Thought provoking
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I much preferred this to The Drought - the settings turn out to be more familiar and the characters seemed somewhat easier to relate to (though likeable would be going too far). The central idea of regression to thought patterns displayed millions of years ago by earlier life forms is a fascinating and quite sobering one.
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Haunting novel, not entirely successful as either science fiction or serious literature
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The setting of this novel - a flooded, tropical London of the future - made me seek it out. However, despite being prepared to read a book that was not a fast-paced adventure (this is Ballard, after all), I was disappointed by the muffled stuffiness of the prose. I have heard it described as 'controlled' but this is really is too complimentary. I was similarly disappointed on reading Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle (strangely, published in the same year, 1962). In that novel too the author takes a great 'sci-fi' concept but his treatment of it is likewise oddly dull and blunted.
The opening follows the conventions of hard sci-fi, explaining scientifically how the world got to be in this state. However, right from this plain facts opening the novel is muddled. The explanation lacks clarity and doesn't make sense. We are told that the melting of the polar ice caps would only raise global sea levels by a few feet, yet London is 20-30 feet underwater. There is some explanation of this involving 'silt', but this is not clear. Even when describing events, Ballard fails to clearly demarcate the geographical space in which his characters live. Mention of a 'shoreline' just doesn't make sense.
The central character, Kerans, and his two friends decide not to resist change and live in the relatively cooler poles with the rest of the survivors of humanity, and choose instead to try and adapt to the new conditions, as the planet's other life forms have. However, if London is only 20 feet underwater, there must be lots of places that are above the sea level, even in southern Britain. Why don't Kerans and co. settle in some of these places instead of a filthy water world where they have to get around by boat and are constantly threatened by mutating marine creatures?
As well as these problems, the novel also suffers from some confused writing, for example using "apart from" instead of "including" in one place. This completely muddles the meaning of the prose and is, I think, a mistake. I had trouble working out clearly what was going on in plenty more passages, and I suspect that similar occurrences are answerable for it. Other details are ludicrous. Strangman and his pet crocodiles and alligators, for a start. I can't believe Ballard put them in here.
However, the novel does have its strengths. The hallucinatory descriptions of the physical reality, mirroring the internal consciousness of the characters, is done very evocatively and, I think, memorably. The study of the effects on the human consciousness the return of a pre-historic phase in the planet's climate would have is novel. Time has been effectively turned back and this awakens all sorts of long-dormant genetic memories in the characters. This is all very interesting, but not developed as fully as it could be.
The ending, however, is much better than the beginning, and it does consolidate a lot of what's gone before. We are left with the haunting spectre of a new epoch literally superimposing itself on our own age, as floodwaters and huge banks of silt overlay city streets and the former outlines of the continents. Humanity, no longer suitable to the new conditions, is dying out, being replaced once more by reptiles and amphibeans. The book shows how precarious all that we take for granted is. That it can be swept away as easily as the swatting of a fly.
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Drowned world - the illustrated novel.
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In a series of 36 stunningly beautiful watercolours - some double spreads - Dick French (born 1946) manages to perfectly evoke the claustrophobic hothouse atmosphere of Ballard's novel.
The flyleaf to this larger than A4 sized edition reads:
'The sun has gone mad and stripped the earth of its ionosphere. For decades blasting radiation has poured upon earth, melting the polar caps and turning permafrost into streams, rivers, oceans. Huge deltas have been built, lakes formed, seas have risen. The continents have been entirely altered. Jungles have crept and then rushed from the equator to Greenland. Siberia is a tropical nightmare. Mosquitoes the size of dragonflies carry horrendous new malarias. Mammals are on their way out and iguanas have grown as large as horses. Ferns and clubmosses smother those parts of ancient cities - New York, Berlin, Moscow, Peking- that are not drowned and offering steaming shelter to gigantic alligators and other saurians. As for humanity, well, there are only 5 million men and women left, living in the sub-tropical confinement of the Arctic and Antarctic circles.
It is as if history were rolled backward, as if the Triassic Age were here again. Man's science is useless against the solar furnace. And man's mind? Is that also slipping backward, far backward, to before the apes, to before the mammals, to the Triassic terror itself.
This novel- written in lucid, convincing, matter-of-fact prose - is both fierce and unsensational. It has a compelling authority which grips the reader at once and keeps him in its power long after the book is read. This is an unforgettable work.'
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I'm not quite sure what Ballard is doing, but it's a lot of fun trying to figure it out
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Plenty of superlatives have been thrown around to describe Ballard. In order to avoid that, my opening gambit will be a quote by Christopher Priest. "I'm not quite sure what Ballard is doing, but it's a lot of fun trying to figure it out."
If you want a summary of the plot read the other reviews, my intention here is just to note the pleasure and excitement of reading this book. In the novel, Ballard's obvious intention is to explore what we can do with the genre normally referred to as sci-fi. In a traditionally British way he decides not to make everything as big as possible but instead reduces the elements of the catastrophe to the psychology at play.
As you would expect from any Ballard book there's a twisted longing to become the centre of the catastrophe and an uncomfortable thrill in enjoying the world going to hell.
The Chapter 'A NEW PSCHOLOGY' is almost a manifesto in itself with regards to how Ballard would go on to create a whole new take on what H.G. Wells called scientific romance. The novel covers biological manipulation, time travel, ecological disaster and all in ways so original that it makes the mind whirl. It's dream like in so many ways, but most interestingly in that 'it seemed logical in the dream but now...' feeling so common when trying to relate your inner mental journeys to someone else.
This is the first book by Ballard that I have read an actually got the whole 'Ballard is a genius' thing. The prose is controlled and effective and after I had finished i went back to re-read some chapters again, just for the hell of it.
Strongly recommended.
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Planet Sauna
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The world is heating up as a result of solar instability. Ice caps have melted and oceans have risen, flooding low-lying areas. Once temperate zones remaining above sea level have become areas of lush, tropical jungle. Surviving populations have had to migrate to the cooler, polar regions. A party of soldier and scientist representatives of these exiled people, have travelled down from the north to study the new flora and fauna that is mutating and evolving rapidly back towards ancient Triassic forms. Some members of the party start to have disturbing dreams of belonging to a hotter, wetter climate and feel drawn in the direction of the equator by some sort of ancestral memory of living in a primeval swamp. The bloated sun and steaming jungle start to feel like a fond memory of the womb to those who are most susceptible and the hypnotic pull of it dominates even their waking hours.
Some reviewers have complained that this is not proper science fiction, not hard science fiction, not fast-paced, not plot-driven. Ballard places it in an area on the fringe of science fiction that he calls `speculative fantasy' - an area where `dream and reality become fused together'. When I started the book I hoped it might be something like John Wyndham's `The Kraken Wakes', but it's different in almost every way, apart from the flooding. There's no enemy to defeat in order to re-establish normality. There are no solutions to the problem, other than avoidance in the shrinking cool zone. A few individuals are making mental adjustments to the catastrophic climate change that seem superficially like a sort of Lamarckian evolutionary adaptation, but the chances of their survival, in isolation, in the crocodile populated swamp areas look doubtful. The reader has to adopt a fantastic amount of suspension of disbelief to swallow the notion of race memory and reverse evolution. Even so, I sank into the story and festered happily away in its swamps and lagoons right from the start and was reluctant to slurp out of it at the end. Ballard's descriptions are, to use one of his own descriptions, like a fata Morgana: shimmering and evocative.
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