The Crystal World

By J. G. Ballard

The Crystal World, J. G. Ballard's fourth novel, which established his reputation as a writer of extraordinary talent and imaginative powers, tells the story of a physician specializing in the treatment of leprosy who is invited to a small outpost in the interior of Africa. Finding the roadways blocked, he takes to the river, and embarks on a frightening journey through a strange petrified forest whose area expands daily, affecting not only the physical environment but also its inhabitants.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jul 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781466856639

J. G. Ballard

J.G. Ballard (1930–2009) was the author of numerous books, including Concrete Island, The Kindness of Women, and Crash. He is revered as one of the most important writers of fiction to address the consequences of twentieth-century technology. 

Book preview

introduction

by robert macfarlane

In his second novel J. G. Ballard drowned the Earth, in his third he burned it, and in his fourth he turned it to crystal. Between 1962 and 1966 he ruined the world three times—though he later made it clear that these works were not to be understood as disaster stories, but as transformation stories. The geophysical changes that take place [in them], he said in 1975, are all positive and good.

Ballard is not always to be trusted as his own best interpreter, nor do any of his extraordinary novels succumb to single readings, but it is true that one ends The Crystal World exhilarated by what has been witnessed. It is in two senses a dazzling work, which leaves the mind’s eye scorched into strangeness. Deep in the central African jungle, time itself has begun to leak away, and the consequence of this temporal depletion is a super-saturation of space. Anything present within the zone of leakage begins to crystalize: to re-iterate itself as pure structure. Orchids and ferns encase themselves in intricately outgrowing replicas. Water hardens into a white and glowing ice. Crocodiles acquire new skins of glassy silver scales.

Downstream of the zone, a man called Sanders arrives at a remote town called Port Matarre just before the equinox. He believes himself to be searching for his former lover, Suzanne, who is working at a leper clinic fifty miles further into the jungle. Self-analyzing but also self-deluding, strongly driven but curiously aimless, Sanders is an early version of a character-type that will recur throughout Ballard’s fiction. In Matarre an odd gaggle of other visitors gathers: Ventress, white-suited and hyperactive; Balthus, a black-frocked Jesuit priest, and Louise, a French journalist looking for a lost colleague and a scoop. All are drawn, for opaque reasons, deeper into the jungle and closer to the zone. What follows is a kind of Baroquealypse Now, a river journey into the heart of lightness. All of the main characters eventually reach the ornate crystalline dream-forest of the focal area, where gem-eyed pythons slither past, and the bodies of men lie embalmed in diamond armor.

It is the central paradox of catastrophe fiction that to destroy the world you must first summon it into being. The Crystal World is surely Ballard’s most gorgeous calamity: apocalypse not as abolition but as transfiguration. The prose of the jungle scenes glitters with a dark and elaborate beauty, which feels far from the chrome-sleek sentences of Crash, published seven years later. This is a Byzantine Ballard, relishing the prismatic intricacies of the jeweled twilight world he has conjured. The crossing of the glacial river back to Mont Royal, the hunts through the radiant perils of the forest, the siege scene at Thorensen’s mansion, the fate of Radek: to me these are among the most brilliant episodes of all Ballard’s fiction. They lustre on in the memory.

The jacket-image of The Crystal World’s first edition was a detail from Max Ernst’s vast surrealist painting, The Eye of Silence, completed in early 1944 after Ernst had twice escaped internment in France. It depicts what appear to be the remnants of a city, over whose ruins—and inhabitants—vegetation has tanglingly grown. The result is a mossy ossuary, in which humanoid figures are undergoing metamorphoses into hybrid bird-men and tree-beings. We know Ballard to have been an admirer of Ernst, whom he described in 1963 as an iconographer of inner space. Indeed, one of Ernst’s paintings appears in The Drowned World (1962): on the wall of an abandoned apartment, the canvas of one of Max Ernst’s self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles screamed silently to itself. Ernst influenced Ballard—and Ballard in turn would influence the work of Japanese anime directors, especially Hayao Miyazaki and his followers at Studio Ghibli, whose films are often set in futures in which forests (sometimes toxic, sometimes benign) have re-colonized humanity’s ruins.

The trope at the heart of the Baroque is repetition; repetition is also the trope at the heart of Ballard. It occurs across his oeuvre, and one of the first challenges of reading him is to understand that this repetition is strategic rather than careless. It operates as what he once called a second language, existing upon the surface of the narrative as a kind of code, or as signposts (his metaphor) that give access to depths. In The Crystal World, repetition—also the first principle of crystallography—juts out in the form of image, and is internalised as the novel’s grammar. The first crystalized object that Sanders sees is an orchid whose mineral metamorphosis has resulted in a dozen [refracted] images … one upon the other, as if seen through a maze of prisms. Things repeat themselves—and then things repeat each other. In the zone, all objects are self-similar because all are vitrified. It is, reflects Sanders, a place of rainbows [where] nothing is distinguished from anything else.

Ballard’s language performs its own version of this indistinction by means of simile, which proliferates from the opening page. A profusion of as ifs and likes function as the crystalization does, bringing all things into mutual resemblance. This surplus of sameness also expresses itself in the characters who begin, weirdly, to repeat activities and phrases, and to pair off in twinned versions of each other. And at the novel’s end (though I must not reveal too much) an act of perfect repetition on Sanders’s part returns us to a much earlier point in the book—thus leaving The Crystal World encased in its own maze of prisms.

In a 1961 essay Iris Murdoch separated twentieth-century novels into two types: the journalistic and the crystalline. The journalistic was sprawling, inclusive, and documentary, a degenerate descendant of the 19th-century novel. The crystalline novel, by contrast, was a small quasi-allegorical object that did not contain characters in the 19th-century sense. Certainly, The Crystal World is crystalline in Murdoch’s definition of the term. But what is the nature of its quasi-allegory? What do the crystals mean?

They mean many things, of course. At one point in the novel, Sanders considers the physics of gem-stone cutting, whereby faceting and polishing serves to gather and ricochet light, such that jewels appear to occupy more than their own volume of space. Ballard’s novel possesses similar properties: it is radiant and repetitive with meanings. It is possible, for instance, to read the crystals as a manifestation of capital: a fiscal rather than a physical precipitation, whereby all things are rendered fungible. The time-leak starts close to a French-run diamond mine, where the earth is being plundered for profit. The military investigation into the phenomenon is triggered not because of the danger to local people, but because it has destabilized the global diamond markets. Or perhaps the crystalization represents mediation, the endless image-making of modernity, and the consequent retreat of the real and death of affect that so inspired mid-period Ballard. A hint is dropped in support of this reading when Sanders seeks a comparison for the zone’s luminosity, and thinks that it is as if the whole scene were being reproduced by some over-active Technicolor process. And—risky as biographical interpretations always are—it is hard not to connect the novel with the sudden death from pneumonia in 1964 of Ballard’s wife, Mary, two years before the publication of The Crystal World. Thus, perhaps, the presence of Serena, who lies in the jungle, fatally stricken with tuberculosis yet sustained by her progressive crystalization, as two grieving men circle obsessively about her.

Unmistakably, the novel also expresses Ballard’s career-long fascination with the annihilation of time. Again and again, he wrote in opposition to meliorist narratives of progress and development, preferring to represent human experience as a succession of instants and episodes: shards and planes, rather than smooth-flowing rivers. As such, he was drawn to devise situations in which the dimension of time contracted, and that of space dilated. Thus the archaeo-psychic deep time of The Drowned World (1962), which can be dived down into; or the memory erasures that occur on the arid plains of The Drought (1964); or Sanders’s rapturous conversion into an apostle of the prismatic sun, surrendered of his identity and occupying the pure space of the zone, in which environment he can—as Walter Pater put it in praise of momentariness in 1873—burn with a hard and gem-like flame.

The Crystal World has never been filmed. It has been optioned more than once, but never shot. It is easy to imagine the allure of the novel to directors—and the problems it would pose. This is a novel so intensely visual that it would overwhelm the medium of film. The closest realization of Ballard’s vision occurred in 2008, when the British artist Roger Hiorns created a work called Seizure. Hiorns arranged for 75,000 liters of copper sulfate solution to be pumped into an abandoned and stripped-out council flat in a low-rise housing development in London’s Elephant and Castle. As the solution cooled, precipitation occurred, until every surface of the flat was jagged with blue crystals. The result was a spiky modernist super-mold, a freeze-frame of decay, and a space to set the scalp prickling. Like Ballard’s novel, Hiorns’s sculpture allowed no easy reading and no soft voyeurism. The seizure of the work’s title invokes a physical spasm, but also seizure in the sense of foreclosure and repossession (the work appeared within months of the 2007 financial crisis, such that it seemed as if debt itself were the cause of the crystals). I wish I had been able to get down to London in time to enter the room of Seizure. Stepping into it would have been some version of entering Ballard’s bedizened jungle; the experience of both is sharply terrifying, conceptually prickly, and utterly bewitching.

Cambridge, 2014

i.

equinox

the dark river

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. After many delays, the small passenger steamer was at last approaching the line of jetties, but although it was ten o’clock the surface of the water was still gray and sluggish, leaching away the somber tinctures of the collapsing vegetation along the banks.

At intervals, when the sky was overcast, the water was almost black, like putrescent dye. By contrast, the straggle of warehouses and small hotels that constituted Port Matarre gleamed across the dark swells with a spectral brightness, as if lit less by solar light than by some interior lantern, like the pavilions of an abandoned necropolis built out on a series of piers from the edges of the jungle.

This pervading auroral gloom, broken by sudden inward shifts of light, Dr. Sanders had noticed during his long wait at the rail of the passenger deck. For two hours the steamer had sat out in the center of the estuary, now and then blowing its whistle at the shore in a half-hearted way. But for the vague sense of uncertainty induced by the darkness over the river, the few passengers would have been driven mad with annoyance. Apart from a French military landing craft, there seemed to be no other vessels of any size berthed along the jetties. As he watched the shore, Dr. Sanders was almost certain that the steamer was being deliberately held off, though the reason was hard to see. The steamer was the regular packet boat from Libreville, with its weekly cargo of mail, brandy and automobile spare parts, not to be postponed for more than a moment by anything less than an outbreak of the plague.

Politically, this isolated corner of the Cameroon Republic was still recovering from an abortive coup ten years earlier, when a handful of rebels had seized the emerald and diamond mines at Mont Royal, fifty miles up the Matarre River. Despite the presence of the landing craft—a French military mission supervised the training of the local troops—life in the nondescript port at the river mouth seemed entirely normal. Watched by a group of children, a jeep was at that moment being unloaded. People wandered along the wharves and through the arcades in the main street, and a few outriggers loaded with jars of crude palm oil drifted past on the dark water toward the native market to the west of the port.

Nevertheless, the sense of unease persisted. Puzzled by the dim light, Dr. Sanders turned his attention to the inshore areas, following the river as it made a slow clockwise turn to the southeast. Here and there a break in the forest canopy marked the progress of a road, but otherwise the jungle stretched in a flat olive-green mantle toward the inland hills. Usually the forest roof would have been bleached to a pale yellow by the sun, but even five miles inland Dr. Sanders could see the dark green arbors towering into the dull air like immense cypresses, somber and motionless, touched only by faint gleams of light.

Someone drummed impatiently at the rail, sending a stir down its length, and the half-dozen passengers on either side of Dr. Sanders shuffled and muttered to one another, glancing up at the wheelhouse, where the captain gazed absently at the jetty, apparently unperturbed by the delay.

Dr. Sanders turned to Father Balthus, who was standing a few feet away on his left. The light—have you noticed it? Is there an eclipse expected? The sun seems unable to make up its mind.

The priest was smoking steadily, his long fingers drawing the cigarette half an inch from his mouth after each inhalation. Like Sanders, he was gazing, not at the harbor, but at the forest slopes far inland. In the dull light his thin scholar’s face seemed tired and fleshless. During the three-day journey from Libreville he had kept to himself, evidently distracted by some private matter, and only began to talk to his table companion when he learned of Dr. Sanders’s post at the Fort Isabelle leper hospital. Sanders gathered that he was returning to his parish at Mont Royal after a sabbatical month, but there seemed something a little too plausible about this explanation, which he repeated several times in the same automatic phrasing, unlike his usual hesitant stutter. However, Sanders was well aware of the dangers of imputing his own ambiguous motives for coming to Port Matarre to those around him.

Even so, at first Dr. Sanders had suspected that Father Balthus might not be a priest at all. The self-immersed eyes and pale neurasthenic hands bore all the signatures of the impostor, perhaps an expelled novice still hoping to find some kind of salvation within a borrowed soutane. However, Father Balthus was entirely genuine, whatever that term meant and whatever its limits. The first officer, the steward and several of the passengers recognized him, complimented him on his return and generally seemed to accept his isolated manner.

An eclipse? Father Balthus flicked his cigarette stub into the dark water below. The steamer was now overrunning its own wake, and the veins of foam sank down through the deeps like threads of luminous spittle. "I think not, Doctor. Surely the maximum duration would be eight

Reviews for The Crystal World

[unclebob53703 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This review from PeterCrump exactly captures how I feel about this book--and he rated it the same as me. "A novel of imagery and metaphor rather than story or character. Ballard is on top hallucinogenic form, his somewhat passive protagonists adrift in an African jungle crystallizing mysteriously around them. The Ballard leitmotifs of entropy and decay are starkly present, but it's the feverish fecundity of the crystal world that takes centre-stage with its arresting images of psychedelic mineral-animal-human hybrids."

[bmdenny · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

boring amd hard to get through.

[katesherrod · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Flawed as this short little novel is, I weep that our ideal time for a cinematic adaptation of it is past, for I can think of no team who could do it justice as Peter Greenaway and Sacha Vierney could have, and they don't work together anymore. But their mastery of light in cinema, especially as demonstrated in Drowning By Numbers and A Zed and Two Noughts, could alone bring Ballard's exquisite vision to the screen.

And there, I would love to see it. And Greenaway could maybe pep up the story a little.

I mention this because the play of light on the surfaces of the slowly (and sometimes not-so-slowly) transforming surfaces of the jungles in The Crystal World is very, very important. Very. Description of same makes up the bulk of its verbiage. Ballard, perhaps mesmerized by the very idea of his creation, took great pains to share its every sparkly, shiny, spiny detail. As such, there is some seriously gorgeous prose to be had in this book, and thus much enjoyment, if that is your thing.

It's possibly the first book ever for which one wishes one had sunglasses for one's mind's eye.

Dazzling as the book is -- and not just visually; the scientific explanation for how and why this is happening, involving theories about sub-atomic particles and space-time that I do not feel adequate to explaining here, is also quite dazzling -- it's also one of the most melancholy reads I've encountered since, say The Road. For there are some people, including a band of lepers led by the protagonist's ex-lover, want to be crystallized. To be crystallized is to have time, and thus the progress of the disease, stop; to be alive but to cease decaying. The fact that nothing else will ever happen to them again is just by the bye. Like the characters of Ballard's The Drowned World, most of this novel's cast comprises people half in love with death, or at least with the destruction of the human world and the seductive chance it offers them to be something else.

Combine this with yet another Conradian quest (Ballard must have had an even bigger boner for Conrad than your humble reviewer does), up an African river, seeking a long-lost companion who has gone nuts in the jungle, and you almost have a really great novel. But somehow, perhaps its the extreme disinterest Ballard, and thus this reader, has in the characters peopling his frosty landscapes, perhaps it's just the depressing nature of all of this beauty, paging through this slim little novel felt like more of a chore than a delight. I'd still recommend it to anyone who values imagination and perfect prose, but with the caveat that such joys come with a price, and in this case, it's story. Ah, me.

[g33kgrrl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A lyrical, descriptive story about a changed world and the people who are drawn to it. A study of character and thoughtfulness.Probably not recommended to be read in pieces on public transit.

[malrubius · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Stumbled across this after remembering that I enjoyed the Drowned World many years ago. This is excellent also, Great, flawed characters, vivid setting, excellent writing. Fast, fun, and thought-provoking.

[leischen_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Nicely done science fiction disater novel. A mysterious force is causing the world to be covered in crystal. Plants, inanimate objects, animals, men-- all being encased in a crystalline subject. Ballard's prose conveys the beauty of the crystalline world and the horror of the approaching end that it conveys.

[john257hopper · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Not taken with this one. An interesting central idea but for me poorly executed and the characters and their reactions seemed other worldly, not in an interesting way as in High Rise.

[ragwaine · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Weird. Felt like I was watching a movie, great visuals. Not sure I understood the total concept.

[tikitu1reviews · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

From mentioning Ballard to a couple of friends, it seems I don't have the same associations with him that many others do. This is the Ballard that I know and love: magic realism, a strong but unspecified religious underpinning, and the story plays out in lush jungle which bulks large in the internal lives of the protagonists.It's not about sex.As a science fiction writer (of a sort), what sets Ballard apart from the golden age giants is his priorities: the science-fictional element (perhaps more appropriately in this case --and despite the pseudoscientific jargon-- the intruding magical element) is put to work as a metaphor for the internal lives of his protagonists. He's a bit heavyhanded about it -- there's a fair bit of tell-not-show contributing to that judgement, and I'd have to reread the novel carefully to be able to see whether I would have drawn the same conclusions if the protagonist hadn't quite explicitly pushed them at me. Still, the otherworldly element is in the service of character, rather than the characters serving to explore and report on the otherworldly element.The novel has a pulpy feel in high contrast to Empire of the Sun. This isn't just the science fictional elements; the chief failings are a terribly wooden characterisation for almost all the supporting characters and a rather hard to swallow protagonist. This is perhaps why I'd characterise this as science fiction instead of magical realism; not that all science fiction has these failings, but I recommend The Crystal World despite its failings, for a very science-fictional reason: the idea is lovely. More, the idea and the way it's described is lovely. If you can make that disconnect between literary content and imaginative content (a juggling act that is sadly often required to enjoy science fiction), you'll find The Crystal World rewarding. If the form matters too much to forgive some lapses of style, you're best avoiding it.