The Crystal World

  

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.

Running Wild

Thoughts on the book by J.G. Ballard

"In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom."

The problem with being prescient is that sooner or later the rest of the world catches up with you, leaving your predictions, once innovative and shocking, entirely out-of-date. It could be argued that such a fate has befallen "Running Wild."

Written by J.G. Ballard as a response to the Hungerford massacre, "Running Wild" outlines, in forensic detail, the peculiarities of a strange killing spree. The entire adult population of a gated, upper-middle-class, suburban enclave along the Thames valley, is dead, their children abducted. Over the course of the book, a psychiatric advisor from Scotland Yard will piece together the various clues and oddities surrounding the case until the shocking truth becomes clear.

Running Wild [J.G. Ballard, 1988]:

When Ballard wrote the book in the late 1980s, the concept of the "spree killing" was something of a rarity in the UK. Crimes like the massacre at Hungerford weren't supposed to happen. Not in suburban England. Among other crimes, we had terror attacks and abductions, domestic violence and robberies gone wrong, but the appearance of something as senseless but seemingly well-orchestrated as the massacre in Hungerford was shocking in its lack of precedence.

The Hungerford massacre occurred on the 19th of August 1987. Michael Ryan, a 27-year-old unemployed handyman and gun enthusiast, shot dead 16 people, including a police officer and his own mother, before shooting himself. His final words to a police negotiator, "I wish I'd stayed in bed", grimly captured something of the banal existentialism of the whole ordeal, and the selfishness of the violence itself.

The Hungerford Massacre (BBC Documentary) [Teresa Hunt, 2005]:

Carrying a handgun and two semi-automatic rifles while dressed in full camouflage, Ryan must have cut a surreal figure as he stalked the streets of this quiet English suburb, opening fire on anyone he encountered. It's the incongruity of the image that's terrifying. Ryan as the displaced soldier of fortune; the relic to some forgotten conflict, wandering suburban streets as if patrolling an occupied territory, searching for a war that only exists in his own tortured mind.

Ballard in particular must have been fascinated by this image and the machinations of this kind of violence that was almost performative in its public exhibition, as the narrative of "Running Wild", sparse and to the point as it is, seems to exist specifically to facilitate a discussion on the senselessness of a crime like that of Hungerford, but also like many of the other senseless spree-killings that have followed in its wake.

It is here where Ballard's prescience has been diminished. Without engaging in spoilers, the mystery surrounding the massacre at Ballard's fictional Pangbourne Village eventually leads to a conclusion that its central character, Dr Richard Greville, and his colleagues on the periphery of the narrative, consider too shocking to entertain. Unfortunately, for those of us that have lived through the deplorable murders of James Bulger and Ana Kriégel, or the massacres at Columbine High School, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Virginia Tech and others, it appears sadly less shocking, instead merely predictive of a kind of violence that is now all too common within western society, and a breed of perpetrator that would have once been considered above suspicion.

Written as a series of journal entries in a largely cold, professional voice, "Running Wild" is never exploitative or salacious in its enquiry. It attempts, quite admirably, to understand through hypothetical conjecture, how a crime like Hungerford, which, from the outside in, appeared totally senseless and without intent, could happen in a setting as incompatible as the leafy narrow streets of suburban England, and in doing so, allows the reader to ruminate on subsequent but similar atrocities, such as the massacres carried out by Thomas Hamilton in Dunblane Scotland, Martin Bryant in Port Arthur Tasmania, Derrick Bird in Cumbria England or Omar Mateen in Orlando Florida.

If the book fails to offer any concrete reasons for why such crimes not only occur but have seemingly become a pandemic in the decades since its initial publication, then it's by no means a flaw. Instead, it's the inability of both the writer and his central character to fully explain or comprehend this expression of violence that makes it all the more unsettling.

Artwork by Stanley Donwood for the 4^th Estate re-issues of Ballard's work [Photographer unknown, 2015]:

What Ballard does arrive at, however, is a theme of social conformity and the notion of violence as an act of rebellion. There's a satirical aspect to this in which the author goes to great and often darkly comic lengths to centre the affluence and cultured leanings of the Pangbourne residents as a stark contrast to the violence brought against them.

Throughout his career, Ballard has concerned himself with the idea of social regression; of seemingly cultivated and civilized societies descending into levels of primal violence and corporeal degradation. In this context, the violence becomes a protest against societal order; an attempt to regain a sense of self by disrupting the organized structure and routine of suburban middle-class civility; a kind of ideological terrorism.

Ballard would return to the same theme in several of his later books, specifically "Cocaine Nights" (1996), "Super Cannes" (2000), "Millennium People" (2003) and "Kingdom Come" (2006) respectively. In each of these books, a random act of violence propels the narrative forwards.

As the world continued to change and crimes like the one depicted in "Running Wild" became sadly more widespread, Ballard continued to ask questions; placing such seemingly senseless bursts of performative violence within a context of political terrorism, the homogenous, depersonalized nature of twenty-first century existence, and the growing rise of the kind of specifically British fascism that ultimately led to Brexit.

The Drowned World

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, 14^th 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.

Crash

Thoughts on the book by J.G. Ballard

Going into "Crash" for the first time, I already had a distant familiarity with director David Cronenberg's 1996 film adaptation, which, even without the benefit of having read the book for myself, had always struck me as a truncated if still suitably provocative palimpsest of Ballard's text. Having now finished the book I'm perhaps better able to contrast and compare the experience of the two versions, with Cronenberg's film now appearing weaker, more inert and vastly more limited in its scope, imagery and psychology. This isn't to say that the Cronenberg film doesn't stand on its own merits, but rather, to do justice to the book, as an actual experience, the resulting film adaptation would have to be genuinely pornographic in order to fully capture how visceral, prescient and transformative the psychological study at the centre of Ballard's story actually is.

So much of the book's ability to confound, provoke and even disgust its audience, comes from the central conception of its characters finding sexual gratification through road accidents. While Cronenberg's film was controversial at the time of its initial release - actually generating the kind of ultra-conservative "ban this sick filth" tabloid outrage campaigns that are now the rhetoric of middle-class liberals afraid of being challenged or upset - it was too restrained, too polished even to put into images what the words of the book so daringly suggest.

Crash [J.G. Ballard, 1973]:

Throughout the book Ballard describes vehicular atrocity as if transcribing sex scenes from a hardcore porn film; finding something in the crumpled ruins of chrome and steel that's evocative of a genuine orgy of flesh and physicality. The fetishistic treatment of the automobile - in which the author goes to extraordinary lengths to describe each curve and contour of a car's bodywork (or the flashing lights and dials of the instrument binnacle) as if describing the corporeal form a current companion - is contrasted by the graphic physical descriptions of the human body locked in copulation. The association that Ballard creates between the two - which forms the central crux of the text - is intentionally graphic so as to humanise the automobile and to imbue it with an inherent physicality, while at the same time dehumanising the actual characters; reducing them to physical objects defining space.

For the protagonists of the book, who each seem to get drawn into the same strange auto-erotic delusion of self-discovery, it isn't just sex and death, or sex and injury detail that becomes the main preoccupation, but an actual union between the car and the human body. More specifically, the physical and psychological symbiosis between the car, and the destruction of it, and the human body and its own self-destruction.

What Cronenberg's film wasn't able to depict was the obvious associations between the visceral contrast of engine fluids and bodily fluids spurting out across vinyl interiors, or across the wet tarmac of an accident site. The contrast of the car, not just as a legitimate sex object, or icon of fetishisation, but the crash itself as a genuine act of intercourse. Ballad's book sees no distinction between the car crash and the act of coitous; they're both, in a way, presented as perverse encounters, of flesh against flesh, or metal against metal. The physical coming together of the two forms of the mechanical and the human, the organic and the synthetic. Penetrations across different forms.

Crash [David Cronenberg, 1996]:

One area where Cronenberg's film does arguably improve upon Ballad's source material is in its ending, which manages to convey the sense of hopelessness implicit in the book's image of civilisation; that existential, almost pre-apocalyptic feeling of dread and dissolution, of societal collapse. As the world and highways of the film become less and less populated, more empty and deserted, it's almost as if the disintegration of these characters' lives and their acts of transgression and self-destruction are a part of a wider cultural shift that's effecting the entire world. It captures the very 'Ballardian' notion of technology as a kind of virus or contagion; something that infects people, and drives them towards madness or acts of irrational violence. The ending of Cronenberg's film is fittingly absurd but grounded in an emotional plausibility. It has something tragic about it, suggesting the physical reunification between man and woman, husband and wife. It's much better and more affecting even than the book's ending, which I won't spoil, but which seems weakly symbolic by comparison.

However the film misses much of what makes the book relevant beyond its obvious sensationalism; the literal "car-crash" nature of its imagery and plot. For instance it never really feels like a character study. Because it loses the first person narrative of the book, its unable to place us in the thought-process of its central character. In the book, so much of the story can be read as kind of personal chronicle of obsession and mental collapse. There's an irony and self-awareness to the voice of this narrator, which is lacking in the film. There's an element of unreliability, which forces the reader to question how much of the book is a fantasy on the part of the protagonist, or if it's an actual attempt to make sense of something as destructive and irrational as an automobile accident (one that in this instance has resulted in the death of a fellow driver). In the book there is a strong implication that the character is dealing with unchecked issues of guilt, as well as obvious post-traumatic stress disorder, which are each leading him on a journey of self-destruction. Cronenberg's film lacks this important aspect while also neutralising the homosexual fantasies of the character, which he projects onto the scarred, similarly damaged figure of the obsessive Vaughn; the book's (sort-of) antagonist.

"Crash" isn't a book that I love as much as Ballard's subsequent works, such as "Concrete Island" (1974) or "High Rise" (1975), however it does explore much of the same interest in the collapse of western civilization. It's engagingly written, grotesque, sometimes funny, but always thought provoking. Its hints of depression narrative and suggestion of PTSD following an encounter with violence, disfigurement and death point the way forward to the author's later hypothetical studies on the fallout from acts of irrational violence found in the books "Running Wild" (1988), "Super Cannes" (2000) and "Kingdom Come" (2006).