JG Ballard - The Drowned World
A few thoughts on The Drowned World.
What surprised me most was how much of an 'adventure story' it was, rather than the psychological horror I was expecting. It's essentially a Pirate story with an extremely strange backdrop. While there are gun-battles, looting and desert islands, they mostly take place in and around a flooded London that gets temporarily drained during the course of the story. The backdrop is a world where solar activity have heated the planet and turned it back to a prehistoric state. Giant iguanas, bats and alligators are the most successful species, dominating the planet while mankind is confined to the poles.
Robert Kerans is the main character, part of a small scientific team in tropical London who are monitoring the changes. Early on it is explained that the change of climate is reverting their minds to a primordial state, the effects of which Kerans experiences first hand. He is unwilling to abandon London when the military pull the science team out. He stays behind with Beatrice Dahl and Dr Bodkin.
Beatrice is the most under-developed character in the novel. She is nothing more than an object of desire, lithe and beautiful. She takes no decisions of her own and has little impact on the other characters. Yet she is always there in Kerans' mind. His fantasy is to head south to Paradise, to become Adam and Eve. But it's a doomed fantasy, the temperatures further south are intolerable. At the end of the novel Kerans comes across Hardman, a previous runaway. Hardman is in a wretched state, his legs are blackened, his eyes are burnt and he can barely walk. That is the future that Kerans is heading towards.
Ballard appears to have had a Classical Education. There are unexplained references to Xerxes and The Pool of Thanatos, which are fine if you know what they are but terribly boring if you don't. Of course, you're then supposed to go and find out. The sentence structure is generally cumbersome and there is a deluge of metaphors throughout. It gives the writing an oppressive density that reflects the heavy climate of the tropics, but also makes it hard to wade through.
Naturally, there's some fabulous imagery. Strangman's hydroplane being preceded by a flotilla of alligators; the visit to the submerged Planetarium, it's ceiling cracked to make impossible new constellations; and the humiliation of Kerans, strapped to a throne and the decapitated head of an alligator placed over his own head.
It's a searing novel, but I wasn't that enamoured of it. There's a lot there to come back to, but then that's balanced against the fighting and nick-of-time rescues.
What surprised me most was how much of an 'adventure story' it was, rather than the psychological horror I was expecting. It's essentially a Pirate story with an extremely strange backdrop. While there are gun-battles, looting and desert islands, they mostly take place in and around a flooded London that gets temporarily drained during the course of the story. The backdrop is a world where solar activity have heated the planet and turned it back to a prehistoric state. Giant iguanas, bats and alligators are the most successful species, dominating the planet while mankind is confined to the poles.
Robert Kerans is the main character, part of a small scientific team in tropical London who are monitoring the changes. Early on it is explained that the change of climate is reverting their minds to a primordial state, the effects of which Kerans experiences first hand. He is unwilling to abandon London when the military pull the science team out. He stays behind with Beatrice Dahl and Dr Bodkin.
Beatrice is the most under-developed character in the novel. She is nothing more than an object of desire, lithe and beautiful. She takes no decisions of her own and has little impact on the other characters. Yet she is always there in Kerans' mind. His fantasy is to head south to Paradise, to become Adam and Eve. But it's a doomed fantasy, the temperatures further south are intolerable. At the end of the novel Kerans comes across Hardman, a previous runaway. Hardman is in a wretched state, his legs are blackened, his eyes are burnt and he can barely walk. That is the future that Kerans is heading towards.
Ballard appears to have had a Classical Education. There are unexplained references to Xerxes and The Pool of Thanatos, which are fine if you know what they are but terribly boring if you don't. Of course, you're then supposed to go and find out. The sentence structure is generally cumbersome and there is a deluge of metaphors throughout. It gives the writing an oppressive density that reflects the heavy climate of the tropics, but also makes it hard to wade through.
Naturally, there's some fabulous imagery. Strangman's hydroplane being preceded by a flotilla of alligators; the visit to the submerged Planetarium, it's ceiling cracked to make impossible new constellations; and the humiliation of Kerans, strapped to a throne and the decapitated head of an alligator placed over his own head.
It's a searing novel, but I wasn't that enamoured of it. There's a lot there to come back to, but then that's balanced against the fighting and nick-of-time rescues.