Departures and network debugging

A lazy morning with the calm only broken by a panic over the near-burning of the roast potatoes for lunch. Mere minutes before we were due to arrive, an old schoolfriend I hadn't seen for 6–7 years happened to drop by only to find himself invited to join us. After lunch my uncle and my granny sorted out their remaining packing, waiting out a couple of appalling hail showers before making an early departure for London.

With the unpredictable weather making a walk a chancy prospect, pater & I spent the afternoon trying to debug the downstairs networking. Connected directly to the secondary router, I noticed that it had been configured to use a different subnet to the primary making it inaccessible without additional routing. After correcting this and putting the secondary back in place, we found that we still couldn't ping it or see any broadcasts from it.

Investigating further, we found that the ethernet-over-power adaptor it using to communicate with the primary router seemed to have lost synchronisation. When we replaced it with a properly synchronised adaptor, the router came on-line and ground floor wifi performance improved from a crawl to blindingly fast. Excelsior!

The Chrysalids

Another end of year comfort read, in the form of John Wyndham's The Chrysalids. While it may seem a slightly odd choice, set as it is a province of Canada a few thousand years after a nuclear apocalypse, there is something rather idyllic about way the narrator portrays his near-medieval life and, of course, the novel ends on a positive note with the intervention of a deux ex machina.

The story opens with the narrator, David Strorm, remembering a dream from childhood: of a shining city, its port full of ships, its sky teeming with aircraft; but David has never even seen the sea, having lived all his life in Waknuk, small village in Labrador far from the sea, where the most sophisticated form of technology is an ancient steam engine from the time before Tribulation. Growing up largely left to his own devices by his distant mother and his fire-and-brimstone father, David spends his time dodging chores and playing with his friend Sophie, who despite having an additional toe on each foot, David fails to recognise as a mutant and a blasphemy.

When Sophie's secret finally comes to light, forcing her family to flee for their lives, David realises the insecurity of his own position; because although he appears perfectly normal, he and a handful of other children in the neighbourhood are able to communicate via telepathy. The situation is abruptly complicated when David's younger sister Petra gets caught up in a life-threatening situation that reveals a telepathic ability sufficiently powerful to compel the rest of the group to respond. Forced to lie about how they learnt about the danger, the telepaths find themselves increasingly compromised with David, Petra, and his cousin Rosalind finally forced to run for the dubious safety of the Fringes.

As might be expected from John Wyndham, Waknuk feels more like a romanticised versions of an English village than anything else. Obviously there are hardships — David describes the ritual destruction of crops and animals that fail to breed true — and Waknuk Farm, with its prominent hellfire quotes from the Bible and from Nicholson's Repentances, is far from welcoming; but David, knowing no different, fails to connect with most of these giving the impression that life is more idyllic than it might objectively appear.

The Chrysalids is clearly a product of the mid-1950s and its central themes — religious fundamentalism, its intolerance of difference, and its exaggerated fear of the telepaths within — can be read as allegories for McCarthyism. Thus David's fearsomely fundamentalist father is a hardcore McCarthyist, not only condemning his own relatives should they show the slightest hint of aberration but willing to join the hunt to kill them when they flee from his jurisdiction. David's group of telepaths, meanwhile, can be taken as the reds under the bed: an internal menace, a group who look like normal people from the outside but whose minds are profoundly different, who may out-number the norms and may, by dint of their abilities, be able to coordinate a strike against the forces of normality.

While this interpretation could paint the Fringes as analogous to Soviet Communism, I suspect it's probably better to take them as those accused of un-American activities and to read the Rescuer as representing the forces of Marxism. This seems to make more sense because the people in the Fringes don't seem to have much in the way of philosophy, other than a simple desire to survive. Whereas the Rescuer comes bearing extremely strong views on evolution, the march of progress, and the inherent superiority of group thinking; something David often goes out of his way to mention, noting the Rescuer's shift from her normal conversation mode to her rather superior lecturing tone.

In all this it's hard not to suspect that Wyndham's sympathies lie with David's pragmatic and worldly Uncle Axel, seeming the only rational adult in Waknuk. Unlike David's parents with their fixed, dogmatic ways, Axel's greater experience with the world means he is more willing to consider the possibility that Nicholson's definition of the True Image — what it is to be human — might be open to debate, having seen the same texts interpreted in radically different ways in different places. He also points out that although Nicholson may have specified the physical components of the True Image — and even then, because he was writing after the events of Tribulation, there are reasons to doubt that his descriptions match those of the Bible — the definition says nothing about the nature of the mind and there is every reason to suppose that the telepaths may actually be closer to God's ideal image of man than those of David's father and the Normalcy Inspectors.

The Chrysalids is probably my favourite of Wyndham's novels: crisp prose, neatly drawn but very English characters, a fascinating world that isn't over-developed, and a clever set of allusions that can be read in different ways and on various levels. Very highly recommended.