John Wyndham’s work has had a mixed reception over the decades: adored by the general reader, treated with cool disdain by the science fiction cognoscenti.

It’s difficult to believe Simon Clark’s The Night of the Triffids, a ‘sequel’ to Wyndham’s classic, will do much to heal the breach. Its action takes place a couple of decades after the end of Wyndham’s novel and largely in and around New York where David Masen, the son of Wyndham’s principal character, finds himself battling a larger, more efficiently aggressive strain of triffid after being plucked from his rustic English idyll during the all-enveloping darkness that threatens humanity’s faltering recovery from the original catastrophe.

The clash of ideologies that formed an emerging subplot in the latter half of Wyndham’s book is a more dominant theme in Clark’s, and to represent the darker side of human ambition he can do no better than to resurrect Torrence, whose early career as executioner and paramilitary commander is chronicled in The Day of the Triffids.

There is plenty of scope for dramatic confrontation from the outset of The Night of the Triffids, then, and Clark does not disappoint. The voice he gives David Masen is in clear relation to the confidence-born-of-diffidence that characterises father Bill’s maturation in the earlier book, and Clark retains much, though not all, of Wyndham’s low-key plausibility.

We are now familiar with the horrors triffids present, and Wyndham has shown us how to deal with them. As a threat to humanity, they look as quaint as the hula hoop and not much more threatening (though much more durable, having survived an appalling Hollywood film adaptation and a stilted 1980s BBC TV effort). In The Night of the Triffids, the author works
well with limited material, but can hardly achieve the great impact of his hero.