My next Vintage SciFi Month offering was … interesting. Up until now I have loved the nature-takes-back-the-world trope in all its guises, so I was looking forward to reading The Drowned World, but while I enjoyed aspects of this novel, I found both the lack of plot and the lack of characterization difficult.
Both lacks seem intentional, however. After a “succession of gigantic geophysical upheavals which had transformed the Earth’s climate” the world is now a waterlogged hothouse and London, where Ballard centres his novel, is a sweltering maze of tropical lagoons predominantly occupied by giant mosquitoes, iguanas and water snakes, and incredible prehistoric plant-life. In an environment becoming less and less human-friendly, naturally such things as plot fall by the wayside. The main drive of the story seems to be simply that Robert Kerans, over whose shoulder we view this new world, accept the inevitable regression that is occurring both around and within him.
Which I guess is why the lack of characterization is equally appropriate. While we meet a handful of characters within these pages – most notably Beatrice, Doctor Bodkin, Hardman, Strangman and Colonel Riggs – they aren’t people we get to know well. When the world has literally gone to hell in a handcart and it’s so hot that just putting on a shirt is exhausting, getting to know someone hardly seems worth it, perhaps. Certainly, when life is stripped back to survival, individuality seems less important.
“However, I am convinced that as we move back through geophysical time so we re-enter the amnionic corridor and move back through spinal and archaeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch, each with a distinct geological terrain, its own unique flora and fauna, as recognisable to anyone else as they would be to a traveller in a Wellsian time machine.”
De-evolution and regression are the name of the game. As the world around them returns to a Triassic configuration, Doctor Bodkin theorizes that people will travel back down their genetic memories. Humanity’s recently learned social and domestic behaviours, relationships and ambitions will fall away and there will be “a total reorientation of the personality”. About half of the soldiers attached to the testing station in which biologists Kerans and Bodkin work are experiencing identical dreams – a dream we don’t get to ‘see’ until Kerans also experiences it – in which a giant sun pulses like a heartbeat above a nightmare lagoon writhing with life. The primordial soup, perhaps, with everything that makes us what we are broken back down into basic building blocks. The end, in effect.
So, what use is a plot, and what use individuals to identify with, when the world is coming to an end? The only real attempt Ballard makes at plot is to float out the freebooter Strangman and his crew (and two thousand attendant alligators?! Show-off!), but even this violent, crazed group don’t pose any real threat to our listless main characters. If anything, they seem to be there only to demonstrate the other option: let the veneer of civilization slip from your shoulders and go out bloodied.
Perhaps you’re now wondering why you should bother reading The Drowned World if it’s such a downer? Because, for all that the message is bleak, the writing, the imagery, is beautiful. Ballard was inspired by his childhood experiences in an internment camp in Shanghai when he imagined his flooded future world and perhaps that personal experience is what makes this setting so vividly realized. All I can say is that I loved it. The sun is dazzlingly, menacingly beautiful throughout; the buildings that still rise out of the lagoons swathed in creepers, moss and mould have the appeal of ancient ruins; and the gymnosperms and calamites that tower over everywhere else are otherworldly. Ballard’s future is alive with life, but near alien. A future that cannot be controlled or contained, only submitted to.
There is also a kind of mythic quality to this book that I can’t quite think how to explain. Ballard references Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, and Neptune and Minerva overtly, but that’s not what I mean. It’s more that some of the images feel familiar: Hardman’s leave-taking, seemingly walking directly into the sun; Kerans being crowned and tied to a throne by Strangman and his men; Strangman himself, weirdly pale when the sun has burnt everyone brown; Kerans finding Hardman again at the temple; they all feel like afterimages somewhere in the back of my brain. Or echoes, maybe.
To conclude: don’t read this if you’re looking for an exciting, pacey adventure or big, fleshed-out characters. Do read it if you’re interested in taking an odd, meditative journey South; if you enjoy immersive, descriptive language; or if you understand the need to step back from the world in order to figure out how you feel about a thing.
Extroverts need not apply.
Well, if you liked this Ballard, you’ll probably like most of his stuff…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Still not 100% sure I liked it. I like his writing style, but I really do like a lot more story in my stories. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you for your commentary on “The Drowned World”. A few years ago I came across an interesting cover illustration for this story by Brian Lewis: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?212797
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ooooo, I really like that illustration – it’s perfect! Thank you for sharing it. 🙂
LikeLike
Huh, I’ve only read Empire of the Sun, and this seems strangely similar, even if in totally different decorations 😉 Great review!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I get the feeling that Ballard was very deeply impressed by his childhood in Shanghai – maybe that’s why Empire and this one are weirdly similar?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I can’t imagine anyone not being impressed by such events – maybe every one of his books is somehow a retelling or recreation of this?
LikeLiked by 1 person
That will be an interesting question to answer. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ve looked for this in a bookshop just the day before yesterday, but to no avail.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I read this a long, long time ago (a few decades, certainly) and of course details have become hazy – or worse – but the lasting impression is that of a vividly described world that seems like an alien landscape despite being our own Earth, and the sense that the people are trespassers in this wildly changed world.
Since I don’t remember anything about the characters, once I encountered your definition of them as “listless” I think I understood why the background is now more memorable than they are…
Thanks for sharing! 😊
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think this is exactly what I will remember down the line – the description of a very different Earth is what really stands out, everything else is a bit meh.
Thank you for reading! 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
The only Ballard I’ve read is Crash and, while it was freaky and unsettling, I thought he was a brilliant writer and explored the human condition masterfully. This maybe sounds similar and I’d personally like to read more Ballard. Really enjoyed this review.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah, I really like his writing style, although I’m not sure I really liked this one. It was … evocative, for sure.
I have his The Crystal World on the shelf, so I will definitely read at least one other thing by him. 😀
LikeLiked by 1 person
I can do “exciting, pacey adventure or big, fleshed-out characters” but I also like slow, meditative, challenging, even philosophical novels that require a different kind of engagement. Somewhere I’ve got a Ballard, though not this one, one far too long on my shelf—trouble is we seem to be well on our way to a kind of dystopia and I’d prefer to read about one rather than live through it. We’ll see!
LikeLike
You may have read through the lines and still not realised I enjoyed this review but, if not, I did!
LikeLike
[…] Vintage Science Fiction reviews posted in a short period of time, she recently posted reviews of The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard and The Airs of Earth by Brian […]
LikeLike
LOL, I loved the last sentence of your review. 😀
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you. 😉
LikeLike
Like!! Great article post.Really thank you! Really Cool.
LikeLike
[…] The Drowned World by J G Ballard […]
LikeLiked by 1 person
[…] only last year when I was looking for some older cover art for J G Ballard’s The Drowned World (one of my reads for 2020’s Vintage Science Fiction Month). He is, I’ve since learned, one of the best known American sci-fi cover artists of the Fifties, […]
LikeLiked by 1 person
[…] reading The Drowned World for Vintage SciFi Month last year I knew that I wanted to read something more of Ballard’s work. Maybe not a lot more, but some. […]
LikeLiked by 1 person
[…] is another one of Ballard’s four ‘disaster’ novels, of which I have now read three. The Drowned World imagined the melting of the polar icecaps and a flooded, tropically hot London. The Crystal World […]
LikeLiked by 1 person
[…] The Drowned World by J G Ballard (1962) […]
LikeLiked by 1 person