The cult
fiction writer J.G. Ballard has written some excellent novels. The
Drowned World, however, is not
one of his best. It does
have some good ideas and if you have enough imagination to be able to
see where he was coming from in 1962, there are still some reasons
why this book can be worth reading once.
The Drowned
World is the second book in a
series about ecological apocalypse written by Ballard at the
beginning of his career. The action centers around the biologist
Kerans
and his two partners Beatrice and the psychiatrist Bodkin. They do
research and live on a lagoon that used to be a neighborhood in
London. Due to unusual solar flares, the global
temperature has risen dramatically, the polar ice caps have melted,
and the world is covered in water or uninhabitable land. The only
parts of the planet that are not too hot or dangerous for human
society
is on Antarctica and the Arctic tundra. Most mammals have died off
and the only animals left living are giant alligators, iguanas, bats,
insects, a few fish, some
birds and humans. All the
world’s cities have sunk under water and silt; only the tops of the
tallest buildings can be seen popping up at random intervals from the
surface of the water.
As
Bodkin explains, the human psyche has begun to regress to the
pre-human Triassic period in an effort to re-orient to the changing
conditions of the environment. This causes people to have dreams
involving drumbeats that synchronize with solar flares, visions of
fire, and the frightening croaking and screaming of mammoth-sized
reptiles.
Kerans
and his two companion scientists stay behind at the lagoon after the
military leaves; they have chosen to abandon
modern civilization and reintegrate with the new stage of geological
change. But while they remain isolated there, a band of pirates led
by an adventurer and collector of abandoned art named Strangman
arrives. He drains the lagoon and the pirates terrorize the three
remaining people. The military, who
return later, represents the
order and rationality
of human civilization and Strangman with his crew represent the
Dionysian and chaotic side of social entropy. This is a little
cliché, isn’t it? The
psychoanalytic structure is a little too transparent.
Anyways both sides, in the end, depend on each other and the more
enlightened scientists end up rejecting both of them. (No spoiler in
this review; read the book for yourself)
There
are a lot of problems with The Drowned World. The
narrative gets off to an extremely slow start. The language and
situations are boring and it takes a lot of effort to get through to
the more exciting plot twists
that come in the second half. The language is labored and Ballard,
being a young writer at the time, seemed to have been too calculating
and overly cautious in his choice of wording as if he preferred
moving too slow to avoid making and mistakes. This seriously inhibits
the pacing of the book. On a
related note, the water-thin plot (yes, that was intended) does not
hold the writing together well. It is possible that Ballard tried to
spread a short story out into the length of a short novel
and the result is a long series of passages that do not really amount
to much.
Another
fault
of The Drowned World is
that J.G. Ballard seemed to be conflicted
about how to write it. Originally he intended to develop himself as a
writer of surrealist fiction. The publishing industry did not think
there was a market for such a
thing so Ballard compromised
by adopting science fiction as a genre. (Ironically,
this happened shortly before the psychedelic generation of the late
1960s came about and by then Ballard had moved on to more harsh and
violent subject matters) This
may have led to some holes in the story; the biologists Kerans and
Beatrice do very little scientific work in the book and the
psychiatrist Bodkin explains what their dreams mean
but any character could just have easily done so without being a
psychiatrist. If the government was abandoning the lagoon, why would
they need scientists to study it anyways? The
scientific parts of the narrative seem arbitrary and forced. This
pigeonholing of Ballard’s themes into the science fiction genre
might
have caused some distress to a young writer who authored
books about liberation from modern society and this shows in the way
the story moves along like a car with the emergency brake on.
What
is significant about The Drowned World is
that it introduces some themes that would reach full fruition in
Ballard’s later works. One is psycho-geography; The landscapes and
city-scapes that his characters inhabit are outward representations
of the inner lives of their minds. If Ballard’s modern world is a
wreck that is because its inhabitants have not been able to
successfully adapt psychologically to their environment. When society
implodes it is because there is nothing else for an alienated person
to do but act out psychotic fantasies and obsessions, regress to a
more impulsive stage of development, or indulge in antisocial
and reptilian-brained acts
of sex and violence. The idea of the refuge, haven, or oasis, be they
a physical location or a behavioral act, is a common theme that runs
through many of Ballard’s books like Concrete Island, The
Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, and
Empire Of the Sun. In
The Drowned World, the
refuge is the water, the swamps, and the jungle that Kerans wishes to
integrate with in order to save himself from the stupidities of the
technological age.
This
novel is a significant read for die-hard J.G. Ballard fans who want
to trace the development of his writing trajectory. It is a
germinating point for the seeds that would grow to become the best
works of his later career. It probably will never be regarded as
classic fiction but for a certain set of people it is worth a read.
Ballard, J.G. The Drowned World. Berkeley Publishing Corp: New York, 1966
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