Thoughts on the book by J.G. Ballard
"By day, fantastic birds flew through the
petrified forest, and jewelled crocodiles glittered like heraldic salamanders
on the banks of the crystalline river. By night, the illuminated man raced
among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels, his head like a spectral
crown..."
-The Crystal World, J.G. Ballard, 1966
"In his second novel J.G. Ballard drowned the
Earth, in his third he burned it, and in his fourth he turned it to crystal.
Between 1962 and 1966 he ruined the world three times – though he later made it
clear that these works were not to be understood as 'disaster stories', but as
'transformation stories.' 'The geophysical changes that take place [in them],'
he said in 1975, 'are all positive and good.'"
- Introduction to the Fourth Estate publication of
"The Crystal World",
Robert Macfarlane, 2014
In many ways "The Crystal World" is a
transitional work for Ballard. On one hand, it features enough surface
similarities to his preceding novels, "The Wind from Nowhere" (1961),
which he disowned, "The Drowned World" (1962) and "The Burning
World" (1964), also published as "The Drought", to be taken as
an evolution of a specific theme; chiefly, the destruction of the natural world,
and the evolution that these ecological catastrophes bring about in characters
forced to evolve or regress to either more elevated or primitive forms.
However, it also features several elements that mark the direction that
Ballard's writing would take in subsequent years, with the interest in physical
deterioration, injury detail and the transformation of the human body through
decay and destruction recalling the corporeal obsessions of "The Atrocity
Exhibition" (1970) and "Crash" (1973) respectively.
Like many of Ballard's novels, "The Crystal
World" finds a character arriving in a strange and exotic destination and
finding themselves immediately embroiled in a mystery that connects the
personal circumstances of the central character to the wider uncertainties
plaguing the modern world. In this sense, it can be seen as an earlier, more
outwardly science-fiction themed take on the same narrative machinations found
in his later, more forensic novels, such as "Running Wild" (1988),
"Cocaine Nights" (1996) and "Super Cannes" (2000). There,
the mysteries connected to personal and political atrocities, the collapse of
the modern consumer society with its order and conformity, and the performative
aspect of violence and degradation as a new kind of designer entertainment,
whereas the situation here is more markedly phantasmagorical and surreal.
The Crystal World [J.G. Ballard, 1966]:
The central concept of "The Crystal World"
is genuinely ingenious and results in some of the writer's most startling and
original imagery. As the description on the back cover puts it: Through a
'leaking' of time, the West African jungle starts to crystallize. Trees
metamorphose into enormous jewels. Crocodiles encased in second glittering
skins lurch down river. Pythons with huge blind eyes rear in heraldic poses.
Most flee the area in terror, afraid to face what they cannot understand. But
some, dazzled and strangely entranced, remain to drift through this dreamworld
forest: a doctor in pursuit of his ex-mistress, an enigmatic Jesuit wielding a
crystal cross, and a tribe of lepers searching for Paradise.
Already the description evokes similarities to
"The Drowned World" and the wider influences of writers like Joseph
Conrad; where the journey down river and the leftover specters of Colonialism bring
to mind a book like "Heart of Darkness" (1899) or Nostromo (1904).
However, the jungle adventures of Ballard's story are ultimately less
accessible, as the book returns again and again to ecstatic descriptions of
vitrified forest canopies turned into celestial stained-glass cathedrals radiating
rainbow light, where prolonged exposure to the environment causes wounds to
crystalize into jewelled lesions, and where a diamond frost forms on the clothes
and skin of those left to wander the crystal world. As such it often pulls in
two different directions, on one hand attempting to tell a conventional
science-fiction adventure story with a varied cast of characters, each with
their own interpersonal motives and agendas, and on the other hand concerning
itself with a poetic, often stream-of-consciousness exploration of the world
and the circumstances that transformed it.
While the book has never been brought to the screen,
"The Crystal World" contains such a visceral and singular approach to
both its concept and delivery that an attempt to turn it into a film would no
doubt result in something truly extraordinary, if only in terms of its
visualization. Some have found parallels and similarities to the imagery and
conception of the Alex Garland directed science-fiction horror film Annihilation (2018), which was based on the novel by Jeff
VanderMeer. VanderMeer's book has also been compared to the H.P. Lovecraft
story "The Color Out of Space" (1927) and the 1972 book by Arkady and
Boris Strugatsky, "Roadside Picnic", as well as it's celebrated film
adaptation, Stalker (1979). While I've yet to see Garland's film, there's no
denying that it's imagery, even stripped of context, is incredibly redolent of
situations and transmutations described in "The Crystal World."
Annihilation [Alex Garland, 2018]:
While I wouldn't hesitate to call "The Crystal
World" a work of genius – its conception and imagery is without precedent,
and the prose that Ballard develops to bring the world to life marks a quantum
leap in the evolution of his writing – it isn't the most accessible or
compelling of Ballard's stories, and can often collapse under the weight of its
lengthy evocations. Too often the human drama at the frosted heart of the book
feels vague and underdeveloped, and the characters thinly sketched and lacking personality.
It's simultaneously a better written and more imaginative book than Ballard's
earlier "The Drowned World", and a less engaging one.
While its storytelling and general approach can often seem
as ice cold and glacial as the image of the petrified forest that Ballard works
to explore, there does seem to be something more personal, even inherently
human at the centre of "The Crystal World" that is perhaps easy to
overlook. While it's pure conjecture on my part, I did wonder if it was significant
that Ballard's wife Mary died of pneumonia in 1964, two-years before "The
Crystal World" was first published. In creating a story about a man
willing to return to a place that is slowly dying, or transforming into a place
of cold, loveless beauty, to reclaim the woman he loved, is Ballard in a way
retelling the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and relating it specifically to
the loss of his wife? In this sense, the jewelled forest becomes a kind of phantom
underworld: a personification of a state of grief, where life no longer grows.
Following "The Crystal World" Ballard would
publish several volumes of short science-fiction stories, among them
"The Disaster Area" and "The Overloaded Man" (both 1967),
however, he wouldn't produce another full-length novel for four years. When he
returned, he did so with the aforementioned "The Atrocity
Exhibition", a work that marked a significant change in the author's subject
matter and approach. As such, "The Crystal World" is something of an
ending, bringing to a close the author's early, more conventional
science-fiction period, while at the same time heralding the beginning of
Ballard's most creative and controversial peak.
