Chocky

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At the beginning of the narrative, Matthew and the alien have been in communication for some time and are already arguing like an old married couple. One major element adding to our enjoyment in turning the pages of this fascinating novel is knowing we are reading a work of science fiction, that Chocky is an alien consciousness that has chosen to communicate with a particular human boy. And then things grow even stranger, as Matthew, a nonswimmer, suddenly becomes proficient enough to rescue Polly from drowning, and a good enough painter to have his bizarre compositions win a school prize. It's not about mass blindness and man-eating plants or about the great novel that was later turned into Stepford Wives. John Wyndham’s late novel Chocky, published in 1968, just one year before his death (although it was based on a novelette published five years earlier), ponders this latter question.

Chocky - Wikipedia

David Gore becomes concerned that his twelve-year-old son, Matthew, is too old to have an imaginary friend. Wyndham described the odd rather than the fantastic, the disturbing rather than the horrific, the remarkable rather than the outrageous. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. This is a fairly short novel so I don't want to say much more about the plot but will say is that it’s not difficult to work out what is going on. Wyndham withholds his revelations as to Chocky's nature and origin until the very end, which keeps us guessing all the way through, and most readers will not be disappointed.By using Matthew's adoptive father as the narrator Wyndham is able to employ him as the voice of reason contrasting him with the emotional response of his adoptive mother. When the questions Chocky asks become too advanced and, frankly, too odd for teachers to answer, Matthew’s parents start to wonder if Chocky might be something far stranger than a figment of their son’s imagination. That is how it has come to install itself inside the head of young Matthew, 11 years old and hitherto unremarkable. Although The Day of the Triffids (1951) is fairly well known – in fact, the name ‘triffid’ for a large plant has become part of the English dictionary – many of those who recognise the word triffid rarely know the story from which it came. The sort who teaches him binary counting, how to paint through new eyes, how to swim (even when he can’t), and encourages him to ask the most unusual questions of his parents and teachers.

Chocky by John Wyndham | Goodreads

What if your son had an imaginary friend with whom he often conversed, answering questions that nobody had apparently asked, and behaving as though this invisible and seemingly immaterial Other were the most natural thing in the world? Wyndham, as he also does in The Midwich Cuckoos, is examining the idea of the stranger within, that children are a mystery to adults nearly as much as adults are to children. The pace is sedate compared to much sci-fi, I suppose, the settings very Home Counties, perhaps interpreted as stilted.As had so many other of the author's previous works, the novel initially saw the light of day as a hardcover bearing the imprint of British publishing house Michael Joseph, in 1968; this reader was fortunate enough to acquire the original American edition, a 75-cent Ballantine paperback, also from 1968. David and Mary are not overly worried about their son having an imaginary friend until their son begins to act strangely and asks questions that are much more advanced than his eleven years. She needs to have the things Matthew is looking at, such as cows, explained to her as if she’s never seen them before and finds examples of modern technology, such as cars, both clumsy and silly. Minor issues present such as mild cracking, inscriptions, inserts, light foxing, tanning and thumb marking.