Don’t be fooled by the car crashes and explosions in J.G. Ballard’s writings. Or by the descriptions of flesh wounds and injuries that read like extracts from a coroner’s report. In particular, don’t pay any attention to the techno talk that might lull you into thinking that you are reading a science fiction story.
All that’s just there to distract you.
The really weird stuff in a Ballard book always takes place inside his characters' heads. At a time when other sci-fi writers were obsessed with outer space, as Martin Amis has wisely noted, Ballard was fixated on inner space. And the psychic space of a Ballard protgaonist is a cabinet of horrors, filled with neuroses that make Freud’s clinical studies read like The Boy Scout Handbook by comparison.
See Also Crash by J.G. Ballard (reviewed by Ted Gioia) The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard (reviewed by Ted Gioia) The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard (reviewed by Ted Gioia)
The Drowned World is a case in point. At first glance, this book seems to be one more forerunner of the increasingly popular global warming novels now lined up on the sci-fi shelves at your local bookstore. Ballard described many variants on the apocalypse in his early fiction, apparently believing, along with Robert Frost, that the world might end in fire or ice, and that various other elemental forces would also suffice. But Ballard was especially fond of global warming, and covered both the man-made hypothesis (in his novel The Burning World ) and the naturally-caused alternative (in this volume). Solar activity sends the temperatures rising in The Drowned World , melting the polar caps and raising midday temperatures in central Europe up to a toasty 150 degrees Fahrenheit.
But here's where Ballard deviates from the rest of the sci-fi pack. His main characters love the new inferno. While everyone else is heading north, where temperatures stay in the cool nineties, these fanatics want to go south. Towards the equator.
And I thought my wife's sweat yoga class was strange.
But readers familiar with Ballard's oeuvre will not be surprised. We've seen these creepy masochists in his other works, ready to slice off a limb or crash their car into a brick wall. Where Ballard usually fails us is in providing reasons for these obsessions. His characters typically come across as little more than automatons, following the directions programmed into their heads by their peculiar author, but never able to articulate the fascination of, say the “lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles.” Yet in The Drowned World , Ballard actually attempts to offer an explanation for the ever-present 'death wish' in his stories. A strange explanation, needless to say, but at least our author finally acknowledges, in The Drowned World , the legitimacy of probing into the warped reasons for his characters' twisted actions.
Let's allow Dr. Bodkin to explain: "Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic explanation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the into the archaeo-psychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs….You descend back into the neuronic past." In other words, we all carry within ourselves some Jungian remnants of our collective past, and when the atmospheric shifts create a new world that resembles the Triassic age, latent impulses are triggered and we find ourselves caught up by the irresistible appeal, ecstatic and horrifying at the same time, of the impending destruction. As it gets hotter and hotter, we are drawn to the heat. It is like a womb that we crave to return to, although now historical rather than biological.
Did you get that? When the world starts to burn, we act like moths heading for the flame.
The Drowned World opens in a flooded, deserted London, where a small contingent of soldiers and scientists are preparing to retreat to the relative comfort of the Arctic Circle. But many in the group have started experiencing nightmares akin to Jurassic Park in the 3D re-release. At first these dreams are terrifying, but after a while the nighttime visions exert a strange gravitational pull on a small cadre of the unit. They are mesmerized by the power unleashed by the triggering of the "neuronic past." The distinction between dream life and lived reality begins to blur, and the allure of the visions overwhelms the rational elements of their day-to-day routine.
One of the soldiers disappears, and a search party eventually finds him heading south in a makeshift raft, resisting all attempts to 'rescue' him. Soon our main protagonist, biologist Robert Kerans, begins to feel the same urge to move toward the equator—as do Beatrice Dahl, the last lady in London, and Keran’s colleague Dr. Bodkin. But this trio of renegades are so caught up in their dream-coming-true visions, that they can hardly manage to complete a conversation, let alone plan an expedition.
The Drowned World may not be Ballard's most flamboyant or transgressive book. If you are coming to this author for sheer shock value (as many do), skip this volume and head straight for The Atrocity Exhibition ….if you can stand it. But The Drowned World is his best written sci-fi novel, and an excellent entry point into his worldview for those who care about plot, narrative arc, character motivation and those other stalwart yeomen who are often missing in action on other Ballard outings.
But I still have some reservations about this book. The writing may sometimes be grand, at other times wearingly grandiose. Ballard can be too heavy-handed with high-falutin’ modifiers. This man loves adjectives, and especially compound adjectives. The sentences have weight, but it seems more like flab than muscle Our hero feels an urge to dive into the water, but isn't just any body of water—it's a "luminous, dragon-green, serpent-haunted sea." You get the idea.
Yet at his best moments, Ballard shows how these modifiers can work their magic, especially when he draws on metaphors and images that deliberately blur external and internal reality. When the first deranged character heads off for the south, we find him moving toward "the lost but forever beckoning and unattainable shores of the amnionic paradise." It's a bulky phrase, and (as often with Ballard) bordering on the rudely pretentious, but ultimately captivating us with its bravado and poetry. When the sky clears after a storm, it reveals to Kerans "an impassive blue, more the interior ceiling of some deep irrevocable psychosis than the storm-filled celestial sphere he had known during the previous days." When he spots clock towers in the London sky, Kerans sees them as "temple spires of some lost jungle religion," and he can't help comparing their broken-down measurement of scientifically-measured chronology with the "myriad-handed mandala of cosmic time" embedded in his brain.
This is Ballard at his most lyrical. Still heavy-handed—face it, nothing is done with a light touch in his books—and in-your-face, but with a mystical prose-as-poetry ambiguity that gives his books a different ambiance than you will find in other writers, especially authors of science fiction, where a slapdash aesthetic often predominates. If Ballard is a master at presenting nightmare scenarios in his novels, much of the victory is gained via descriptions of this sort, through his control of phrases and images that broach the barrier between private delusion and precise data.
It's hard to believe that this book is more than a half-century old. And I'm not talking about the global warming theme, which gives this book a superficial resemblance to various current-day volumes, fiction and non-fiction. It's Ballard writing style and worldview that refuse to mellow with the passing years. We expect things that are abrasive to soften over time. But Ballard's books still rub at us, often rubbing the wrong way, with just as much roughness as ever. The wonder of The Drowned World , perhaps preeminently among his books, is how beguiling he can make this journey into the abyss.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. His next book, Love Songs: The Hidden History , will be published by Oxford University Press.