John Wyndham's last novel, which remained unpublished until 1979, ten years after the author's death.Currently published by
Penguin,
ISBN 0-14-005338-7.
Sadly, I was quite disappointed with Mr Wyndham's last offering. The story begins somewhat promisingly with a millionaire English lord who dreams of ounding a Utopian community on an uninhabited island, but quickly disintegrates once the island is reached. Mutated spiders attack the colonising party and the adventures which ensue result in multiple deaths and very little, to my mind, in the way of drama.
What is notable about this novel is how John Wyndham's attitudes have changed since his earlier books. The novels written in the Fifties often used nuclear power as some sort of panacaea, but by 1969 the evil side-effects of atomic radiation had become realised. The first handful of pages have a decent satire on British newspaper journalism and a smidgeon of insidious anti-Communism to remind us whose book we are reading.
All things considered, though, it appears that after the masterworks of The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, and even The Outward Urge, John Wyndham had somewhat run out of ideas. Sad, really.