Paul Bryant's Reviews > Trouble with Lichen

Young female biochemist goes to work for top research company and before too long she has made an earth shattering discovery – this Chinese lichen will slow down your metabolism and enable you to live for 200 plus years! Well… now what? She doesn't know that the boss knows, but the boss doesn’t know she knows what he knows. She leaves the company and starts up a beauty salon in London catering for the wives of the rich and influential. Because she has a Plan.

As some years tick by they begin to flock to her establishment because word gets round that damn, this stuff seems to actually work..! So this is her plan : she thinks that if the anti-ageing treatment is announced to the world at large there will be rioting, chaos and general mayhem because not everyone can get it (not enough lichen) and because some powerful elements in society will be dead against it. So what she will do is secretly give the lichen treatment to all these wives of the great and the good so that when she makes the big announcement that semi-immortality has been discovered and the uproar/backlash begins, the secret cabal of wives will find ways of ensuring their husbands support the idea of lichen for all and she will be able to lead first England then the whole human race into its next phase.

Sounds great.

John Wyndham wrote 7 novels, I have read 6 so far. This is the only one not rated 3 stars. This novel gets all tangled up like someone falling on the floor whilst wildly trying to put their pyjama trousers on. He has a very solid sf idea and he wants to use it to spotlight how women’s lives in particular are crippled and bent out of shape under society’s current rules, and this is all good, but the whole thing seems to be played for laughs….I should say for smirks…and his ghastly elbow-in-ribcage old-fashioned unfunny comic writing will just grind the teeth of modern readers.

Still, 5 three star novels out of 6 – I’m not complaining!