The Drowned World by JG Ballard – archive, 27 January 1963
In the third of a new series of reviews from the Observer archive, Kingsley Amis hails the second novel by the brilliantly imaginative science-fiction author
Top 10 books of eco-fiction
Kingsley Amis
Sunday 15 February 2019
James Graham Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 and spent two years of his childhood in a Japanese prison camp during the second world war. The devastated city was the setting for several of his books, notably Empire of the Sun. The Drowned World, his second novel, established him as a major figure in the new wave of science fiction in the 1960s.
In JG Ballard’s new book we have something without precedent in this country – a novel by a science-fiction author that can be judged by the highest standards. To my knowledge, this level has as yet been attained by only two American writers, Algis Budrys and Walter M Miller. Mr Ballard may turn out to be the most imaginative of [HG] Wells’s successors, although he has expressly repudiated Wells as an influence.
The setting is among the super-tropical swamps, lagoons and jungles that, as a result of an increase in the sun’s heat, now cover most of Earth’s surfaces. Plant and animal life is reverting to the giant bamboos and reptiles of the Triassic age. Among the members of a survey team, sent south from Greenland to determine whether parts of Europe may some day be reclaimable, a parallel but far more complex and disturbing regression can be glimpsed.
Those so affected share a recurrent dream in which they appear to be reversing the process of their birth, losing their identity in a warm sea that is at once the uterino fluid and the primeval ocean from which life emerged. In their waking hours they withdraw more and more irrevocably into the “consciousness of their remote biological past”, and the book ends with the hero’s departure on a lone trek southward towards some kind of paradisal graveyard of the species.
There is plenty of drama, notably after the arrival of a diabolical free-booter, bone-white in a world of darkened skins, whose ship is crammed with salvaged altar-pieces and equestrian statues and whose entourage consists of a band of negroes and a pack of alligators. By his agency the main lagoon is drained and a paranoid Walpurgisnacht enacted among the slime-coated buildings of what proves to be Leicester Square. But the main action is in the deeper reaches of the mind, the main merit the extraordinary imaginative power with which whatever inhabits these reaches is externalised in concrete form. The book blazes with images, striking and continuously meaningful.
There are perhaps faults of luxuriance, the similes, though often marvellously appropriate, sometimes crowd too thickly, and the author sees fit here and there to tell us that such and such is strange while amply demonstrating its strangeness. But he triumphantly achieves his object of exploring “inner space”. His emblem is a metaphorical diving suit, as against the literal spacesuit of most of his contemporaries.
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