Yes, I know this is over 50 years old. Someone recently mentioned it and it had been a long time since I read it, so I checked it out from the library. This copy has an interesting introduction penned for the fiftieth anniversary, evaluating it in the context of 9-11.
Wyndham is, I think, underrated, like a number of British authors (e.g., James Blish). Now you might think that anyone writing about the doom of mankind at the hand, er, tendril, of homicidal plants is justly underrated, but Wyndham sets it up expertly and credibly. The writing is spare and immediate: he does not waste time explaining the source of the meteor shower or how the triffids originated in Russia. He just gets right to the good stuff.
I think that the book is underappreciated because it is so veddy English - even though prim and proper English society had been dealt a massive attitude readjustment by WWII, by 1951 it still remained on a different social planet from the USA. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Mrs. Grundy character who responds to an announcement by a Prof. de la Paz-type character that the surviving men will have to take multiple wives and the women make babies, with the frosty retort, "Is the speaker advocating Free Love?" And yet - and yet - Wyndham then goes on to make an impassioned pragmatic defense of the prof's argument, through no less a character than a young attractive female, who was not only quite capable but had recently penned a book titled, "Sex is My Adventure"! Hence my review of this book here - this section is positively Heinleinian. Given the publication date, it's debatable who influenced whom, if at all, of course.
It now reads as somewhat dated, not just for the slightly complex phrasing but also the attitudes of yesteryear - survivors feeling guilty at taking items from abandoned stores without paying for them seems regrettably quaint now. But for anyone who hasn't read this book, if you never thought that walking plants could be a terrifying adversary, check it out.
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