Thoughts
on the book by J.G. Ballard
"The next morning he
dismantled the craft, ported the sections one by one up the enormous
sludge-covered slopes, hoping for a southward extension of the waterway. Around
him the great banks undulated for miles, the curving dunes dotted with
cuttlefish and nautiloids. The sea was no longer visible, and he was all alone
with these few lifeless objects, like the debris of a vanished continuum, one
dune giving way to another as he dragged the heavy fifty-gallon drums from
crest to crest. Overhead the sky was dull and cloudless, a bland impassive
blue, more the interior ceiling of some deep irrevocable psychosis than the
storm-filled celestial sphere he had known during the previous days. At times,
after he had dropped one burden, he would totter down into the hollow of the
wrong dune, and find himself stumbling about the silent basins, their floors
cracked into hexagonal plates, like a dreamer searching for an invisible door
out of his nightmare."
- The
Drowned World, J.G. Ballard, 1962
"As I wrote Empire of
the Sun I could see the way in which the landscapes of Shanghai had permeated
all my previous novels in disguised form, and it always struck me as odd that I
should have waited 40 years to write about my wartime experiences. But I
realise now that I probably was writing about them all the time, and that one
of the reasons I chose to write science fiction at the beginning was that it
offered me a way in which I could remake the landscapes of the England I knew
in the 1960s and 1970s, in the way that the surrealists worked, to make them
resemble unconsciously the landscapes of wartime Shanghai. I could flood London
and the drowned world, I could reshape the everyday reality of Britain, western
Europe and the United States."
-
Great voices of science fiction, The Guardian, 14th May, 2011
Despite being an early work
for the writer J.G. Ballard, "The Drowned World" (1962) is
nonetheless characteristic of the themes and interests that would go on to
define and dominate the author's later, more celebrated books. Books such as "Concrete Island" (1974), "High
Rise" (1975) and his final novel, "Kingdom Come" (2006), where
microcosms of contemporary culture break down into scenes of tribal violence, or
where characters isolated from the accepted niceties of polite society, find
liberation in their regression to a more lawless, primordial state.
The Drowned World [J.G. Ballard, 1962]:
Originally published as a
short novella in the January 1962 issue of the magazine "Science Fiction
Adventures", before subsequently being expanded by Ballard into its
current form, "The Drowned World" builds on the still timely issue of
global warming, depicting the landscapes of Northern Europe turned by
ecological disaster into a tropical lagoon overrun by exotic reptiles and dangerous
creatures. However, the book eventually reveals itself to be more concerned
with the standard 'Ballardian' themes of contemporary existentialism, civil
disobedience, hysteria, and the descent of humanity into expressions of primal
aggression.
Having spent his childhood
years in Shanghai during The Second World War, and at one point finding himself
a prisoner in a Japanese internment camp, Ballard recognised how thin the line is
that separates societies from order into lawlessness. Wars, crises and
catastrophes turn people desperate, backing them into corners, elevating the
need for survival and self-preservation over rationality and reason. His
characters, like so many people he must have encountered during his youth,
descend in the face of this desperation, into brutality; as tribalism and
general anxieties and fear wash over them like a wave.
Ballard's characters
frequently embrace this degeneration into primalism, seeing themselves as
modern-day (or even futuristic) variations on "Robinson Crusoe", part
anthropologists, part survivalists. In this sense, the book will be of interest
to fans and devotees of the author, as we can recognise where ideas that later
formed the basis of remarkable books, like "Crash" (1973) and the
aforementioned "Concrete Island", first bloomed into consciousness.
"The Drowned World" isn't a remarkable book. It's a good
book, with remarkable moments, but it finds Ballard as a merely talented young
writer, before the quantum leap he would later make with The Atrocity
Exhibition (1970); that endlessly controversial and experimental work that
would go on to define the general cultural perception of Ballard's
fiction, his imagery and his themes.
