Ballardian

OPENING LINE:
“Above all, the darkness of the river was what impressed Dr. Sanders as he looked out for the first time across the open mouth of the Matarre estuary.”

Ballard’s fourth novel. My 1993 Flamingo version has quotes on the back:

Through a ‘leaking’ of time and a supersaturation of matter, a forest area in West Africa is gradually becoming crystallised: leaves flash like gemstones, crocodiles with a second armour thrash in the stiffening streams, men who don’t keep moving are frosted over, encrusted, and fused to the ground … Brilliantly imagined, dark, brooding, convincing and powerful.”
New Statesman.

A haunting vision of diseased beauty … Ballard sustains it with extraordinary density. The purpose of the action is to show the characters gradually succumbing to the environment; and such if the force of the imagery – a blind python with enormous jewelled eyes, a prty of lepers dancing into the virtrified forest – that one can share their view of it as an ancestral paradise.”Observer.

Strange Words again:

The Crystal World is a very challenging book. Clearly, the Ballardian obsession with time is a central issue, as is the perverse love for disease found in some of his tales. This strange Heart of Darkness is set in a landscape without time, where it is possible for Sanders to “free the questions of motive and identity that were bound up with his sense of time and the past”. Indeed, the woman he has come to save is a former lover, now ravaged with leprosy. In a colonial end-of-the-road town, next to a river like a snake, etc., Ballard contrasts time with a strange and beautiful anti-time.
…
This is a book to be read many times. The madness in Ballard’s visions is disturbing, but puts the light to a darker side of sanity in his meditations on time and existence. His is a search for, if not the silver lining in the cloud of Apocalypse, at least the light of knowledge, and a view of the end as a doorway to New Things and Times. Things happen, then come to a hinge of crisis, a paroxysm of madness, and the world, destroyed in fire, rises again. And again.”

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

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