyndham's later novels - resourceful, intelligent, and more insightful than the hero. The hero, however, probably ranks as one of Wyndham's least intelligent. The reader figures out roughoy what's happening pretty quickly, but every time other characters start talking about something that would help the hero figure it out he stops listening for one reason or another. This becomes immensely frustrating, almost as much as the fortunate accidents that befall him repeatedly.

It feels like a third or fourth draft - the quality of writing and the majority of the plot are fine, but it needed an editor to run an eye across it a final time to iron out the coincidences and TSTL moments. It's definitely worth reading if you're a Wyndham fan, but if you're just starting to read his works I'd leave it until last.

www.solelyfictional.org ( )