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The Drought
An apocalyptic dystopia like no other, one whose "originality and power [of] vision can be felt" ( Times Literary Supplement ). Weird and mesmerizingly grotesque, The Drought tells the chilling story of the world on the brink of extinction, where a global drought, brought on by industrial waste, has left mankind in a life-or-death search for water. Violence erupts and insanity reigns as the human race struggles for survival in a worldwide desert of despair.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1964
About the author
J.G. Ballard
411 books3,847 followersJames Graham "J. G." Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Ballard came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard focused on an eclectic variety of short stories (or "condensed novels") such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which drew closer comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Burroughs. In 1973 the highly controversial novel Crash was published, a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism; the protagonist becomes sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car crashes. The story was later adapted into a film of the same name by Canadian director David Cronenberg.
While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army. Described as "The best British novel about the Second World War" by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg.
The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".
While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army. Described as "The best British novel about the Second World War" by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg.
The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 268 reviews
December 20, 2022
Ballard's apocalyptic speculative fiction climate disaster tale with the world on the brink, and then over it, as it all goes to Hell, doesn't really stand the test of time, as many other similar works have done, but it is still an interesting enough story.
Ballard, like many sci-fi writers of his generation, tapped into the reality that it will be mankind's misuse of the planet that could eventually lead to Earth being unable to sustain human life without a lot of difficulty 5 out of 12, Two Star read.
2006 read
Ballard, like many sci-fi writers of his generation, tapped into the reality that it will be mankind's misuse of the planet that could eventually lead to Earth being unable to sustain human life without a lot of difficulty 5 out of 12, Two Star read.
2006 read
May 31, 2020
”Far away to the north-west, where the dried husks of the desert merged into the foothills of the night, an animal howled wearily. Its lost cries echoed among the steel pillars of the bridge, reverberating across the white river that lay beside them, as if trying to resurrect this long-dormant skeleton of the dead land.”
Dr. Charles Ransom is caught in a drought. He spends most of his time on his boat, navigating the last of the water on the lake as the river that feeds it slows to a trickle. His wife, Judith, has left him. His practice becomes smaller as people flee to the ocean, giving him more time to ponder and plan for a bleak future.
Water becomes the only form of currency.
There are rather strange people who have decided to stay. The Lomaxes, a wealthy brother and sister duo who are hoarding water, intending to wait out the drought for when the rains return. I actually shivered when I read this description of the sister: ”Ransom always felt a sharp sense of unease, although superficially she was attractive enough. Perhaps this physical appeal, the gilding of the lily, was what warned him away from her. Lomax’s eccentricities were predictable in their way, but Miranda was less self-immersed, casting her eye on the world like a witch waiting for the casual chance.” Many of us have at some point in time found ourselves strangely attracted to someone whom we find unlikeable, maybe even loathsome. Pondering these improbable desires one can wonder, Am I really so shallow to be fooled by the “gilding of the lily?”
There is also a strange boy named Quilter with a misshapen head. He is too bright to be considered special needs, but he is so odd and rambunctious that one must treat him with caution. He is Caliban, striding out of the pages of The Tempest. When Ransom meets back up with him later in the book, he has become a character from the world of Mad Max. He strode off on his stilts across the sand, the furs and dressing-gown lifting behind him like tattered wings.”
Ransom stays as long as he can, but when violence erupts over water, he too flees to the coast. Deciding to become a refugee is a difficult decision. It is hard to leave behind all that you have, the mementos of your life, the cosiness of the familiar. Violence or lack of food and water are really the only two things that will force most people to choose to be refugees. Even in our modern world, we are still seeing people forced to flee terrible circumstances. I always think about the book On the Beach, one of my favorite post-apocalyptic books, where the people in this part of Australia have elected to stoically stay instead of fleeing to try and keep one furlong ahead of the nuclear fallout. Most of us don’t know when we will die, but for these people, it is a matter of doing the math. Our sense of what is really important becomes sharply defined when we are faced with our unavoidable death.
There is no salvation at the coast. There is only more death. So what did we do to ourselves to create such a massive drought? ”A thin but resilient mono-molecular film formed from a complex of saturated long-chain polymers, generated within the sea from the vast quantities of industrial wastes discharged into the ocean basins during the previous fifty years. This tough, oxygen-permeable membrane lay on the air-water interface and prevented almost all evaporation of surface water into the air space above.” Isn’t it too bad that every other living creature and fauna has to pay the price for our mismanagement of the planet?
Here is another evocative scene of this displaced world. ”They had been left there during the tremendous traffic jams the previous week. Stalled in motionless glaciers of metal that reached over the plains as far as the horizon, their occupants must have given up in despair and decided to walk the remaining miles.” I really like the word choice of “glaciers of metal.”
Can Ransom survive in this world long enough to feel the patter of rain once again?
I don’t think there is another writer who can compete with J. G. Ballard when it comes to describing post-apocalyptic worlds. His creative visions of man’s final destructive influence on the planet are harrowing and yet in some ways beautiful. He makes you want to see it, even as you fear that someday you will.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten and an Instagram account https://www.instagram.com/jeffreykeeten/
Dr. Charles Ransom is caught in a drought. He spends most of his time on his boat, navigating the last of the water on the lake as the river that feeds it slows to a trickle. His wife, Judith, has left him. His practice becomes smaller as people flee to the ocean, giving him more time to ponder and plan for a bleak future.
Water becomes the only form of currency.
There are rather strange people who have decided to stay. The Lomaxes, a wealthy brother and sister duo who are hoarding water, intending to wait out the drought for when the rains return. I actually shivered when I read this description of the sister: ”Ransom always felt a sharp sense of unease, although superficially she was attractive enough. Perhaps this physical appeal, the gilding of the lily, was what warned him away from her. Lomax’s eccentricities were predictable in their way, but Miranda was less self-immersed, casting her eye on the world like a witch waiting for the casual chance.” Many of us have at some point in time found ourselves strangely attracted to someone whom we find unlikeable, maybe even loathsome. Pondering these improbable desires one can wonder, Am I really so shallow to be fooled by the “gilding of the lily?”
There is also a strange boy named Quilter with a misshapen head. He is too bright to be considered special needs, but he is so odd and rambunctious that one must treat him with caution. He is Caliban, striding out of the pages of The Tempest. When Ransom meets back up with him later in the book, he has become a character from the world of Mad Max. He strode off on his stilts across the sand, the furs and dressing-gown lifting behind him like tattered wings.”
Ransom stays as long as he can, but when violence erupts over water, he too flees to the coast. Deciding to become a refugee is a difficult decision. It is hard to leave behind all that you have, the mementos of your life, the cosiness of the familiar. Violence or lack of food and water are really the only two things that will force most people to choose to be refugees. Even in our modern world, we are still seeing people forced to flee terrible circumstances. I always think about the book On the Beach, one of my favorite post-apocalyptic books, where the people in this part of Australia have elected to stoically stay instead of fleeing to try and keep one furlong ahead of the nuclear fallout. Most of us don’t know when we will die, but for these people, it is a matter of doing the math. Our sense of what is really important becomes sharply defined when we are faced with our unavoidable death.
There is no salvation at the coast. There is only more death. So what did we do to ourselves to create such a massive drought? ”A thin but resilient mono-molecular film formed from a complex of saturated long-chain polymers, generated within the sea from the vast quantities of industrial wastes discharged into the ocean basins during the previous fifty years. This tough, oxygen-permeable membrane lay on the air-water interface and prevented almost all evaporation of surface water into the air space above.” Isn’t it too bad that every other living creature and fauna has to pay the price for our mismanagement of the planet?
Here is another evocative scene of this displaced world. ”They had been left there during the tremendous traffic jams the previous week. Stalled in motionless glaciers of metal that reached over the plains as far as the horizon, their occupants must have given up in despair and decided to walk the remaining miles.” I really like the word choice of “glaciers of metal.”
Can Ransom survive in this world long enough to feel the patter of rain once again?
I don’t think there is another writer who can compete with J. G. Ballard when it comes to describing post-apocalyptic worlds. His creative visions of man’s final destructive influence on the planet are harrowing and yet in some ways beautiful. He makes you want to see it, even as you fear that someday you will.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten and an Instagram account https://www.instagram.com/jeffreykeeten/
August 15, 2020
Should I be worried that I feel at home in Ballard’s world?
The Drought is the fourth of Ballard’s books that I have read. (The others are The Drowned World, Concrete Island, and High-Rise.) I’m drawn to his themes of isolation and alienation. His association of inner world and outer world. And his misfit characters.
It is especially the misfit characters that make The Drought feel like home.
The protagonists of all four novels are estranged from the world around them. When the world around them changes, it offers them the opportunity to withdraw further into themselves. This is the reason they feel at home in their new worlds. And this happens, not despite the disasters, but because of them.
In The Drought, Ransom moves into a houseboat on the river to escape his marriage and career. Here, among “the people living on the margins of the channel” (22), he finally feels at home. These are his people. These marginal people. Stragglers and lingerers. Solipsists and solitaries. Outcasts and castaways.
There are parallels between the characters in The Drought and the characters from the other novels I have read. The greatest resemblance is between The Drought and Concrete Island. Ransom, Catherine, and Quilter might even be the prototype for Maitland, Jane, and Proctor.
One of the strengths of Concrete Island is the dynamic between the trio of characters. But The Drought has many characters. Ransom, Catherine, and Quilter are not a trio. Philip Jordan exists as the antithesis of Quilter. Lomax and Miranda add another component to the story.
High-Rise, like The Drought, has a larger cast of characters, but its plot still concerns a trio—Laing, Wilder, and Royal—representing the three social classes. Ransom, Quilter, and Lomax might be the prototype for this hierarchical structure. Both Lomax and Royal are wealthy architects. Ransom and Laing are middle-class physicians. And Quilter and Wilder are wild cards from the lowest economic class.
I believe the characters in The Drought have been refined and recombined in Ballard’s later novels. But here, in The Drought, they are an odd assortment of individuals living on the margins of society. And they are all truly individuals, for even when they are together, they are solitary beings.
These are the people who stay behind as the river dries up and everyone else evacuates to the seashore. There is Catherine, the zoo curator’s daughter, “remote sister of the lions” (28). And the zookeeper Whitman, a man who nurses “a wild misanthropic hope” (68). While Catherine is only truly at home with her lions, she can get along with people. But Whitman is completely estranged from society. He has nothing but contempt for people. He could easily add to his namesake’s litany of complaints against the human species.
“I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals . . . . they are so placid and self-contained” (Leaves of Grass, 1855).
There is the idiot Quilter, at home amid the stench and mud of the dying river with its dead birds and fish rotting under the sun. And the antithesis of Quilter, the Ariel to Quilter’s Caliban, Philip Jordan, the character most closely identified with the river, “part waif and part water-elf” (33).
Lomax and Miranda do not seem to fit into their environment as naturally as Catherine and Whitman, Quilter and Philip Jordan, yet they too are singular members of this community of misfits.
The foppish Lomax and his witch-like sister live in a luxurious mansion, yet despite their wealth, they are not part of ordinary society. They are as marginal as the river people. After their servants flee to the sea with the rest of the population, it is Quilter and Whitman who service their needs and their property.
Then there are the minor characters. Captain Tulloch, who will man his steamer to the very end. Mrs. Quilter, fanning herself on the houseboat given to her as charity by Lomax. And Jonas, the obsessed ship’s caption, “like a desert Ahab, hunting for his white sea” (200).
In The Drowned World, Ballard’s language suits his landscape perfectly. It is profuse, teeming with metaphor, lush in description. This is the novel’s strength, for the story goes downhill in the second half.
In contrast, the language of The Drought is self-conscious. The metaphors and literary references are all over the place. Is this The Tempest, with Lomax as “a demented Prospero” (208)? His sister or daughter or whatever she is, Miranda, lusted after by the “Caliban-like” (21) Quilter? While Philip Jordan serves as “the calm-eyed Ariel of the river” (89-90)?
Or is Miranda “an imbecile Ophelia” (103)? Is Lomax Mephistopheles” (64)?
Is this The Odyssey? The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Moby Dick? The mixture is chaotic. But it is not without a unifying theme. These are seafaring tales. Tales of “Ulysses” (34) and “Sinbad” (205). Of the Ancient Mariner and his “albatross” (35). Of the castaways Prospero and Miranda. And most of all of Jonah. The Reverend Johnstone sermonizes on Jonah’s gourd. Jonas, the “desert Ahab” (200), Jonas “the preacher” (216) has a name that is mighty close to Jonah.
And the main character, Ransom? His name is not as obvious as Whitman’s or Miranda’s. But it is also not subtle. ‘Ransom’ comes from the Latin for ‘redemption.’ And this is indeed a tale of redemption.
In the second half of The Drowned World, mood is sacrificed for action. Not so in The Drought. There is no villain in The Drought. Instead, the characters contend with each other and with the environment.
As the river dries up, it stinks. Dead birds and fish lie in the mud. Garbage fires dot the landscape. Dust covers everything. Yet Ransom lingers. He deliberately stays behind when most people are evacuating. He welcomes the change. Catherine expresses it best when she says to him: “nothing moves, but so much is happening” (29).
Later, amid the salt dunes of a dying sea, the river will call to them. Ransom and Catherine and Philip Jordan. The true solitaries in this collection of misfits. Catherine, drawn back to her lions. Philip Jordan, drawn back to his river. Ransom, seeking the timelessness of the desert.
The river people. The marginal people. I feel at home with them as my neighbors. They coexist without infringing on each other’s solitariness. They come and go as they will. One may wave to the other on the river bank. The other may wave back. Or not. They are mysteries to each other. But what they have in common is their separateness.
The river is timeless. Whether water or sand. It washes away the past. It washes away memory. It washes away obligation. Leaving behind an eternal present. And in that, there is freedom. This is what Ransom was seeking and in his return to the river he has ransomed himself. He has redeemed himself.
The Drought is the fourth of Ballard’s books that I have read. (The others are The Drowned World, Concrete Island, and High-Rise.) I’m drawn to his themes of isolation and alienation. His association of inner world and outer world. And his misfit characters.
It is especially the misfit characters that make The Drought feel like home.
The protagonists of all four novels are estranged from the world around them. When the world around them changes, it offers them the opportunity to withdraw further into themselves. This is the reason they feel at home in their new worlds. And this happens, not despite the disasters, but because of them.
In The Drought, Ransom moves into a houseboat on the river to escape his marriage and career. Here, among “the people living on the margins of the channel” (22), he finally feels at home. These are his people. These marginal people. Stragglers and lingerers. Solipsists and solitaries. Outcasts and castaways.
There are parallels between the characters in The Drought and the characters from the other novels I have read. The greatest resemblance is between The Drought and Concrete Island. Ransom, Catherine, and Quilter might even be the prototype for Maitland, Jane, and Proctor.
One of the strengths of Concrete Island is the dynamic between the trio of characters. But The Drought has many characters. Ransom, Catherine, and Quilter are not a trio. Philip Jordan exists as the antithesis of Quilter. Lomax and Miranda add another component to the story.
High-Rise, like The Drought, has a larger cast of characters, but its plot still concerns a trio—Laing, Wilder, and Royal—representing the three social classes. Ransom, Quilter, and Lomax might be the prototype for this hierarchical structure. Both Lomax and Royal are wealthy architects. Ransom and Laing are middle-class physicians. And Quilter and Wilder are wild cards from the lowest economic class.
I believe the characters in The Drought have been refined and recombined in Ballard’s later novels. But here, in The Drought, they are an odd assortment of individuals living on the margins of society. And they are all truly individuals, for even when they are together, they are solitary beings.
These are the people who stay behind as the river dries up and everyone else evacuates to the seashore. There is Catherine, the zoo curator’s daughter, “remote sister of the lions” (28). And the zookeeper Whitman, a man who nurses “a wild misanthropic hope” (68). While Catherine is only truly at home with her lions, she can get along with people. But Whitman is completely estranged from society. He has nothing but contempt for people. He could easily add to his namesake’s litany of complaints against the human species.
“I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals . . . . they are so placid and self-contained” (Leaves of Grass, 1855).
There is the idiot Quilter, at home amid the stench and mud of the dying river with its dead birds and fish rotting under the sun. And the antithesis of Quilter, the Ariel to Quilter’s Caliban, Philip Jordan, the character most closely identified with the river, “part waif and part water-elf” (33).
Lomax and Miranda do not seem to fit into their environment as naturally as Catherine and Whitman, Quilter and Philip Jordan, yet they too are singular members of this community of misfits.
The foppish Lomax and his witch-like sister live in a luxurious mansion, yet despite their wealth, they are not part of ordinary society. They are as marginal as the river people. After their servants flee to the sea with the rest of the population, it is Quilter and Whitman who service their needs and their property.
Then there are the minor characters. Captain Tulloch, who will man his steamer to the very end. Mrs. Quilter, fanning herself on the houseboat given to her as charity by Lomax. And Jonas, the obsessed ship’s caption, “like a desert Ahab, hunting for his white sea” (200).
In The Drowned World, Ballard’s language suits his landscape perfectly. It is profuse, teeming with metaphor, lush in description. This is the novel’s strength, for the story goes downhill in the second half.
In contrast, the language of The Drought is self-conscious. The metaphors and literary references are all over the place. Is this The Tempest, with Lomax as “a demented Prospero” (208)? His sister or daughter or whatever she is, Miranda, lusted after by the “Caliban-like” (21) Quilter? While Philip Jordan serves as “the calm-eyed Ariel of the river” (89-90)?
Or is Miranda “an imbecile Ophelia” (103)? Is Lomax Mephistopheles” (64)?
Is this The Odyssey? The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Moby Dick? The mixture is chaotic. But it is not without a unifying theme. These are seafaring tales. Tales of “Ulysses” (34) and “Sinbad” (205). Of the Ancient Mariner and his “albatross” (35). Of the castaways Prospero and Miranda. And most of all of Jonah. The Reverend Johnstone sermonizes on Jonah’s gourd. Jonas, the “desert Ahab” (200), Jonas “the preacher” (216) has a name that is mighty close to Jonah.
And the main character, Ransom? His name is not as obvious as Whitman’s or Miranda’s. But it is also not subtle. ‘Ransom’ comes from the Latin for ‘redemption.’ And this is indeed a tale of redemption.
In the second half of The Drowned World, mood is sacrificed for action. Not so in The Drought. There is no villain in The Drought. Instead, the characters contend with each other and with the environment.
As the river dries up, it stinks. Dead birds and fish lie in the mud. Garbage fires dot the landscape. Dust covers everything. Yet Ransom lingers. He deliberately stays behind when most people are evacuating. He welcomes the change. Catherine expresses it best when she says to him: “nothing moves, but so much is happening” (29).
Later, amid the salt dunes of a dying sea, the river will call to them. Ransom and Catherine and Philip Jordan. The true solitaries in this collection of misfits. Catherine, drawn back to her lions. Philip Jordan, drawn back to his river. Ransom, seeking the timelessness of the desert.
The river people. The marginal people. I feel at home with them as my neighbors. They coexist without infringing on each other’s solitariness. They come and go as they will. One may wave to the other on the river bank. The other may wave back. Or not. They are mysteries to each other. But what they have in common is their separateness.
The river is timeless. Whether water or sand. It washes away the past. It washes away memory. It washes away obligation. Leaving behind an eternal present. And in that, there is freedom. This is what Ransom was seeking and in his return to the river he has ransomed himself. He has redeemed himself.
June 28, 2023
The Drought is written in a prose so consistently overwrought that it entertains on a different level of reading altogether, one that is experiential, and a little bit nauseating. It’s exactly like drinking one of those fragrant, fruity gins. It reminds me of Poe at his most hysterical. It makes me nostalgic for the era when novelists were allowed space and time to develop their craft, because this early Ballard novel is an adjective-laden morass of hokey fun, and I can’t shake the feeling that debut authors would never get away with this kind of thing in these highly competitive days of publishing, when everything must be either deeply earnest and/or sellable as a movie script.
As with the last several Ballard novels I just read, just days ago and just days apart from each other, I got the feeling that any one sentence of this novel was a sentence that no one else but J.G. Ballard could have written. Start for instance with this doozy of a first sentence:
At noon, when Dr Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the entrance to the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot son of the old woman who lived in the ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating in the water below his feet.
As with the last several Ballard novels I just read, just days ago and just days apart from each other, I got the feeling that any one sentence of this novel was a sentence that no one else but J.G. Ballard could have written. Start for instance with this doozy of a first sentence:
At noon, when Dr Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the entrance to the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot son of the old woman who lived in the ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating in the water below his feet.
June 8, 2024
Thirsty work was this. The heat rising from the dunes alone, stretching out towards the horizon, made me want to stick my head in a bucket of iced water like it was one of those hot dog eating contests. You can really feel those parched throats here - lions and cheetahs included. Ballard doesn't really moralize when it comes to the actual various disaster scenarios - whether this, the apocalyptic global warming in The Drowned World or the energy crisis in Hello America - but rather focuses on us humans; on the transformation of society as the primal urge for survival kicks in. Here, the premise is simple. Earth turning into one giant dustbowl after years of drought - drained lakes, dried up rivers and so forth. Part one looks at the fictional town of Hamilton after months of no rain fall and as the residents make their way to the coast. Dr Charles Ransom, another privileged Ballard protagonist, along with Catherine, a female zoo worker, and Philip, a teenage boy, head off too after Ransom's houseboat on the river becomes uninhabitable. This after being kidnapped and escaping from a gang of pissed-off fishermen. Part two moves to a decade later when the remainder of an obliterated human race are refining seawater before the final part takes on a more surrealistic aspect as Charles, Philip and Catherine take a journey back up the dusty dried-up river to the ruined city of Mount Royal. Whilst I do prefer Ballard's more experimental work and the gated community thrillers of his later years, the vividness of his early 60s catastrophe novels carry an impressive cinematic quality no doubt. He writes of changed landscapes due to disaster as good as anyone and really gets one thinking and putting frightening thoughts into one's head; made even worse by the fact they are ever so believable. So eerily real and cautionary. Just to think...no more running water, no more fresh water. Any fresh water stored worth more than all the money in the world.
Read
June 22, 2019Like The Drowned World this early Ballard novel is visiting through fiction the experience of a world turned upside down that is described in Empire of the Sun. Or to be slightly different, applying the understanding that gave him and trying to share that with others through fiction. You think you know the world, says Ballard, it looks familiar, comprehensible, yes? Well now look at your picnic as I yank out the blanket from underneath it! And as a reader one agrees, given this one simple change how radically different our cosy little picnic has become. Here it is not invading Japanese who overturn with casual indifference the apple cart of colonial Shanghai but a drought that drives society out of the familiar. An unending drought causes the cities to become empty while the seashore becomes an encampment for the population, working to produce fresh water rather than finding food which had been Ballard's boyhood experience in China. In these earlier novels it is the familiar environment taken for granted which Ballard shows as treacherous, later he shifts to portray human society as having through its own operations a natural tendency to dehumanise.
This is not though a book about the revolt of nature, rather a revelation of the nakedness of the Emperor, humanity does not apparently cause the drought, for nature is simply beyond us, and we are dependant on it like parasites. Here, if spring is silent, it is because nature is fundamentally capricious. The modern world is both in his vision fragile and tends to render us more delicate, a counterpoint to the triumphalism of faith in technology or otherwise said our colonial and pretended Imperial domination over nature.
This is not though a book about the revolt of nature, rather a revelation of the nakedness of the Emperor, humanity does not apparently cause the drought, for nature is simply beyond us, and we are dependant on it like parasites. Here, if spring is silent, it is because nature is fundamentally capricious. The modern world is both in his vision fragile and tends to render us more delicate, a counterpoint to the triumphalism of faith in technology or otherwise said our colonial and pretended Imperial domination over nature.
February 2, 2021
La sequía mundial, ahora en el quinto mes, era la culminación de una larga serie de extensas sequías que se habían multiplicado por todo el globo en la última década. Diez años atrás los alimentos habían empezado a escasear, cuando las lluvias de la estación, esperadas en algunas zonas agrícolas, no se produjeron. En los siguientes meses sólo habían caído unos pocos centímetros cúbicos de lluvia, y en el espacio de dos años esas tierras de cultivo se habían convertido en zonas devastadas. Una vez que las poblaciones se instalaban en algún otro sitio, estos nuevos desiertos quedaban abandonados para siempre.
Cincuenta y cuatro años antes de que la activista ecológica Greta Thunberg volviera a poner en el candelero el nefasto futuro que nos espera si la humanidad sigue cometiendo las atrocidades que generan el cambio climático y el calentamiento global, el autor James Graham Ballard había escrito en 1965 esta excelente novela distópica y post apocalíptica llamada "La sequía."
Ambientada primeramente en un ficticio pueblo llamado Hamilton, nos narra las peripecias que vive un médico llamado Charles Ransom, conjuntamente con otros personajes y nos da un claro mensaje de alerta de lo que sucedería si por ciertos factores dejara de llover sobre el planeta.
En esta distopía el océano está cubierto por una fina capa de polímeros. Los ríos, lagos y lagunas, con sus cauces ensanchados se han transformado en cuencas vacías y el agua de los mares ha retrocedido o desaparecido tanto que en el desolado y agreste paisaje solo se ven enormes dunas de salitre y sedimento marino.
La historia nos cuenta lo que sucede pasados diez años de sequía con un salto temporal intermedio, en donde la humanidad comienza a luchar por sobrevivir.
Las costumbres cambian abruptamente y el mundo se transforma en un lugar sin leyes en donde solo los más aptos sobreviven.
La medida de todas las cosas es el agua. Es la que regula la vida de todos en el planeta y los pocos habitantes que quedan el mundo buscan posibles oasis o depósitos escondidos donde pueda estar escondida el agua tan preciada, cuyo valor se multiplica más que el dinero o el oro.
Ballard haciendo uso de una narrativa dinámica nos somete al mismo destino que sus personajes y nos deja formar parte de la relación entre Ransom y los demás, algunos de ellos realmente desquiciados.
Nada importa ya en la humanidad, los sentimientos no son parámetro de nada. Lo único que les interesa es el agua y para conseguirla, estos desesperados personajes son capaces de todo.
La acción nunca se detiene, puesto que el autor ya desde las primera página nos somete a este mundo árido, seco y desértico, y con ello a todo el devenir de una historia sin pausa.
Cuando uno lee la novela, tiene la posibilidad de detenerse a pensar cómo reaccionaría ante una situación así, sobre qué haría con su vida para sobrevivir.
"La sequía" tiene ciertos puntos de contactos con otras novelas post apocalípticas como "La carretera" de Cormac McCarthy e incluso tanto historia como personajes me recordaron en cierto pasajes a "La peste" de Albert Camus, más puntualmente en la construcción que Ballard hace de Ransom, cuyos valores se asemejan a los de Bernard Rieux en "La peste", ya que ambos personajes nunca dejan de batallar; en el caso de Ransom para encontrar agua, en el de Rieux para conseguir la cura contra la peste que asola a Orán.
En la descripción de la soledad como regulador del paisaje, pude conectar con la novela "Soy Leyenda", en donde Richard Matheson describe cómo es la Tierra prácticamente deshabitada, vacía y muerta.
"La sequía" es una clara muestra de que el ser humano no es consciente de que se juega el futuro de sus hijos y nietos si no detiene su paso destructivo sobre el planeta y hasta el momento, da la sensación de no haberse dado cuenta aún.
Cincuenta y cuatro años antes de que la activista ecológica Greta Thunberg volviera a poner en el candelero el nefasto futuro que nos espera si la humanidad sigue cometiendo las atrocidades que generan el cambio climático y el calentamiento global, el autor James Graham Ballard había escrito en 1965 esta excelente novela distópica y post apocalíptica llamada "La sequía."
Ambientada primeramente en un ficticio pueblo llamado Hamilton, nos narra las peripecias que vive un médico llamado Charles Ransom, conjuntamente con otros personajes y nos da un claro mensaje de alerta de lo que sucedería si por ciertos factores dejara de llover sobre el planeta.
En esta distopía el océano está cubierto por una fina capa de polímeros. Los ríos, lagos y lagunas, con sus cauces ensanchados se han transformado en cuencas vacías y el agua de los mares ha retrocedido o desaparecido tanto que en el desolado y agreste paisaje solo se ven enormes dunas de salitre y sedimento marino.
La historia nos cuenta lo que sucede pasados diez años de sequía con un salto temporal intermedio, en donde la humanidad comienza a luchar por sobrevivir.
Las costumbres cambian abruptamente y el mundo se transforma en un lugar sin leyes en donde solo los más aptos sobreviven.
La medida de todas las cosas es el agua. Es la que regula la vida de todos en el planeta y los pocos habitantes que quedan el mundo buscan posibles oasis o depósitos escondidos donde pueda estar escondida el agua tan preciada, cuyo valor se multiplica más que el dinero o el oro.
Ballard haciendo uso de una narrativa dinámica nos somete al mismo destino que sus personajes y nos deja formar parte de la relación entre Ransom y los demás, algunos de ellos realmente desquiciados.
Nada importa ya en la humanidad, los sentimientos no son parámetro de nada. Lo único que les interesa es el agua y para conseguirla, estos desesperados personajes son capaces de todo.
La acción nunca se detiene, puesto que el autor ya desde las primera página nos somete a este mundo árido, seco y desértico, y con ello a todo el devenir de una historia sin pausa.
Cuando uno lee la novela, tiene la posibilidad de detenerse a pensar cómo reaccionaría ante una situación así, sobre qué haría con su vida para sobrevivir.
"La sequía" tiene ciertos puntos de contactos con otras novelas post apocalípticas como "La carretera" de Cormac McCarthy e incluso tanto historia como personajes me recordaron en cierto pasajes a "La peste" de Albert Camus, más puntualmente en la construcción que Ballard hace de Ransom, cuyos valores se asemejan a los de Bernard Rieux en "La peste", ya que ambos personajes nunca dejan de batallar; en el caso de Ransom para encontrar agua, en el de Rieux para conseguir la cura contra la peste que asola a Orán.
En la descripción de la soledad como regulador del paisaje, pude conectar con la novela "Soy Leyenda", en donde Richard Matheson describe cómo es la Tierra prácticamente deshabitada, vacía y muerta.
"La sequía" es una clara muestra de que el ser humano no es consciente de que se juega el futuro de sus hijos y nietos si no detiene su paso destructivo sobre el planeta y hasta el momento, da la sensación de no haberse dado cuenta aún.
January 18, 2019
In the middle of another record Australia summer, while rivers dry up and temperatures in some towns crest 49 degrees celsius (120 degrees in old-money fahrenheit), what could be a more fitting read than a J.G Ballard novel where the entire world plunges into an endless apocalyptic drought?
And that is the premise behind The Drought (also published as The Burning World). Due to human chemical pollution of the oceans a film has formed on the seas that prevents evaporation and cloud formation. From a thousand kilometers out from the coasts of every continent rain ceases to be. Not a drop of water falls, or will fall, on any landmass in the world, plunging the entire globe into utter, unbreaking drought. As the lakes, rivers and taps go dry no-one knows how long the rain will be gone for, and as animals die and water becomes scarce a mass, desperate exodus to the coasts begins.
The Drought can in some ways be seen as a companion piece to Ballard’s other novel of a climate gone crazy - The Drowned World. In the drowned world the planet has been getting hotter, and climate becoming crazily tropical as waters rise and inundate the world’s cities – there is too much water, in contrast to the shortage that defines The Drought.
Like The Drowned World, The Drought centers on a single, slightly odd male protagonist, whose reaction to the changes around him is a strange mix of ambivalence and an almost primal attraction to the wild, inhospitable new world he finds himself in.
Ballard’s focus as the world dries out is on Charles Ransom, a doctor in a small city who spends most of his time on a houseboat. Detached from his career, his life and his failed marriage, Ransom has become an almost passive observer of the collapse of civilization. He watches as the river he is moored on becomes a series of puddles, watches as people flee to the ocean, watches as his city burns, knowing all the while that he too will eventually have to flee.
What drive he has to live seems more about witnessing, about seeing what strangeness can eventuate rather than connecting with others or finding meaning in his tired and threadbare life.
He simply wants to see what is going to happen, to see how deep the apocalypse can be.
And what an apocalypse it is. We see the desperate hordes at the coasts, lining up for desalinated water. We see their remnants years later We see what has become of the now-desert towns, only maniacs and the direly damaged still clinging to life among the parched ruins.
Ballard knew how to spin a story, and The Drought is a pacey read, filled with weird, disconcerting characters and a deep pessimism at the human capacity both to take care of our planet and deal with society-shaking disaster. This pessimism is underlined by the book’s ending, where Ransom comes full circle to where he began, his actions largely meaningless, his life largely empty, his existence dictated by the caprices of nature.
As you’ve guessed, this is not a light-hearted story (did Ballard ever write anything that wasn’t weird and gloomy?) but it’s a hell of a ride, watching the world burn in the searing sun, every throat parched, every tongue dry and eventually, every man for himself.
Four dusty, sun-baked stars.
Postscript: Reading this I couldn’t help but wonder at my own nation’s future. Australia is an arid land of long, punishing droughts that are being turbocharged by climate change. We already cling to the coasts – all our major cities are seaside – and it wouldn’t take much to run our lakes and reservoirs dry, bringing some of Ballard’s nightmare to fruition. If you plan to visit, bring water.
And that is the premise behind The Drought (also published as The Burning World). Due to human chemical pollution of the oceans a film has formed on the seas that prevents evaporation and cloud formation. From a thousand kilometers out from the coasts of every continent rain ceases to be. Not a drop of water falls, or will fall, on any landmass in the world, plunging the entire globe into utter, unbreaking drought. As the lakes, rivers and taps go dry no-one knows how long the rain will be gone for, and as animals die and water becomes scarce a mass, desperate exodus to the coasts begins.
The Drought can in some ways be seen as a companion piece to Ballard’s other novel of a climate gone crazy - The Drowned World. In the drowned world the planet has been getting hotter, and climate becoming crazily tropical as waters rise and inundate the world’s cities – there is too much water, in contrast to the shortage that defines The Drought.
Like The Drowned World, The Drought centers on a single, slightly odd male protagonist, whose reaction to the changes around him is a strange mix of ambivalence and an almost primal attraction to the wild, inhospitable new world he finds himself in.
Ballard’s focus as the world dries out is on Charles Ransom, a doctor in a small city who spends most of his time on a houseboat. Detached from his career, his life and his failed marriage, Ransom has become an almost passive observer of the collapse of civilization. He watches as the river he is moored on becomes a series of puddles, watches as people flee to the ocean, watches as his city burns, knowing all the while that he too will eventually have to flee.
What drive he has to live seems more about witnessing, about seeing what strangeness can eventuate rather than connecting with others or finding meaning in his tired and threadbare life.
He simply wants to see what is going to happen, to see how deep the apocalypse can be.
And what an apocalypse it is. We see the desperate hordes at the coasts, lining up for desalinated water. We see their remnants years later We see what has become of the now-desert towns, only maniacs and the direly damaged still clinging to life among the parched ruins.
Ballard knew how to spin a story, and The Drought is a pacey read, filled with weird, disconcerting characters and a deep pessimism at the human capacity both to take care of our planet and deal with society-shaking disaster. This pessimism is underlined by the book’s ending, where Ransom comes full circle to where he began, his actions largely meaningless, his life largely empty, his existence dictated by the caprices of nature.
As you’ve guessed, this is not a light-hearted story (did Ballard ever write anything that wasn’t weird and gloomy?) but it’s a hell of a ride, watching the world burn in the searing sun, every throat parched, every tongue dry and eventually, every man for himself.
Four dusty, sun-baked stars.
Postscript: Reading this I couldn’t help but wonder at my own nation’s future. Australia is an arid land of long, punishing droughts that are being turbocharged by climate change. We already cling to the coasts – all our major cities are seaside – and it wouldn’t take much to run our lakes and reservoirs dry, bringing some of Ballard’s nightmare to fruition. If you plan to visit, bring water.
November 21, 2017
Channel your interior Robbie Krieger and prepare for pondering The End. No. I don’t mean David Beckham’s retirement, but rather closing time, like permanently. One of my criticisms of The Road was its attempt to capture the After with an almost biblical gravity of language. J.G. Ballard appears too savvy for those traps. His exploration is empty. Life is vast and bleak. It isn’t going to rain anymore. We’re sure as hell Doomed, done for. Experiences don’t amount to much anymore. I wouldn’t waste any time on Hope either. It is this arid silence which propels the novel through its second and third sections. After the end is always the challenge. Hobbesean variations usually ensue. Its the wild west (or Somalia) or simply wicked medieval madness. There are hints of both here. A disabled man flitting about on six-foot stilts could be out of Fellini. That said, the characters’ responses are never emotional. That aspect of humanity has been deleted for operating purposes. I was impressed.
November 10, 2021
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote
Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse
For the last several years, I've ended up at the holidays with something like 20 to 30 book reviews still to write; so I've tended to just log them and give them scores so they'll count towards that year's reading challenge, but then move on in January to new books and not go back and review the ones from the previous December I didn't get around to. (Thankfully I'm keeping up with the reviews fairly well this year, so this hopefully won't be a problem again.) Anyway, as I sat down today to review JG Ballard's 1964 The Burning World, I realized that the book previous to this, 1962's The Drowned World, was one of those ones from last December that never got reviewed; and it's important to today's book that you know what I thought of the previous book, so it looks like today's one of those occasional days where I'll be doing two book reviews in one.
Ballard is now mostly remembered for the freaky, transgressive tales he wrote in the '70s and '80s, so it'll be surprising to most to learn that he started his career with a quadrilogy of Mid-Century-Modernist-style straightforward post-apocalyptic science-fiction stories about ecology and natural disasters, which in the early '60s originally got him lumped in with writers like Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, before heading off in much weirder and unclassifiable directions during the Countercultural Era. Per Ballard's wishes, I skipped entirely his 1961 debut The Wind From Nowhere, which he himself hated to the extent of literally omitting it from his bibliography while alive; so I'm instead starting with his trilogy of the similarly titled The Drowning World, The Burned World and 1966's The Crystal World, in which the planet Earth alternatively dies out from global flooding, a global drought, and an alien infection that crystallizes all organic matter it touches. (The Wind From Nowhere, meanwhile, is about the Earth dying out from an unending series of hurricanes and tsunamis, effectively making his first four novels concern global disasters via air, water, fire and earth.)
And indeed, for an author I mostly currently know because of head-trippers like High-Rise and Crash, what struck me most about The Drowning World when I read it last December was how sober and grounded in science it is, with Ballard spending a huge chunk of the book simply looking at how the planet gets into the untenable position it's in, and only delving into his trademark weirdness at the very end, in which our James-Kirkesque hero falls in with a group of doomsday cultists who have decided to stay behind in a now flooded London in order to loot the city of random treasures for absurdist reasons. This left me thinking that Ballard was perhaps going to play all three of these novels with a straight face, until getting to what's widely acknowledged as his first transgressive book, the 1970 experimental story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (which was then followed with 1973's sex-and-car-accident fever dream Crash, which was such a force of nature that it singlehandedly changed his literary reputation into the one we still now have of him...but more on this in a few months).
I was wrong, however; for if you define The Drowned World as a book mostly about the science of ecological disaster, which as a bonus delves a little bit into the bizarre ways some humans would behave during such a disaster, you can define The Burning World as the exact opposite, as mostly about the freakouts that people go through in the face of a world-ending disaster, with only lip service paid (literally only a few paragraphs in the entire book) to how the disaster came about in the first place. Or, I mean, to be fair, Ballard isn't looking here at how all humans would change in the face of a global disaster, with our story taking place well into the end-times and most of rational, sane humanity having already packed up and headed to the nearest ocean; instead, Ballard is interested in looking at the small amount of people who would choose to stay behind in their now waterless towns even after such a disaster took place, pointing a laser eye at the nihilists, criminals, mentally challenged, and cultishly religious who would voluntarily choose to end their existences under such dire circumstances, effectively making this a companion piece to the recent indie movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, only with Ballard damning his freak-flag-flying stragglers instead of celebrating them like the film does.
For those looking for their expected Ballard bizarro fix, this is basically the earliest book of his career where you can find one, as the author serves up nightmarish visions of landlocked pirates, genocidal armed struggles on beachfronts, monstrously obese billionaire climate-deniers who have gone insane, developmentally disabled man-child animals who hunt humans for sport while wrapped in the bloody pelts of emaciated tigers from the local zoo, and all kinds of other chapters that will make you think, "Ah, right, there's the singular weirdo we all know and love." It makes me much more excited to delve into the final volume of the trilogy, and of course from that point on to throw myself into the New Weird books he's now much better known for.
JG Ballard books being reviewed for this series: The Drowned World (1962) | The Burning World (1964) | The Crystal World (1966) | The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) | Crash (1973) | Concrete Island (1974) | High Rise (1975) | The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) | Hello America (1981) | Empire of the Sun (1984) | The Day of Creation (1987) | Running Wild (1988) | The Kindness of Women (1991) | Rushing to Paradise (1994) | Cocaine Nights (1996) | Super-Cannes (2000) | Millennium People (2003) | Kingdom Come (2006)
Currently in the challenge: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse
For the last several years, I've ended up at the holidays with something like 20 to 30 book reviews still to write; so I've tended to just log them and give them scores so they'll count towards that year's reading challenge, but then move on in January to new books and not go back and review the ones from the previous December I didn't get around to. (Thankfully I'm keeping up with the reviews fairly well this year, so this hopefully won't be a problem again.) Anyway, as I sat down today to review JG Ballard's 1964 The Burning World, I realized that the book previous to this, 1962's The Drowned World, was one of those ones from last December that never got reviewed; and it's important to today's book that you know what I thought of the previous book, so it looks like today's one of those occasional days where I'll be doing two book reviews in one.
Ballard is now mostly remembered for the freaky, transgressive tales he wrote in the '70s and '80s, so it'll be surprising to most to learn that he started his career with a quadrilogy of Mid-Century-Modernist-style straightforward post-apocalyptic science-fiction stories about ecology and natural disasters, which in the early '60s originally got him lumped in with writers like Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, before heading off in much weirder and unclassifiable directions during the Countercultural Era. Per Ballard's wishes, I skipped entirely his 1961 debut The Wind From Nowhere, which he himself hated to the extent of literally omitting it from his bibliography while alive; so I'm instead starting with his trilogy of the similarly titled The Drowning World, The Burned World and 1966's The Crystal World, in which the planet Earth alternatively dies out from global flooding, a global drought, and an alien infection that crystallizes all organic matter it touches. (The Wind From Nowhere, meanwhile, is about the Earth dying out from an unending series of hurricanes and tsunamis, effectively making his first four novels concern global disasters via air, water, fire and earth.)
And indeed, for an author I mostly currently know because of head-trippers like High-Rise and Crash, what struck me most about The Drowning World when I read it last December was how sober and grounded in science it is, with Ballard spending a huge chunk of the book simply looking at how the planet gets into the untenable position it's in, and only delving into his trademark weirdness at the very end, in which our James-Kirkesque hero falls in with a group of doomsday cultists who have decided to stay behind in a now flooded London in order to loot the city of random treasures for absurdist reasons. This left me thinking that Ballard was perhaps going to play all three of these novels with a straight face, until getting to what's widely acknowledged as his first transgressive book, the 1970 experimental story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (which was then followed with 1973's sex-and-car-accident fever dream Crash, which was such a force of nature that it singlehandedly changed his literary reputation into the one we still now have of him...but more on this in a few months).
I was wrong, however; for if you define The Drowned World as a book mostly about the science of ecological disaster, which as a bonus delves a little bit into the bizarre ways some humans would behave during such a disaster, you can define The Burning World as the exact opposite, as mostly about the freakouts that people go through in the face of a world-ending disaster, with only lip service paid (literally only a few paragraphs in the entire book) to how the disaster came about in the first place. Or, I mean, to be fair, Ballard isn't looking here at how all humans would change in the face of a global disaster, with our story taking place well into the end-times and most of rational, sane humanity having already packed up and headed to the nearest ocean; instead, Ballard is interested in looking at the small amount of people who would choose to stay behind in their now waterless towns even after such a disaster took place, pointing a laser eye at the nihilists, criminals, mentally challenged, and cultishly religious who would voluntarily choose to end their existences under such dire circumstances, effectively making this a companion piece to the recent indie movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, only with Ballard damning his freak-flag-flying stragglers instead of celebrating them like the film does.
For those looking for their expected Ballard bizarro fix, this is basically the earliest book of his career where you can find one, as the author serves up nightmarish visions of landlocked pirates, genocidal armed struggles on beachfronts, monstrously obese billionaire climate-deniers who have gone insane, developmentally disabled man-child animals who hunt humans for sport while wrapped in the bloody pelts of emaciated tigers from the local zoo, and all kinds of other chapters that will make you think, "Ah, right, there's the singular weirdo we all know and love." It makes me much more excited to delve into the final volume of the trilogy, and of course from that point on to throw myself into the New Weird books he's now much better known for.
JG Ballard books being reviewed for this series: The Drowned World (1962) | The Burning World (1964) | The Crystal World (1966) | The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) | Crash (1973) | Concrete Island (1974) | High Rise (1975) | The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) | Hello America (1981) | Empire of the Sun (1984) | The Day of Creation (1987) | Running Wild (1988) | The Kindness of Women (1991) | Rushing to Paradise (1994) | Cocaine Nights (1996) | Super-Cannes (2000) | Millennium People (2003) | Kingdom Come (2006)
August 13, 2020
Es el problema que tienen estas novelas distópicas, que, a golpe de nihilismo, te hacen sentir eso: nada. Ballard presenta una sociedad tan horrenda y deprimente que ¿para qué vamos a sufrir por los héroes? ¿Para qué vamos a desear redención? No nos la va a dar, siendo fiel a su estilo.
Leer es puro masoquismo, entonces. Un gusto adquirido, pero solo para cuando uno tiene el cuerpo.
Leer es puro masoquismo, entonces. Un gusto adquirido, pero solo para cuando uno tiene el cuerpo.
January 6, 2021
(You can see my video on J.G. Ballard's books here: https://youtu.be/CQrrMtwZioY )
I have to admit, part of me loves the confusion surrounding a book with two names - Is it The Drought or The Burning World? Its dual identity added about five minutes onto my Google search for a cheap secondhand copy, but when the package arrived I still felt like I'd gotten my hands on some arcane relic, valuable only to those who know its thematic connection to Ballard's other novel, The Drowned World. As for the book itself, I think that it boasts some strengths in comparison to his previous work, but it's struck by some notable weaknesses too.
In The Drought, the sun is doing something a lot more relatable than transforming the Earth into a bubbling swamp: It's drying up all of the water, scorching the land to dust, and crippling civilization with famine and disease. Once again, Ballard utilises the demoralising force of repetition to draw the reader into the deathstruck world, but his inspiration for it seems to come less from the murky pool of his imagination and more from the memories of his own troubled childhood.
Anybody who's familiar with Ballard will know about his fictionalised memoir that recounts the time he spent growing up in a Japanese POW camp. The movie that sprung from the book fascinated me as a boy, which led me to his fiction as an adult and to an interest in his biography in general. For me, reading a Ballard book can sometimes become a treasure hunt as I pinpoint moments that have been directly inspired by the traumatic period he lived through.
One such moment is at the forefront of my mind when I think about The Drought:
The leading man nurses some affection for a woman in their camp. She's fiery and rebellious, or at least as best she can be under the conditions. Most people are dying of thirst, you see, and have neither the will nor energy to get mad about anything. The woman is different though. Whether by instinct or choice, she wants to hold onto some part of her identity in the face of overwhelming apathy, and the only way she can think to do it is by being angry.
In that single character description, I think that Ballard achieved more psychological complexity than he did in all of The Drowned World. It injects the woman with life and by doing so makes the world around her a 3-dimensional place.
The Drowned World never reached that level, but the follow-up still manages to fall a little short of Ballard's previous apocalyptic novel.
The climactic disaster in The Drought is a lot less blisteringly rendered. At times it felt like Ballard had run out of steam with the concept, but was ploughing ahead in the hopes of it coming together in the end. There is some wonderful imagery at play. I can still picture the ocean receding from the shorelines and the swath of humanity trailing its edge. But overall, the story just isn't as taut or inspired as I'd have liked it to be.
(Don't forget to check out my video J.G. Ballard's books: https://youtu.be/CQrrMtwZioY )
I have to admit, part of me loves the confusion surrounding a book with two names - Is it The Drought or The Burning World? Its dual identity added about five minutes onto my Google search for a cheap secondhand copy, but when the package arrived I still felt like I'd gotten my hands on some arcane relic, valuable only to those who know its thematic connection to Ballard's other novel, The Drowned World. As for the book itself, I think that it boasts some strengths in comparison to his previous work, but it's struck by some notable weaknesses too.
In The Drought, the sun is doing something a lot more relatable than transforming the Earth into a bubbling swamp: It's drying up all of the water, scorching the land to dust, and crippling civilization with famine and disease. Once again, Ballard utilises the demoralising force of repetition to draw the reader into the deathstruck world, but his inspiration for it seems to come less from the murky pool of his imagination and more from the memories of his own troubled childhood.
Anybody who's familiar with Ballard will know about his fictionalised memoir that recounts the time he spent growing up in a Japanese POW camp. The movie that sprung from the book fascinated me as a boy, which led me to his fiction as an adult and to an interest in his biography in general. For me, reading a Ballard book can sometimes become a treasure hunt as I pinpoint moments that have been directly inspired by the traumatic period he lived through.
One such moment is at the forefront of my mind when I think about The Drought:
The leading man nurses some affection for a woman in their camp. She's fiery and rebellious, or at least as best she can be under the conditions. Most people are dying of thirst, you see, and have neither the will nor energy to get mad about anything. The woman is different though. Whether by instinct or choice, she wants to hold onto some part of her identity in the face of overwhelming apathy, and the only way she can think to do it is by being angry.
In that single character description, I think that Ballard achieved more psychological complexity than he did in all of The Drowned World. It injects the woman with life and by doing so makes the world around her a 3-dimensional place.
The Drowned World never reached that level, but the follow-up still manages to fall a little short of Ballard's previous apocalyptic novel.
The climactic disaster in The Drought is a lot less blisteringly rendered. At times it felt like Ballard had run out of steam with the concept, but was ploughing ahead in the hopes of it coming together in the end. There is some wonderful imagery at play. I can still picture the ocean receding from the shorelines and the swath of humanity trailing its edge. But overall, the story just isn't as taut or inspired as I'd have liked it to be.
(Don't forget to check out my video J.G. Ballard's books: https://youtu.be/CQrrMtwZioY )
April 29, 2021
¿ Hay mejor argumento para una novela que un grupo de seres humanos luchando entre sí, mostrando sus vilezas, ante una hecatombe climática? Seguro que no. Y si el autor es Ballard, debe ser un éxito asegurado.
Pues bien, me he aburrido como una ostra. Pasan las páginas y el sinsentido de muchas escenas me han tirado abajo a la presente novela apocalíptica.
Los personajes son más que extraños, entran y salen de cuadro con actitudes y acciones que no se entienden. Muy raro todo. Lectura incómoda y no placentera pese a ser de editorial Fiordo.
Pues bien, me he aburrido como una ostra. Pasan las páginas y el sinsentido de muchas escenas me han tirado abajo a la presente novela apocalíptica.
Los personajes son más que extraños, entran y salen de cuadro con actitudes y acciones que no se entienden. Muy raro todo. Lectura incómoda y no placentera pese a ser de editorial Fiordo.
June 14, 2012
As Maya noted when she was reading this, there's a certain stodginess about the style, a certain pre-modern feeling at odds with the novel's future disaster premise, but as Will Self notes in his afterword, it's hard for that to really slow things up too much when the story is so full of mirage-wavered portents and apocalyptic tableaus. The strangest aspect, though, is not that tension, but the general ellipticness of and hazyness of the storytelling, the characters are inscrutable gamepieces, tracing shapes through the dust which only they can read, while the terms of the disaster are both world-scale and nearly generational, while constricted within a narrow stretch of land devoid of context after the basic setup. All of which leaves this in the eerie space, not of science fiction, but of an unnerving and untranslatable dream. Which should make it an absolute favorite, I would think, but there's also a receding quality about it -- we will never actually be able to follow the characters on their journey, it's just too foreign and detached. Again, that sounds like something I'd like. And I do, it just didn't completely click here. But it's Ballard's first published novel, I believe, of many, so I'll have plenty more stabs at this.
Oh, and like all of Ballard, or so I hear, societal collapse is never far off, it only needs a little push. Which is almost the most believable part.
Oh, and like all of Ballard, or so I hear, societal collapse is never far off, it only needs a little push. Which is almost the most believable part.
December 25, 2023
داستان خشکسالی ای که ده سال به درازا میکشه و اتفاقاتی که در طول این مدت میفته و تلاش شخصیت ها برای بقا و رسیدن به دریا رو به تصویر میکشه.
یکمی ارتباط گرفتن باهاش (کتاب) دیر اتفاق افتاد.دوست داشتم شخصیت ها رو بیشتر بفهمم و باهاشون باشم ولی انگار همش تو یه فاصله ای از من قرار داشتن! یه جاهایی احساس میکردم چندتا جمله اون وسط مسطا گم شده که البته همه ی این ها برای بخش های اول و دوم بود. بخش آخر تا حدی انتظاراتم از این کتاب رو براورده کرد.
از متن کتاب:
الان با او حرف بزن. به او بگو اگر زودتر دست به کار نشود و آب پیدا نکند، در آب غرق می شود.
یکمی ارتباط گرفتن باهاش (کتاب) دیر اتفاق افتاد.دوست داشتم شخصیت ها رو بیشتر بفهمم و باهاشون باشم ولی انگار همش تو یه فاصله ای از من قرار داشتن! یه جاهایی احساس میکردم چندتا جمله اون وسط مسطا گم شده که البته همه ی این ها برای بخش های اول و دوم بود. بخش آخر تا حدی انتظاراتم از این کتاب رو براورده کرد.
از متن کتاب:
الان با او حرف بزن. به او بگو اگر زودتر دست به کار نشود و آب پیدا نکند، در آب غرق می شود.
February 6, 2022
3.5 stars. An engaging science fiction novel about a world where there is a scarcity of water. Dr. Charles Ransom, the protagonist, is a survivor in the collapse of society. There is a never ending quest for water.
Ballard and dystopian fans should find this book a satisfying reading experience. Readers new to Ballard should begin with ‘Crash’ and ‘Empire of the Sun’.
This book was first published in 1964.
Ballard and dystopian fans should find this book a satisfying reading experience. Readers new to Ballard should begin with ‘Crash’ and ‘Empire of the Sun’.
This book was first published in 1964.
January 1, 2024
The middle of Ballard's loose "disaster" trilogy this is an intelligent and intriguing read.
May 29, 2023
Three and a half stars.
The truth is, I'm not sure how to describe this book. So, I'll adopt the term "Ballardian" used by some critics.
It's clear that a book written by J.G. Ballard, which also deals with a global drought, certainly doesn't promise anything optimistic, especially considering the current situation in my country (Spain).
Perhaps this is the enchantment of literature, when it transcends into art, how reading a book evokes sensations that you can't fully comprehend. Regarding the plot, it revolves around how a severe drought affects the inhabitants of a small town and depicts absurdly apocalyptic situations, which are characteristic of the author's style.
Of course I intend to read more works by this author, but I think it's not a recommended read for someone going through a personal depressive phase.
The truth is, I'm not sure how to describe this book. So, I'll adopt the term "Ballardian" used by some critics.
It's clear that a book written by J.G. Ballard, which also deals with a global drought, certainly doesn't promise anything optimistic, especially considering the current situation in my country (Spain).
Perhaps this is the enchantment of literature, when it transcends into art, how reading a book evokes sensations that you can't fully comprehend. Regarding the plot, it revolves around how a severe drought affects the inhabitants of a small town and depicts absurdly apocalyptic situations, which are characteristic of the author's style.
Of course I intend to read more works by this author, but I think it's not a recommended read for someone going through a personal depressive phase.
April 7, 2021
خوب تجربه ی دوم از جی جی بالارد هم تموم شد. تو این کتابش هم، اون سکته هایی که در مورد رمان قبلیش (برج) گفتم، خیلی بیشتر خودشو نشون میداد. اینکه یه هو احساس میکردی انگار چند سطر پاک شده، یه کم توضیحات کمه، رفتارا چرا انقدر مبهمن؟
بازم هدف آدمها از واکنشهاشون و روند اینجوری شدنشون رو کم داشت داستان.شاید بهتر بود به جای اونهمه توصیفات فضا، حالات روحی آدمهای داستانش رو توصیف میکرد.
ولی داستان تم جذاب و هیجان انگیزی داره، طوری که با یه عالم سر گیجه، بازم میخوای بری صفحه بعدی.
خشکسالی، بلایی نه چندان دور از ما. آخرالزمانی که توش آدمها دیگه نه برای پول، بلکه برای یه قمقمه آب
همدیگه رو هلاک میکنن.
اشتراکی که توی دوتا کار خونده شده از نویسنده دیدم و خیلی خوشم اومد، نمایش اشرف مخلوقات وقتی که برای بقا میجنگه، بود. بشریتی که اخلاق براش میشه مثل یه خاطره ی دور. یه خاطره ی فراموش شده. چه موجودات ترسناکی هستیم واقعا...
.
ولی برج، یه چیز دیگه بود...
بازم هدف آدمها از واکنشهاشون و روند اینجوری شدنشون رو کم داشت داستان.شاید بهتر بود به جای اونهمه توصیفات فضا، حالات روحی آدمهای داستانش رو توصیف میکرد.
ولی داستان تم جذاب و هیجان انگیزی داره، طوری که با یه عالم سر گیجه، بازم میخوای بری صفحه بعدی.
خشکسالی، بلایی نه چندان دور از ما. آخرالزمانی که توش آدمها دیگه نه برای پول، بلکه برای یه قمقمه آب
همدیگه رو هلاک میکنن.
اشتراکی که توی دوتا کار خونده شده از نویسنده دیدم و خیلی خوشم اومد، نمایش اشرف مخلوقات وقتی که برای بقا میجنگه، بود. بشریتی که اخلاق براش میشه مثل یه خاطره ی دور. یه خاطره ی فراموش شده. چه موجودات ترسناکی هستیم واقعا...
.
ولی برج، یه چیز دیگه بود...
September 20, 2018
Do you realize that authors have been writing climate fiction for a long time? J G Ballard was one of those authors. I have read three of his, The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World, and now The Drought. All were classified as science fiction in the 1960s but these days would be practically contemporary fiction.
The Drought was originally titled The Burning World when first published in 1964. Ballard then expanded the story and retitled it The Drought. No rain for years, shrinking rivers and shorelines, and the resultant fires, violence and insanity provide the milieu.
The main characters are residents of one neighborhood in one city and their reactions to the burgeoning catastrophe provide the plot. As you might expect, no one behaves well but Ballard seems always to provide at least one rugged or determined character who one way or another prevails.
The cause of the drought is industrial waste changing the atmospheric conditions over the oceans. In actual fact that implicates most of humanity. In our current times, over 50 years later, this is the worst it has ever been, if you believe science. I do. If you have ever wondered what it would be like to run out of water, Ballard makes it quite real.
Basically a whole lot of people die along with animals and plants, the rest fight over shrinking food supplies, hoard water or go quietly insane. I suppose this type of story would not appeal to many readers but it made me consider how I would conduct myself in such a scenario.
Someone on Goodreads complained that J G Ballard's writing is hysterical. That is what I like about him. Anyone who lives in this world and does not get hysterical from time to time is barely alive!
For further related reading try The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi and Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins, both of whom get hysterical!!
November 20, 2020
No sé qué terminé de leer, básicamente “qué carajos leí” fue mi expresión cuando terminé este libro.
O sea, tenemos una sequía que viene hace un tiempo, personajes a cada cual está más mal de la cabeza. Y hasta ahí se entiende, pero lo que no tiene cordura es la narración, dudo que fuera la traducción, creo que es como escribe este hombre, había cosas que no tenían sentido, terminabas de leer un párrafo y tenias que releerlo porque no entendías nada. O cambia de una situación a otra y vos quedas “¿acá falta algo?”.
No sé, estuvo ok la historia, muy lindo el final ¿? (o no) pero si algo tengo claro es que no vuelvo a tocar un libro de este señor en mi vida.
O sea, tenemos una sequía que viene hace un tiempo, personajes a cada cual está más mal de la cabeza. Y hasta ahí se entiende, pero lo que no tiene cordura es la narración, dudo que fuera la traducción, creo que es como escribe este hombre, había cosas que no tenían sentido, terminabas de leer un párrafo y tenias que releerlo porque no entendías nada. O cambia de una situación a otra y vos quedas “¿acá falta algo?”.
No sé, estuvo ok la historia, muy lindo el final ¿? (o no) pero si algo tengo claro es que no vuelvo a tocar un libro de este señor en mi vida.
September 5, 2021
As noted in the review for The Drowned World, another part of the quartet of Ballard's "Elemental Apocalypse" - formerly titled THE BURNING WORLD, this describes a future in which water has grown scarce (yet another possibility for our future, sadly). IIRC, it starts out with the realization of what's going on just beginning to grip the populace of a British suburb, and then at mid-book jumps ahead a number of years to the desiccated, blasted future where rag-tag groups skate across vast salt plains looking to harvest what water they can find, and follows our group of varied characters back to the suburb they once left. As with DROWNED and CRYSTAL, it's yet another iteration of Ballard's musings on Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", with the crazy, decadent rich guy in the Kurtz role.
Didn't like it as much as DROWNED or CRYSTAL, but more than WIND FROM NOWHERE. Worth checking out if you're interested in a salty, dry experience.
Didn't like it as much as DROWNED or CRYSTAL, but more than WIND FROM NOWHERE. Worth checking out if you're interested in a salty, dry experience.
September 17, 2016
This Ballards postapocaliptic novel follows to the The Drowned World and as this previous is on a environemental catastrophe,but this time is a human pollution caused.
As in other postapocaliptic novels we can see a lost of civilization values,a social regression to small groups of almost hunters-gatherers and also a distortion of the perceived space and time and in some the sense of his own identity.There are few emotional links and little psichological intronspection
But where Ballard is great is in describing the dry,arid,desolated infinite landscapes with a neat prose full of beautiful metaphores,a novel rather of images.
As in other postapocaliptic novels we can see a lost of civilization values,a social regression to small groups of almost hunters-gatherers and also a distortion of the perceived space and time and in some the sense of his own identity.There are few emotional links and little psichological intronspection
But where Ballard is great is in describing the dry,arid,desolated infinite landscapes with a neat prose full of beautiful metaphores,a novel rather of images.
October 7, 2012
Sometimes I read to escape my situation; sometimes I read to wallow in it. I suspect that my taking up The Burning World during this hot, dry, searing, scorching summer of wildfire and little rain is due to the latter tendency, but I'm not entirely sure. I never am, with J.G. Ballard.
This is my third foray into the gently trippy, weirdly abstracted imagination of this mid-century master (last year saw me sinking under the surface of The Drowned World; I spent part of February freezing over in The Crystal World. I guess I'll have to track down The Wind from Nowhere next, to get all of Ballard's "Elemental Apocalypse" quartet under my belt), and I'll definitely be returning for more. Nothing compares to a Ballard novel: short, vivid, melancholy, yet curiously detatched, just like his characters, who are never fighting the drowning/crystallizing/burning of their worlds, but rather just observing and saying something along the lines of "Well. How about that?"
As the novel opens, Charles Ransom, -- our, well, I hesitate to call him either hero or protagonist, so let's just call him our viewpoint character -- lives and waits in the lakeside community of Larchmont, where his marriage to Judith has dried up along with most of the continent. At first, it is she, but not he, who is preparing to follow most of the rest of the area's residents in abandoning the town forever in an exodus to the coast, where desalinization plants offer humanity's last hope. Soon Ransom is left only with the remnants of a somewhat bullying Presbyterian minister's shotgun-toting congregation, Mr. Lomax, a possibly deranged architect expending every last bit of his resources in pursuit of what he imagines is going to be a promising future, Lomax's even more bizarre sister Miranda*, a weirdo named Quilter who runs around with a dead peacock hanging off his belt, and Ransom's friend, Philip Jordan, a strange, silent young man of about 20 whose whole life was spent mucking about in the water until the water started to go.
And then there's the fishermen, whether bent over a beached boat "like widows over a coffin", standing mutely, hats in hands, at the back of Reverend Johnstone's church, or rampaging through the streets with nets like toreadors, become fishers of men for their own quixotic crusade, because Larchmont isn't nearly sad or Lovecraftian enough yet. Really. I'm talking burning churches wearing sturgeon's heads as hats Lovecraftian.
The cause of all this desolation both is and isn't plausible (not that causes or plausibility seem ever to be the point, in Ballard): decades of pollution and discharge into the oceans has left a soup of petrochemicals and polymers that have formed a thin but impenetrable skin on their surfaces that has halted, probably forever, the cycle of evaporation and precipitation that makes life on land possible. This is my first Ballard, in other words, in which the end of the world is humanity's fault.
Not that any hand-wringing over this happens, as would be true with pretty much any other author. The closest we come is the sermons of Reverend Johnstone, who regards the drought not so much as punishment as just another manifestation of the opus contra naturam by which man earns his right to exist in creation. All those migrators away from the dwindling lake and the withering vegetation are sinners for their lack of faith and sissies who are unworthy of the grace of God.
But not Charlie. Charlie thinks he is staying put, though not, of course, for any reasons the Reverend would understand, nor, I suspect, any that Charlie would, either. His inaction, even when impulsively accompanying a water truck driver to deliver the last of the water from Lomax's swimming pool to a local zoo to keep the animals there alive for a few more days, draws always the same reaction from others: they want to know what he is going to do, why he hasn't left, as though somehow knowing that will make their own paths clearer. But Ransom can't help them. He's about to have problems of his own.
Like holding onto his humanity once circumstances finally compel him to leave Larchmont with just three other people, on his own lemming-like journey to the sea:
During their journey to the south he had felt an increasing sense of vacuum, as if he was pointlessly following a vestigial instinct that no longer had any real meaning for him. The four people with him were becoming more and more shadowy, residues of themselves as notional as the empty river.
Another common theme in Ballard, that, it seems**; the guy did imagine everybody dreaming of slipping back, evolutionarily, to their lizard brains or beyond in The Drowned World.
I must digress here for a moment, for I find I have a similar experience when I read Ballard. The characters and their immediate situations are always sort of drifting in and out of my consciousness. I've pondered this for a while and decided that this is because Ballard manages to summon so many cultural ghosts to haunt his stories. Phrases or passages suggest Shakespeare, Saramago, Sebald, Homer, Tolkien, tarot decks, Greenaway and Herzog films, but do so with such subtlety that one doesn't consciously notice it as she reads along. Ballard is a hypnotist, and he's inducing daydreams. Hence the bewildering effect of seemingly ordinary passages like this, when our hero spots a man in a dusty cotton suit, sort of shambling ahead in the distance: "Without thinking, Ransom walked forward a few paces, as if following the man. He waited, almost expecting to see a dog appear and run around the man's heels." The Fool card. And now I'm tripping on T.S. Eliot and Tim Powers... meanwhile the mystery man keeps shambling along in the "absolute isolation of the chalkwhite promenade, with its empty perspectives..."
Imagine experiencing something like that every few paragraphs, and then you'll see that Ballard is expanding way beyond the notional 160 pages of this novel, or page count of any novel. I could share examples of this until this post was longer even than my Lord of the Rings rambles over at Kate of Mind.
This effect should be a flaw by most gauges of literary worth or entertainment value that I know of, but it's not. Novels are supposed to suck you into another world when you read them. Ballard just sucks the rest of the world in with you.
That's not to say Ballard is just borrowing other art. There is original imagery that is going to stay with me for the rest of my life in this novel:
"They reached the margins of the river estuary. the funnel-shaped area had once been bordered by marshes and sandfalts, and the low-lying ground still seemed damp and gloomy, despite the hot sunlight breaking across the dry grass. The hundreds of vehicles parked among the dunes and hillocks had sunk up to their axles in the soft sand, their roofs tilting in all directions."
And so begins our fossil record, no?
Ballard writes a lot about isolation and solipsism, directly or indirectly, always in a perfectly neutral tone, no judgement or consequence. His characters just end up as islands or, in this case, as dunes, just as we who read him do, for surely no two of us are ever lured into the same space. And once lured or driven apart, these characters seldom reunite as they adapt in their idiosyncratic ways to their utterly transformed world. And when they do come back together, it's not always in merry meetings. Adaptation and isolation do lead, after all, to speciation, don't they.
And so it is on the seacoast to which Ransom brings his three companions, Philip Jordan, Jordan's blind and elderly foster father, the Calibanesque Quilter's witchy mother (yeah, shades of Sycorax!), and a red-haired former zookeeper, Catherine. A ten-year lacuna sunders them utterly (not that that's very hard), and when next we see them, they are unrecognizable. And as to what they get up to, reverting as they have to a primitive life of sealskin capes and repurposed fragments of the old world, is as bizarre, yet well-imagined, as anything I have ever seen. Capturing water that the tide washes up and then steals away is difficult enough; moving it around enough to leach out the salt is monumental; stealing it is almost ridiculously complicated!
But even that mighty effort is just a stop-gap, if a long one. It's no way to live, and echoes of Lomax's last words to Ransom, telling him that he'll be back someday, have already dragged the reader's thoughts back to Larchmont even before the excuse is found to try going there. That suggestion, planted so long ago, is the deepest and most compelling of all, and so it doesn't matter a bit that the excuse found doesn't make a lot of sense. Why, of course.
I'm perhaps no longer making sense, but Ballard does that to me, just like W.G. Sebald did. I'm in awe and maybe still a little entranced. And watching everything burn. Well. How about that?
*There is totally a sort of reverse-Tempest thing going on; Quilter gets compared to Caliban at least as often as Philip Jordan to Ariel; Lomax might make an Antonio to Ransom's Prospero, but as Miranda belongs to/with Lomax (sister rather than daughter, but still) perhaps it is he who is Prospero? But Ransom does not seem like a usurper type, or any other of the types from the Shakespeare play. And maybe he's not supposed to. Maybe I'm getting carried away with the analogies. I do that, sometimes. But really: there's even rather a lot of repetition of the world "bosun."
**I keep saying "it seems" about Ballard because I'm being cautious. I've only read three of his books to date, and so am not entirely comfortable making sweeping pronouncements about what is or is not common to Ballard's work, thematically or otherwise. BUT, I do feel somewhat backed up in my sense of Ballard by this great little piece by Martin Amis that appeared recently in the Guardian. And I plan to become a real Ballardian.
This is my third foray into the gently trippy, weirdly abstracted imagination of this mid-century master (last year saw me sinking under the surface of The Drowned World; I spent part of February freezing over in The Crystal World. I guess I'll have to track down The Wind from Nowhere next, to get all of Ballard's "Elemental Apocalypse" quartet under my belt), and I'll definitely be returning for more. Nothing compares to a Ballard novel: short, vivid, melancholy, yet curiously detatched, just like his characters, who are never fighting the drowning/crystallizing/burning of their worlds, but rather just observing and saying something along the lines of "Well. How about that?"
As the novel opens, Charles Ransom, -- our, well, I hesitate to call him either hero or protagonist, so let's just call him our viewpoint character -- lives and waits in the lakeside community of Larchmont, where his marriage to Judith has dried up along with most of the continent. At first, it is she, but not he, who is preparing to follow most of the rest of the area's residents in abandoning the town forever in an exodus to the coast, where desalinization plants offer humanity's last hope. Soon Ransom is left only with the remnants of a somewhat bullying Presbyterian minister's shotgun-toting congregation, Mr. Lomax, a possibly deranged architect expending every last bit of his resources in pursuit of what he imagines is going to be a promising future, Lomax's even more bizarre sister Miranda*, a weirdo named Quilter who runs around with a dead peacock hanging off his belt, and Ransom's friend, Philip Jordan, a strange, silent young man of about 20 whose whole life was spent mucking about in the water until the water started to go.
And then there's the fishermen, whether bent over a beached boat "like widows over a coffin", standing mutely, hats in hands, at the back of Reverend Johnstone's church, or rampaging through the streets with nets like toreadors, become fishers of men for their own quixotic crusade, because Larchmont isn't nearly sad or Lovecraftian enough yet. Really. I'm talking burning churches wearing sturgeon's heads as hats Lovecraftian.
The cause of all this desolation both is and isn't plausible (not that causes or plausibility seem ever to be the point, in Ballard): decades of pollution and discharge into the oceans has left a soup of petrochemicals and polymers that have formed a thin but impenetrable skin on their surfaces that has halted, probably forever, the cycle of evaporation and precipitation that makes life on land possible. This is my first Ballard, in other words, in which the end of the world is humanity's fault.
Not that any hand-wringing over this happens, as would be true with pretty much any other author. The closest we come is the sermons of Reverend Johnstone, who regards the drought not so much as punishment as just another manifestation of the opus contra naturam by which man earns his right to exist in creation. All those migrators away from the dwindling lake and the withering vegetation are sinners for their lack of faith and sissies who are unworthy of the grace of God.
But not Charlie. Charlie thinks he is staying put, though not, of course, for any reasons the Reverend would understand, nor, I suspect, any that Charlie would, either. His inaction, even when impulsively accompanying a water truck driver to deliver the last of the water from Lomax's swimming pool to a local zoo to keep the animals there alive for a few more days, draws always the same reaction from others: they want to know what he is going to do, why he hasn't left, as though somehow knowing that will make their own paths clearer. But Ransom can't help them. He's about to have problems of his own.
Like holding onto his humanity once circumstances finally compel him to leave Larchmont with just three other people, on his own lemming-like journey to the sea:
During their journey to the south he had felt an increasing sense of vacuum, as if he was pointlessly following a vestigial instinct that no longer had any real meaning for him. The four people with him were becoming more and more shadowy, residues of themselves as notional as the empty river.
Another common theme in Ballard, that, it seems**; the guy did imagine everybody dreaming of slipping back, evolutionarily, to their lizard brains or beyond in The Drowned World.
I must digress here for a moment, for I find I have a similar experience when I read Ballard. The characters and their immediate situations are always sort of drifting in and out of my consciousness. I've pondered this for a while and decided that this is because Ballard manages to summon so many cultural ghosts to haunt his stories. Phrases or passages suggest Shakespeare, Saramago, Sebald, Homer, Tolkien, tarot decks, Greenaway and Herzog films, but do so with such subtlety that one doesn't consciously notice it as she reads along. Ballard is a hypnotist, and he's inducing daydreams. Hence the bewildering effect of seemingly ordinary passages like this, when our hero spots a man in a dusty cotton suit, sort of shambling ahead in the distance: "Without thinking, Ransom walked forward a few paces, as if following the man. He waited, almost expecting to see a dog appear and run around the man's heels." The Fool card. And now I'm tripping on T.S. Eliot and Tim Powers... meanwhile the mystery man keeps shambling along in the "absolute isolation of the chalkwhite promenade, with its empty perspectives..."
Imagine experiencing something like that every few paragraphs, and then you'll see that Ballard is expanding way beyond the notional 160 pages of this novel, or page count of any novel. I could share examples of this until this post was longer even than my Lord of the Rings rambles over at Kate of Mind.
This effect should be a flaw by most gauges of literary worth or entertainment value that I know of, but it's not. Novels are supposed to suck you into another world when you read them. Ballard just sucks the rest of the world in with you.
That's not to say Ballard is just borrowing other art. There is original imagery that is going to stay with me for the rest of my life in this novel:
"They reached the margins of the river estuary. the funnel-shaped area had once been bordered by marshes and sandfalts, and the low-lying ground still seemed damp and gloomy, despite the hot sunlight breaking across the dry grass. The hundreds of vehicles parked among the dunes and hillocks had sunk up to their axles in the soft sand, their roofs tilting in all directions."
And so begins our fossil record, no?
Ballard writes a lot about isolation and solipsism, directly or indirectly, always in a perfectly neutral tone, no judgement or consequence. His characters just end up as islands or, in this case, as dunes, just as we who read him do, for surely no two of us are ever lured into the same space. And once lured or driven apart, these characters seldom reunite as they adapt in their idiosyncratic ways to their utterly transformed world. And when they do come back together, it's not always in merry meetings. Adaptation and isolation do lead, after all, to speciation, don't they.
And so it is on the seacoast to which Ransom brings his three companions, Philip Jordan, Jordan's blind and elderly foster father, the Calibanesque Quilter's witchy mother (yeah, shades of Sycorax!), and a red-haired former zookeeper, Catherine. A ten-year lacuna sunders them utterly (not that that's very hard), and when next we see them, they are unrecognizable. And as to what they get up to, reverting as they have to a primitive life of sealskin capes and repurposed fragments of the old world, is as bizarre, yet well-imagined, as anything I have ever seen. Capturing water that the tide washes up and then steals away is difficult enough; moving it around enough to leach out the salt is monumental; stealing it is almost ridiculously complicated!
But even that mighty effort is just a stop-gap, if a long one. It's no way to live, and echoes of Lomax's last words to Ransom, telling him that he'll be back someday, have already dragged the reader's thoughts back to Larchmont even before the excuse is found to try going there. That suggestion, planted so long ago, is the deepest and most compelling of all, and so it doesn't matter a bit that the excuse found doesn't make a lot of sense. Why, of course.
I'm perhaps no longer making sense, but Ballard does that to me, just like W.G. Sebald did. I'm in awe and maybe still a little entranced. And watching everything burn. Well. How about that?
*There is totally a sort of reverse-Tempest thing going on; Quilter gets compared to Caliban at least as often as Philip Jordan to Ariel; Lomax might make an Antonio to Ransom's Prospero, but as Miranda belongs to/with Lomax (sister rather than daughter, but still) perhaps it is he who is Prospero? But Ransom does not seem like a usurper type, or any other of the types from the Shakespeare play. And maybe he's not supposed to. Maybe I'm getting carried away with the analogies. I do that, sometimes. But really: there's even rather a lot of repetition of the world "bosun."
**I keep saying "it seems" about Ballard because I'm being cautious. I've only read three of his books to date, and so am not entirely comfortable making sweeping pronouncements about what is or is not common to Ballard's work, thematically or otherwise. BUT, I do feel somewhat backed up in my sense of Ballard by this great little piece by Martin Amis that appeared recently in the Guardian. And I plan to become a real Ballardian.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 5, 2020
Todo lo que me sorprendió en "El mundo sumergido" se revela aquí como obsesión. En esta novela se repiten inquietudes y modos de la obra anterior. Ballard ha encontrado su camino, el que desde aquí será su sello de identidad, y lo explora a conciencia. De nuevo imágenes fascinantes, de nuevo paisajes insólitos, una vez más el interior como prolongación del vacío exterior. La esencia del hombre trastocada por el medio en un viaje de retorno al nodo de la existencia. Lo que las aguas mantenían sumergido en su anterior novela sale a la superficie en esta. Igual que la sequía saca a la luz los distintos objetos entre el barro, la conciencia se erige desnuda como una isla en la ausencia de civilización. El hombre sin todo aquello que le da sentido, roído hasta el hueso.
El contenido de fondo, ese estilo ballardiano, es absolutamente disfrutable, pero en la narrativa he encontrado también defectos. Hay acciones que no me han quedado muy claras, e incluso he percibido un desconcertante baile de personajes. La elipsis central, por otra parte, me ha dejado perdido un tiempo. He sentido la tentación de culpar a la traducción, pero dado que ya me ocurrió algo semejante con la siguiente novela, "El mundo de cristal", he acudido a comprobar si también esa estaba traducida por Francisco Porrúa bajo alguno de sus heterónimos. Y no.
Curiosamente, y aun reconociendo que Ballard se va perfeccionando a sí mismo, mi gusto por esta serie de los desastres naturales corre a la inversa (aún no he leído la primera, confieso). "El mundo sumergido", quizás por el impacto de lo original e inesperado, me pareció extraordinaria. En "La sequía" vuelve a fascinarme el juego paralelo entre el paisaje y la molicie interior, pero me impresiona menos. En "El mundo de cristal", sublimación de lo ballardiano, mi interés por lo que hay tras la estética decae del todo. Aun así, me siguen pareciendo obras al alcance de muy pocos. Ballard, después de todo, sigue siendo Ballard.
El contenido de fondo, ese estilo ballardiano, es absolutamente disfrutable, pero en la narrativa he encontrado también defectos. Hay acciones que no me han quedado muy claras, e incluso he percibido un desconcertante baile de personajes. La elipsis central, por otra parte, me ha dejado perdido un tiempo. He sentido la tentación de culpar a la traducción, pero dado que ya me ocurrió algo semejante con la siguiente novela, "El mundo de cristal", he acudido a comprobar si también esa estaba traducida por Francisco Porrúa bajo alguno de sus heterónimos. Y no.
Curiosamente, y aun reconociendo que Ballard se va perfeccionando a sí mismo, mi gusto por esta serie de los desastres naturales corre a la inversa (aún no he leído la primera, confieso). "El mundo sumergido", quizás por el impacto de lo original e inesperado, me pareció extraordinaria. En "La sequía" vuelve a fascinarme el juego paralelo entre el paisaje y la molicie interior, pero me impresiona menos. En "El mundo de cristal", sublimación de lo ballardiano, mi interés por lo que hay tras la estética decae del todo. Aun así, me siguen pareciendo obras al alcance de muy pocos. Ballard, después de todo, sigue siendo Ballard.
May 24, 2021
Ballard stavolta immagina un mondo caduto in una tremenda siccità, tanto forte che si sono e continuano a prosciugarsi i fiumi e i mari, lasciando solo polvere e sale. Anche in questo caso la colpa è da imputare all'umanità perché, ci viene approfonditamente spiegato nella storia, ha inquinato con gli scarichi industriali (quindi scarti chimici) così tanto che si è creata come una rete - un polimero - che impedisce l'evaporazione dell'acqua e automaticamente non piove più. Il protagonista della storia, un dottore, si ritrova a dover sopravvivere in questo apocalisse di siccità, alla disperata e continua ricerca di acqua potabile, più preziosa di qualsiasi altra cosa.
Altro forte monito che l'autore fa a tutti noi se continuiamo a sprecare ma soprattutto ad inquinare l'acqua. Rispetto ai precedenti due romanzi dello stesso autore, ovvero Il condominio e Il mondo sommerso, la lettura della storia mi ha stancato, non mi ha preso più di tanto. Ciò non toglie nulla alla bravura di Ballard, forse il suo tratto distintivo, nel descriverci e ben rappresentarci la psicologia dei personaggi che incontriamo e conosciamo. Ci può stare che, nonostante apprezzi un'autore qualche sua opera ti risulta meno piacevole.
Curiosità: a tratti mi ricordava il film Mad Max: Fury Road, forse per l'ambientazione desertica e di sopravvivenza.
Altro forte monito che l'autore fa a tutti noi se continuiamo a sprecare ma soprattutto ad inquinare l'acqua. Rispetto ai precedenti due romanzi dello stesso autore, ovvero Il condominio e Il mondo sommerso, la lettura della storia mi ha stancato, non mi ha preso più di tanto. Ciò non toglie nulla alla bravura di Ballard, forse il suo tratto distintivo, nel descriverci e ben rappresentarci la psicologia dei personaggi che incontriamo e conosciamo. Ci può stare che, nonostante apprezzi un'autore qualche sua opera ti risulta meno piacevole.
Curiosità: a tratti mi ricordava il film Mad Max: Fury Road, forse per l'ambientazione desertica e di sopravvivenza.
September 1, 2016
This was my first Ballard and I have to say it was rather disappointing. It is, too, one of his first novels, so that might account for the disappointment. His prose is very hard to follow and his sentence structures were often awkward and incomprehensible without multiple reads. I thought the story was interesting and there were some promising characters but except for a few passages that seemed to flow with more ease, it was not too engaging and when it's over you wonder what the point of it all was.
I'm not saying it was terrible, though. Like I said, I liked the story and I think I get where he was going with the endlessly bleak narration. Moreover, in the end, there were some bizarre elements that sparked my interest so I don't believe he is without talent. Sadly, this arrived too late.
I'm not saying it was terrible, though. Like I said, I liked the story and I think I get where he was going with the endlessly bleak narration. Moreover, in the end, there were some bizarre elements that sparked my interest so I don't believe he is without talent. Sadly, this arrived too late.
July 23, 2015
Skimmed this pretty heavily. I love Ballard's descriptions and scientific speculations, but he always seems to fail me when it comes to character or plot. But descriptions and speculation are enough to validate a read anyways :)
February 8, 2010
One secret to enjoying this novel is to keep all images of any Kevin Costner movie out of you mind while reading it.
April 27, 2022
Me dejó de importar más o menos a la mitad y después ya leía desconcentrada. Al final lo cerré y me lo olvidé al toque. Se vio reemplazado por las Bellas.
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