Summary:
Wyndham’s third published novel (published as Re-Birth in the USA) is a post-holocaust/persecution of mutants/coming of age tale narrated by David, who recounts his childhood days in a primitive farming community located in Labrador. His village is not far from the Fringes and the radioactive Badlands.
The first part of the story mostly focuses on the characters and their local customs and prohibitions (BEWARE THOU THE MUTANT!), and it has some particularly well executed scenes; the second half of the novel (spoiler) exposes David and his telepathic group to the rest of the villagers, resulting in some of the former escaping to the Fringes. En route, and as they are pursued, they make a telepathic connection with a woman in distant “Sealand.” She comes to rescue them.
The theme of humanity’s racial and/or evolutionary destiny, and to a lesser extent the idea of change, is woven into the narrative throughout.
ISFDB link
Amazon UK/USA copies

Other reviews:¹
Anthony Boucher, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1955
Groff Conklin, Galaxy Science Fiction, September 1955
P. Schuyler Miller, Astounding Science Fiction, October 1955
Hans Stefan Santesson, Fantastic Universe, October 1955
Villiers Gerson, Amazing Stories, November 1955
Leslie Flood, New Worlds Science Fiction, #42 December 1955
Damon Knight, Science Fiction Stories, January 1956
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, July 1966
Charlie Brown, Locus, #59 July 16, 1970
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, April 1971
Douglas Menville, Forgotten Fantasy, June 1971
Paul McGuire, III, Science Fiction Review, July 1978
Joseph Nicholas, Paperback Parlour, October 1979
Don D’Ammassa, Science Fiction Chronicle, #169 January 1994
Darrell Bain, My 100 Most Readable (and Re-Readable) Science Fiction Novels
Jo Walton, Tor.com
Graham Sleight, Locus, #599 December 2010
Colin Steele, SF Commentary, #81, p. 39
Duncan Lawie, Slashdot
Philip Womack, The Observer
Various, Goodreads
NYRB Reading Groups Guide

_____________________

Fiction:
The Chrysalids • novel by John Wyndham ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Introduction • by M. John Harrison¹ ∗∗∗

_____________________

I don’t often bother with novels nowadays² but, as a result of browsing through a pile of Argosy magazines from 1955 (the UK digest sized magazine, not the better known American pulp), I ended up reading this one. In two of those Argosys (the September and October 1955 issues³) there is a serial version of The Chrysalids (a.k.a. Re-Birth), and when I mentioned this on the Fictionmags listserv the ensuing discussion revealed that the novella⁴ serial was a variant version of the novel. When I said I’d probably read both (to see how they compared), I was advised to read the novel first, which I did (spoilers follow).

The Chrysalids opens with its narrator, David, recalling his childhood dreams of a city (the entire novel is narrated from some unspecified future), and it soon becomes apparent from his comments that cities do not exist in his world: he lives in a more primitive time, in a farming society set after the “Tribulation”.
When he later meets Sophie (another local child) at the river they play together. When she traps her foot under a branch David helps free her, and he discovers that she has six toes—apparently a blasphemy against “The Definition of Man”. This is the first indication we get that mutations are not tolerated in this post-holocaust world.
These prohibitions are gone into in more detail in subsequent chapters, where we find out about “Offences,” “Blasphemies” and “Deviations,” as well as the local geography of David’s world, which includes the Fringes, the Badlands and the Wild Country:

[The] occurrence of an Offence was sometimes quite an impressive occasion. Usually the first sign that one had happened was that my father came into the house in a bad temper. Then, in the evening, he would call us all together, including everyone who worked on the farm. We would all kneel while he proclaimed our repentance and led prayers for forgiveness. The next morning we would all be up before daylight and gather in the yard. As the sun rose we would sing a hymn while my father ceremonially slaughtered the two-headed calf, four-legged chicken, or whatever other kind of Offence it happened to be. Sometimes it would be a much queerer thing than those . . .
Nor were Offences limited to the livestock. Sometimes there would be some stalks of corn, or some vegetables, that my father produced and cast on the kitchen table in anger and shame. If it were merely a matter of a few rows of vegetables, they just came out and were destroyed. But if a whole field had gone wrong we would wait for good weather, and then set fire to it, singing hymns while it burnt. I used to find that a very fine sight.  pp. 18-19 (NYRB edition)

We also learn about David’s family, in particular his father Joseph Strorm who is a pious observer of this society’s anti-mutant laws (the family house contains many decorative wooden panels with sayings from the Repentances, such as THE NORM IS THE WILL OF GOD, and WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT!). When David makes a careless remark about wishing he had a third arm to help with some task or other, he enrages his father, and is at the receiving end of an anti-mutant tirade. That night, David dreams of Sophie:

We were all gathered in the yard, just as we had been at the last Purification. Then it had been a little hairless calf that stood waiting, blinking stupidly at the knife in my father’s hand; this time it was a little girl, Sophie, standing barefooted and trying uselessly to hide the whole long row of toes that everyone could see on each foot. We all stood looking at her, and waiting. Presently she started to run from one person to another, imploring them to help her, but none of them moved, and none of their faces had any expression. My father started to walk towards her, the knife shining in his hand. Sophie grew frantic; she flitted from one unmoving person to another, tears running down her face. My father, stern, implacable, kept on coming nearer; still no one would move to help her. My father came closer still, with long arms outspread to prevent her bolting as he cornered her.
He caught her, and dragged her back to the middle of the yard. The sun’s edge began to show above the horizon, and everyone started to sing a hymn. My father held Sophie with one arm just as he had held the struggling calf. He raised his other hand high, and as he swept it down the knife flashed in the light of the rising sun, just as it had flashed when he cut the calf’s throat . . .  p. 28 (NYRB)

We then discover that David is a mutant too; this happens when he recalls how his Uncle Axel discovered his telepathic ability when he saw him apparently talking to himself. David tells Axel that he can communicate telepathically with Rosalind, his half-cousin, prompting his uncle to tell David to keep it a secret. That evening David warns both Rosalind and the rest of the small telepathic mutant group he is in contact with.
We learn more about David’s world in a couple of subsequent episodes. The first of these involves an attack by raiders from the Fringes, when one of the men is captured and brought to the village. He talks and looks remarkably like David’s father, but his legs and arms are monstrously long and thin. The “spiderman” talks briefly to David before he is taken away.
The other episode details a dispute between David’s father and David’s half-uncle Angus (who is also Rosalind’s father) about two giant “greathorses” the latter owns. Joseph Strorm claims they are Offences, but the local inspector disagrees, saying they comply with government regulations. During all this we find that David’s village, Waknuk, is in Labrador, in what was Canada.
Later on in the story, David and Sophie are once again at the pool when another boy comes upon them and sees Sophie’s secret. There is a fight where the boy is knocked unconscious: Sophie flees to her home, and her family pack up and flee. David stays out overnight, and when he returns the next day his father whips him.
After this, David considers running away, and discusses the idea with his Uncle Axel. The latter advises against it and, from his days as a sailor, gives a vivid description of the lands and mutant races that would face David outside normal society:⁵

When sailors first saw those parts they were pretty scared. They felt they were leaving all Purity behind, and sailing farther and farther away from God, where He’d not be able to help them. Everybody knows that if you walk on Badlands you die, and they’d none of them expected ever to see them so close with their own eyes. But what worried them most—and worried the people they talked to when they got back—was to see how the things which are against God’s laws of nature flourish there, just as if they had a right to.
And a shocking sight it must have been at first, too. You can see giant, distorted heads of corn growing higher than small trees; big saprophytes growing on rocks, with their roots trailing out on the wind like bunches of hair, fathoms long; in some places there are fungus colonies that you’d take at first sight for big white boulders; you can see succulents like barrels, but as big as small houses, and with spines ten feet long. There are plants which grow on the clifftops and send thick, green cables down a hundred feet and more into the sea; and you wonder whether it’s a land plant that’s got to the salt water, or a sea plant that’s somehow climbed ashore. There are hundreds of kinds of queer things, and scarcely a normal one among them—it’s a kind of jungle of Deviations, going on for miles and miles. There don’t seem to be many animals, but occasionally you catch sight of one, though you’d never be able to name it. There are a fair number of birds, though, sea-birds mostly; and once or twice people have seen big things flying in the distance, too far away to make out anything except that the motion didn’t look right for birds. It’s a weird, evil land; and many a man who sees it suddenly understands what might happen here if it weren’t for the Purity Laws and the inspector.  p. 59 (NYRB)

The lands down there aren’t civilized. Mostly they don’t have any sense of sin so they don’t stop Deviations; and where they do have a sense of sin, they’ve got it mixed up. A lot of them aren’t ashamed of Mutants; it doesn’t seem to worry them when children turn out wrong, provided they’re right enough to live and to learn to look after themselves. Other places, though, you’ll find Deviations who think they are normal. There’s one tribe where both the men and women are hairless, and they think that hair is the devil’s mark; and there’s another where they all have white hair and pink eyes. In one place they don’t think you’re properly human unless you have webbed fingers and toes; in another, they don’t allow any woman who is not multi-breasted to have children.
You’ll find islands where the people are all thickset, and others where they’re thin; there are even said to be some islands where both the men and women would be passed as true images if it weren’t that some strange deviation has turned them all completely black – though even that’s easier to believe than the one about a race of Deviations that has dwindled to two feet high, grown fur and a tail, and taken to living in trees.  p. 62 (NYRB)

What is already a superior piece of post-apocalyptic fiction becomes a near-excellent one in the next chapter, which more or less ends the first major arc of the novel (involving David’s early childhood, this world’s background, and Sophie’s escape), and sows the seeds of the second (his sister Petra’s birth and their eventual flight from the village to the Fringes and external rescue).
This chapter details the birth of David’s sister, which again highlights the bad feeling between Joseph Strorm and the local inspector. In this world no-one acknowledges births until the inspector issues a certificate of normality so, inevitably, when Petra is born the inspector torments David’s father by taking his time to come out to the house, and then drags out the inspection process as well as generally humming and hawing before issuing the certificate.
Later the same month, David’s Aunt Harriet arrives at the house with her own—as we discover later, mutant—child, and suggests to David’s mother that they swap children for a few days so she can get hers certificated. David’s mother bluntly refuse her plea, and then Joseph Strorm turns up and starts denouncing her. Aunt Harriet gives her heretical views on the way out:

There were two light footsteps. The baby gave a little whimper as Aunt Harriet picked it up. She came towards the door and lifted the latch, then she paused.
‘I shall pray,’ she said. ‘Yes, I shall pray.’ She paused, then she went on, her voice steady and harder: ‘I shall pray God to send charity into this hideous world, and sympathy for the weak, and love for the unhappy and unfortunate. I shall ask Him if it is indeed His will that a child should suffer and its soul be damned for a little blemish of the body . . . And I shall pray Him, too, that the hearts of the self-righteous may be broken . . .’
Then the door closed and I heard her pass slowly along the passage.
I moved cautiously back to the window, and watched her come out and lay the white bundle gently in the trap. She stood looking down on it for a few seconds, then she unhitched the horse, climbed up on the seat, and took the bundle on to her lap, with one arm guarding it in her cloak.
She turned, and left a picture that is fixed in my mind. The baby cradled in her arm, her cloak half open, showing the upper part of the brown, braid-edged cross on her fawn dress; eyes that seemed to see nothing as they looked towards the house from a face set hard as granite . . .  p. 73 (NYRB)

Aunt Harriet is later found dead in a nearby river; there is no sign of the child.

The second part of the novel takes place several years later, when one of the group, Michael, goes to a school in the nearest city Rigo. As a result of this the group become better-informed about the world they live in.
Then the eight telepaths in the village become nine. This happens when David’s sister Petra falls into a nearby river and gives a mental shout for help, revealing herself as a particularly strong—and commanding—telepath. A number of the group rush to her rescue, causing some suspicion among the other villagers. Petra lapses back into dormancy after this trauma, which saves David having to have an awkward and potentially perilous conversation with his six-year-old sister (she may blab). Petra’s abilities, and a repeat episode, eventually cause the mutants to flee the village and head for the Fringes.
Petra’s abilities, and the events she precipitates, unfortunately provide problems for the novel as well as for the telepaths. The first of these problems is that the focus of the book drifts from David towards the group and, after the first incident, it feels as if they are almost permanently in contact: sometimes it feels like David can’t decide what to have for breakfast without consulting the group and receiving advice (I exaggerate, but not by much). Moreover, the way their telepathic communication is described is quite dull. It strikes me that if you want to write about this subject you can do so in one of two ways—you can go down the innermost-intimate-thoughts route, or you can make the process more pyrotechnic. What we get instead are endlessly dull descriptions of the “thought-shapes” that they send each other (there are pages of this in the middle of Chapter 11, when David tries to train Petra to control her power).
Also, the more time the telepaths spend together as a group, the more the characters seem to morph into a group of middle class teenagers on some jolly adventure (Michael increasingly sounds more like a head prefect than mutant superman. At one point, Rosalind says to a boasting Petra, “Beware, odious smug child”; and, after the climactic battle at the end of the novel , Petra announces, “That was very horrid.”)
While this last takes the shine off of the book, what really spoiled it for me is what happens when the threesome are eventually caught by a Fringes tribe led by the “spiderman,” and taken to his camp. During this, a distant telepath contacts Petra, and we eventually learn the sender is a woman located in “Sealand” (New Zealand). When David and Rosalind eventually come into her telepathic range she impresses on them that Petra has unprecedented telepathic power, and that help is coming. So far, so good, but in her subsequent contacts, she bangs on about the evolutionary destiny of the human race, and how telepaths are the next stage. When David later considers whether he should fight and kill his father in the upcoming battle between the village posse and the Fringe tribe, she tells him this:

‘Let him be,’ came the severe, clear pattern from the Sealand woman. ‘Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They are the crown of creation, they are ambition fulfilled—they have nowhere more to go. But life is change, that is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature. Who, then, were the recent lords of creation, that they should expect to remain unchanged?
‘The living form defies evolution at its peril; if it does not adapt, it will be broken. The idea of completed man is the supreme vanity: the finished image is a sacrilegious myth.
‘The Old People brought down Tribulation, and were broken into fragments by it. Your father and his kind are a part of those fragments. They have become history without being aware of it. They are determined still that there is a final form to defend: soon they will attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is granted—a place among the fossils . . .’
[. . .]
‘There is comfort in a mother’s breast, but there has to be a weaning. The attainment of independence, the severing of ties, is, at best, a bleak process for both sides; but it is necessary, even though each may grudge it and hold it against the other. The cord has been cut at the other end already; it will only be a futile entanglement if you do not cut it at your end, too.
‘Whether harsh intolerance and bitter rectitude are the armour worn over fear and disappointment, or whether they are the festival-dress of the sadist, they cover an enemy of the life-force. The difference in kind can be bridged only by self-sacrifice: his self-sacrifice, for yours would bridge nothing. So, there is the severance. We have a new world to conquer: they have only a lost cause to lose.’
She ceased, leaving me somewhat bemused. Rosalind, too, looked as if she were still catching up on it. Petra seemed bored.  pp. 182-183 (NYRB)

Petra wasn’t the only one.
All these racial/evolutionary destiny lectures come to a head when the Sealand helicopter arrives overhead the camp, and deploys threads of gossamer that bind and incapacitate the battling Waknuk posse and Fringe tribes below. After the battle stops, the Sealand woman gets off the helicopter and sprays a solvent on David, Rosalind, and Petra, dissolving the threads that hold them, while leaving the untermensch—and their horses—to die in the threads’ ever-tightening grip:

‘Yes,’ the Sealand woman told her simply. ‘They’re all dead. The plastic threads contract as they dry. A man who struggles and entangles himself soon becomes unconscious. It is more merciful than your arrows and spears.’  p. 195 (NYRB)

But not as merciful as releasing your helpless, slowly asphyxiating prisoners.
The woman then launches into a speech that has all the charm of Robert Heinlein channelling Joseph Goebbels:

‘The unhappy Fringes people were condemned through no act of their own to a life of squalor and misery— there could be no future for them. As for those who condemned them—well, that, too, is the way of it. There have been lords of life before, you know. Did you ever hear of the great lizards? When the time came for them to be superseded they had to pass away.
‘Sometime there will come a day when we ourselves shall have to give place to a new thing. Very certainly we shall struggle against the inevitable just as these remnants of the Old People do. We shall try with all our strength to grind it back into the earth from which it is emerging, for treachery to one’s own species must always seem a crime. We shall force it to prove itself, and when it does, we shall go; as, by the same process, these are going.
‘In loyalty to their kind they cannot tolerate our rise; in loyalty to our kind, we cannot tolerate their obstruction.
‘If the process shocks you, it is because you have not been able to stand off and, knowing what you are, see what a difference in kind must mean. Your minds are confused by your ties and your upbringing: you are still half-thinking of them as the same kind as yourselves. That is why you are shocked. And that is why they have you at a disadvantage, for they are not confused. They are alert, corporately aware of danger to their species. They can see quite well that if it is to survive they have not only to preserve it from deterioration, but they must protect it from the even more serious threat of the superior variant.
‘For ours is a superior variant, and we are only just beginning.’  pp. 195-196 (NYRB)

Can’t we all just get along? Or at the very least commit mass murder without the self-righteousness?
This chill speciesism (or racism, or whatever it is) that this character expresses makes for uncomfortable reading—why this wasn’t the case when it first appeared beats me; it was, after all, less than ten years after the Holocaust (or perhaps that is what made it unexceptional). I suspect the usual “Fans are Slans” attitude applied, i.e. the readers identify with the persecuted superhuman minority (and the mundanes are written off).⁶
The story finishes with David, Rosalind, and Petra arriving by air at the Sealander woman’s city, and sensing the mass telepathic presence below.

In conclusion, a game of two halves: a very good first half, and a not very good second one.  ●

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1. I’ve decided to comment on the introductions by M. John Harrison (Penguin edition) and Christopher Priest (New York Review of Books edition) alongside the other review comments.
The Penguin Books edition Introduction by M. John Harrison is an interesting piece which highlights several points in the novel that hadn’t registered with me (the religious aspect of Strorm’s conformity, for instance), or I quickly forgot about. It also provides some useful background about the times during which the novel was written:

In 1955 a new social class was emerging in Great Britain. Increased funding for higher education had encouraged a stream of working-and lower-middle-class adolescents into the redbrick universities. In a country where education was still considered a privilege, they went to another town for three years, and were maintained there by public funds, and compelled into an exchange of ideas; and when they came back they were irrevocably changed. They had more in common with each other than with their parents.
Their career expectations were raised. Their social expectations were raised. They had politics, they had sex: they were in possession of new languages. They ate different kinds of food. They knew more. Their parents were horrified: the umbilical cord had been cut again, this time by what seemed like sorcery. Would parental values now mean nothing in the face of book-learning? Not if they had anything to do with it. Cultural confrontation was inevitable. The Generation Gap—which would widen within ten years into outright rebellion—was opening up. If the educated young were beginning to feel like strangers in their own homes, their elders were beginning to see them as dangerous, out of control: deviant.

At other points the commentary wanders off into Harrison’s own ideas about the times, but it’s worth a read (and you can find it using the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon.co.uk).

The NYRB Introduction by Christopher Priest is, for me, the better of the two introductions. This one gives a lot of useful biographical detail, and usefully contextualises both Wyndham and his novel in the times he lived. There are a number of interesting snippets for someone, like me, who is not a Wyndham expert:

Wyndham has sometimes been described by people who knew him as an aloof figure, an outsider, not someone who enjoyed the company of other writers.  p. ix (NYRB)

Wyndham’s early work is not substantially different from that of other writers of the period. In later years he appeared uncomfortable with his prewar stories, and all the evidence is that he felt embarrassed by them. (Most of this early work has been subsequently reprinted, but only after his death in 1969.)  p. x (NYRB)

After the war he returned to science fiction, adopting the John Wyndham name for the first time. In modern terminology, he re-invented himself. He had matured during his wartime experiences and although he was still interested in science fiction, he no longer wanted to approach the material in the fast-moving, sensational style of the pulp magazines. He chose instead to go back to the more thoughtful approach of H. G. Wells. To all intents and purposes, Wyndham became a new writer[.]  p. x (NYRB)

There is more of interest. (You can read five of the seven pages using the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon.com.)

As to the reviews of the book, Anthony Boucher (F&SF, August 1955) says that Re-Birth is:

[Outstanding] among the latest volumes of science fiction [. . .] in a so far undistinguished year, it’s rivaled, only by Arthur C. Clarke’s Earthlight in its combination of literary skill with solid thinking about the future. Its theme will hardly be unfamiliar to any SF reader: the problems of a group of telepathic children in a post-atomic culture [. . .] Wyndham makes something completely fresh and moving out of his telepathic mutants—partly by the accumulation of minutely plausible detail at which he has always excelled, partly by a greater depth and maturity than he has shown in previous novels.  p. 93-94

Groff Conklin (Galaxy Science Fiction, September 1955) says, in part:

This is a fresh new version of the old plot about a post-atomic-war mutant society. It is so skillfully done that the fact that it’s not a shiny new idea makes absolutely no difference.
I have put it on my shelf next to Padgett’s Mutant; and when you compare the two, I think you will agree that variety within existing frameworks is one of the truly healthy directions for science fiction to take.  p. 91

P. Schuyler Miller (Astounding Science Fiction, October 1955) says:

If Arthur C. Clarke is at the moment Britain’s ranking practitioner of science fiction, John Wyndham is running him a close second and improving fast. In “Re-Birth,” quite without straining for novelty, he has made the Mutant theme believable in a way that “Odd John,” “Slan,” and the stories of the Baldies never quite were.
[. . .]
In its quiet way, I think you’ll agree that this is one of the best of the Ballantine originals.  p. 145-146

Hans Stefan Santesson (Fantastic Universe, October 1955) describes the plot and setting of the novel (during which he also quotes the two-headed calf/four-legged chicken passage above), and finishes with this:

Certainly Wyndham’s most mature novel, it is not necessarily “a triumphant assertion of the further potentiality of Man” (to quote the publishers). It grants a possible future—no more. Wyndham, in the struggle for survival of the young telepaths, David, Rosalind and Petra, has drawn a challenging picture of a broken Earth, afraid of the past and as afraid of the future, and still with the seeds of that future within it. Re-Birth is important. Read it!  p. 109-110

Villiers Gerson (Amazing Stories, November 1955) says in part:

Good science fiction writes slowly, and reads fast. It writes slowly because a gifted author such as Mr. Wyndham develops his people and their surroundings with magnificent unity—with thought, and time, and effort. We become intensely interested in our harried protagonists; we follow their flight and its triumphant conclusion with distress and devotion, with an absorption which makes this novel hard to lay down. The author has evoked not only a fully rounded and believable world; he has also evoked an emotional structure, a mood which makes this his best book to date. Highly recommended.  p. 114-115

Leslie Flood (New Worlds Science Fiction, #42 December 1955) says in part:

Mr. Wyndham excels in adding lustre to themes familiar to science fiction readers by attention to realistic detail and considerable literary skill in plotting and characterisation.
[. . .]
[His] new novel concerns the problems of telepathic children in a post-atomic community which fanatically eschews any deviation from the premutation ‘pure’ strain, but happily his ‘freaks’ win through in the end to establish a new era. There is a wealth of warm emotion in this sincere picture of the advent of homo superior, and an increasing maturity of vision which left me very satisfied at the finish.  p. 124

Damon Knight (Science Fiction Stories, January 1956) writes a long review which includes this:

[The new Wyndham] has turned out to be something remarkably like a new H. G. Wells: not the wise-old-owl Wells, more interested in sermon than story, but the young Wells, with that astonishing, unaccountable, compelling gift of pure story-telling.
Written in the first person [. . .] this book introduces us to the most believable After-the-Atom society on record. [. . .] It’s sharply real, because the people and their world are real. These first few chapters have the genuine autobiographical sense—that Wellsian retrospective clarity, the torment of writers who can’t do it themselves.
More’s the pity that Wyndham, for once, failed to realize now good a thing he had. The sixth toe was immensely believable, and sufficient: but Wyndham has dragged in a telepathic mutation on top of it, has made David himself one of the nine child telepaths, and hauled the whole plot away from his carefully built background, into just one more damned chase with a rousing cliché at the end of it.
Wyndham’s unflaggingly expert writing, all the way through, only proves that there are no exceptions: this error is fatal. [. . .] One forest is like another forest, one chase like another chase, one rescue like another rescue. Those who want to read stale derring-do don’t have to come to science fiction: back issues of pulps, at three for a quarter, are foundering full of it. Crooks chase man and girl who Know Too Much; lawman chases badman; over and over and over; why else do you suppose the pulps died? [. . .]
A rolling story gathers no meaning. Most of the frantic physical action in science fiction, of which sophisticated critics rightly complain, is no more than a nervous twitch.
Let us sit still, and unroll our mats, and tell our tales.  p. 118-119

The whole review is worth reading.
P. Schuyler Miller (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, July 1966) adds in his second review of this book:

This is the first science fiction in what is apparently a new Ballantine series of paperbacks selected for teenagers. An introduction for teachers and parents emphasizes that there are indeed serious themes in such stories of a nightmare future, and spells out what they are. The kids will undoubtedly have noted them—and others—in passing.  p. 155

P. Schuyler Miller (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, April 1971) adds in his third review:

This is the only one of the lot with previous hardback publication in the U.S. It was one of the titles in Ballantine’s short-lived simultaneous hard/paperback series, and a classic in its own right.  p. 165

Paul McGuire, III, (Science Fiction Review, July 1978) says:

Roughly the first two-thirds of this novel is the episodic narration of the protagonist’s youth. It is strong on characterization, with a few effective vignettes.
[. . .]
Eventually, as one might expect, discovery is made and Dave, his sister, and girlfriend flee for their lives to the “fringes”, where outlaw mutants have a refuge. The question is, can they survive long enough for the deus ex machina to come and make everything all wonderful.
Two familiar (too familiar?) and related themes tie everything together; telepaths are superior human beings and telepaths will be persecuted. Nothing terribly original, but after all, the book was published in 1955. Still, the book doesn’t really deserve to be called a classic, but then, few of the books labeled that by publishers in this young genre do either.
[. . .]
Occasionally, RE-BIRTH seems to be the READER’S DIGEST version of a larger work, but it is interesting and generally well-written.

Colin Steele (SF Commentary, #81) only briefly mentions The Chrysalids (I’m not convinced he read it) before discussing, at much greater length, the publication of an early (and originally rejected) novel, Plan for Chaos. (The review is on p. 39 of that issue.)

Duncan Lawie (Slashdot) says, in part:

The Chrysalids is skilfully written, displaying the increasing danger and frustration for a hidden community of telepaths in a society which prizes normalcy above all else. Their striving for “averageness” despite an ability which allows them insight far beyond their fellows and in the face of widespread communal fear of the different strikes a chord with generation after generation of reader. There is also clear advocacy for change in this novel. While accepting that any creature will fight to preserve itself and its type, there is an emphasis on the importance of change as the only means of improvement and a belief that evolution has no ultimate end point. This leads to the thesis that it is inherently right that humanity give way to those who come after us. This Darwinian perspective may seem reasonable in the long view but the book draws into renewed sharpness questions which have been debated for decades.
The final pages are almost overwhelmed by Wyndham’s need to state his position clearly, but the novel does regain equilibrium. As a whole, the book achieves considerable complexity of idea and action whilst maintaining straightforward language. The story progresses primarily through character development, which allows a natural flow and shape in the plot. It is a book which rarely pulls its punches and this is a contributing factor to its continued success and validity almost 50 years after its original publication. The Chrysalids is a tight, well developed novel from a master of a peculiarly English style of science fiction.

Jo Walton (Tor.com) concludes with:

The real strength of The Chrysalids is the seamless including of the way it builds up a picture of the future world from the point of view of a child entirely immersed in it. I also give it points for not making the rescuers from Zealand entirely nice—something I totally missed as a child. There are many conventional ways in which Wyndham is not a good writer—I’ve mentioned the characterisation, and his plots often work out much too neatly. He was much better at thinking up situations than having something actually happen in them. But there’s a writing skill that doesn’t have a name, unless it’s called readability, with which he was well endowed—the ability to write a sentence that makes you want to keep reading the next sentence and so on and on. He has that compelling quality, whatever it is, that makes me want to keep reading a book and not put it down. It got me even on this nth re-read in which I knew in advance every single event of the novel and was also looking deeply askance at the female characters. I was reading it standing up at the bus stop, I was reading it on the bus so that I almost missed my stop, I sat down and kept right on reading it when I came in instead of making dinner.

Philip Womack (The Observer) concludes with:

It becomes apparent that David’s village is isolated in its customs and beliefs. [. . .] Whose is the true pattern and whose the mutation? These questions underlie Wyndham’s crystalline, evocative writing, as thrilling as John Buchan’s as we follow David’s final gallop towards what we can only hope is freedom. Wyndham’s genius, though, is to show that even rescue is compromised.

The New York Review of Books issued a Reading Groups Guide when they reprinted the book. It is worth looking at, and had a couple of observations/questions that didn’t occur to me, including this:

The web-like weapon at the end of the book leads to imagery of metamorphosis and rebirth (a chrysalis is a pupal caterpillar in the stage before it emerges from the cocoon as a butterfly), even though it suffocates and kills everyone except the heroes. David, Rosalind, and Petra are saved from their enemies, but how are they reborn?

I suspect my answer would get me drummed out of most book clubs.

2. I started giving up on novels in the 1980s, when books started bloating from the usual 160-200 pp. size to many hundreds of pages—what I think of as the “never mind the quality, feel the width” transition the field went through after the Star Wars movies in the mid-1970s. Most of the doorsteps I’ve picked up since confirm that prejudice, and few wouldn’t have been improved by substantial trimming.

3. The UK Argosy of this period has a piece of SF in nearly every issue as far as I can see (there are a lot of stories by Ray Bradbury, and some are described as a “Science Fiction Choice”). There are also various other names that I recognise (Gerald Kersh, and Joan Aiken, who has a fantasy story in the September issue containing the first part of the Wyndham serial). Here are some of the magazine’s contents lists on Galactic Central.

4. The novella is 28,000 words (13k+15k) long; the novel is 70,000 words.
I am told by a Wyndham enthusiast that no information exists about the circumstances surrounding the creation and publication of the novella version, but the table below shows the content and structure difference of the two works. From memory—it is all a bit of a blur—the main differences are that the novella, apart from its overall compression, loses the Sophie (six toes) and Anne (marriage outside the group) subplots, and the raid by the Fringes tribes is moved to the beginning of the story.

5. Axel’s nautical anecdotes, and the advanced technological society that appears at the end of The Chrysalids, vaguely reminded me of parts of Keith Roberts’ Drek Yarman and Tremarest (the last two of his ‘Kiteworld’ stories). I wonder if The Chrysalids influenced Roberts?—he also wrote a few psi/telepathy stories in his early career: Manipulation, The Inner Wheel, The Worlds That Were.

6. The Chrysalids has a certain similarity to C. M. Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons and James Tiptree’s Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, in that those portrayed as the persecuted (Wyndham’s mutants), the put upon (Kornbluth’s technocrats), or the previously oppressed (Tiptree’s women) turn out to be as as ghastly as those that they oppose and/or replace. That would never happen nowadays.
For another take on how supermen treat those who have come before, have a look at the recently reviewed Kindness by Lester del Rey (review and links to a copy here).  ●