2010 books

[peteryoung]

30) John Wyndham, Chocky, 1968  ( RE-READ )
There's still some uncertainty over Chocky's original publication date: Penguin claims it was a book in 1968 but John Clute points to an earlier appearance in Good Housekeeping in 1963 – it certainly exhibits a domesticated gentility suitable for such a magazine. This new Penguin Modern Classics edition comes with an introduction by Brian Aldiss that maybe goes into a bit too much detail, as if readers of this particular edition will almost certainly have read it before. It's an undemanding and straightforward read that ultimately reveals the identity of that extra voice in young Matthew's head, with perhaps only a fleeting mention of the troubling matter of schizophrenia and no mention at all of Multiple Personality Disorder which, given Matthew's Harley Street treatment, would at least have been considered more than the outdated diagnosis of 'possession'. This seems to indicate that the science has been excised as much as possible, making it one for my list of recommendations of science fiction for people who don't read science fiction.

Comments

[dfordoom.livejournal.com]

I read this one years ago and liked it. I went through a very major John Wyndham phase in my youth.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

I've got most of Wyndham's book in one form or another (even one first edition, The Midwich Cuckoos) yet have only read about half of them. One I must dig out again is his collection Jizzle as I remember a few stories in there were really great stuff.

[dfordoom.livejournal.com]

I liked Wyndham's short stories, which often had a quite different flavour compared to his novels.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I'd like to re-read Wyndham's books because I haven't read them since my teens when I worked my way through most of them.

Re Chocky being in Good Housekeeping, I first read it serialised in Princess (magazine for girls, companion to Eagle the boys' comic). I have no idea whether this was before or after it came out in book form and Googling is failing to come up with anything, though it did reassure me that I hadn't imagined it. Princess was also where I met Tolkien's Hobbit for the first time and other books such as The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. They don't produce comics like that any more. :)

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Multiple personality disorder didn't become a popular diagnosis until the Seventies.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

I've seen and read Sybil, but I wasn't aware until now (via Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disorder)) that it was also an almost exclusively American diagnosis.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

One of the things that always stuck with me was that the family lived, for a time, in Hertfordshire - Chesthunt if memory serves, which is where I lived at the time. It was rather exciting for my 11 year old self.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

CHESHUNT - geez.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

Something that made it contemporary for me was that I realised Matthew would be our age today.