Nutshell: when the world turns to glass, real men hoard women.Situated between Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Wayne Madsen’s Decade of Death Secret Wars and Genocide in Africa 19932003, we have here the colonialist traveling to the heart of sub-Saharan Africa and finding horror therein.Opens at a port in Gabon where protagonist, one Dr. Sanders (potentially related to the colonel? (yeah, I’m a dick)) discusses with a priest how the light “is always like this, very heavy and penumbral—do you know Bocklin’s painting, ‘Island of the Dead,’ where the cypresses stand guard above a cliff pierced by a hypogeum, while a storm hovers over the sea?” (11), which means that this picks up where Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead leaves off, as both build their scenes specifically from the painting. (It is a cool painting, even if the Z book is godsawful.) Principal events occur however deeper in colonial space, “this isolated corner of the Cameroon Republic,” which was “still recovering from an abortive coup ten years earlier, when a handful of rebels had seized the emerald and diamond mines,” as “a French military mission supervised the training of the local troops” (10).Doctor’s fame precedes him: “no one could be found to share a cabin with the assistant director of the Fort Isabelle leper hospital” (13). He is accordingly one of Foucault’s technicians from Discipline & Punish, and notes, very weirdly, that “the world was not without those who, for their own reasons, wished to catch the disease” (id.). (Huh?) (Difficult to resist the impulse to quote Foucault at length on leprosy and juxtapose those comments with Coke’s comments on heresy—but am resisting the temptation.)Forest where principal events occur is a “landscape without time” (14), wherein physician might “be free from the questions of motive and identity that were bound up with his sense of time and the past” (15). Some suggestion in this connection that “his reasons for serving at the leper hospital were not altogether humanitarian, and that he might be more attracted by the idea of leprosy, and whatever it unconsciously represented” (17). That’s all because he was having an affair with one of his colleagues, of course (id.). Plot is set into motion by her letter to him, “with its strange and ecstatic vision of the forest—in maculoanesthetic leprosy there was an involvement of nervous tissue” (id.), causing him to seek her out. In any other novel, this might be a decent enough premise for a story: I go to rescue my lover from the leprosarium amid colonial space and its chronic peril. But because it’s JG Ballard, that’s not good enough. No, we need an apocalyptic confrontation; we don’t get out of bed unless the world is ending in the JGB, yo. It fits the normal JGB story, which is deproletarianized: “there is hardly anyone there at all. Most of the workers have left” (24). What’s left then, as in High Rise, say, or The Drowned World, is an apocalypse for the professionals and proprietors. (Dude summons the spectres of these texts with comments on how “my belief that this illuminated forest in some way reflects an earlier period in our lives, perhaps an archaic memory we are born with of some ancestral paradise where the unity of time and space is the signature of every leaf and flower” (74)—dunno if that’s some kinda ugly subornost-type thesis or other pre-modern proto-fascistic insistence on illiberal unity of atavistic tribes or what—but JGB just can’t stop himself.) Am not sure if this means that in JGB only the upper class is a worthy subject of analysis, or, more precisely, if in JGB the apocalyptic only happens to the elite—if so, it’s almost as though this is a corollary to the standard robot narrative, wherein slave laborers have a revolution against the humans. Here, the slave laborers simply absent themselves and the world ends. Both are variants that fear socialist revolution, which is encoded in Marxism as their Gotterdammerung. Hatless shrugged, I guess. Despite the repeated insistence that various areas are “deserted” (e.g., 50, 65, &c.), the text thinks however that the apocalypse is progressive vitrification, which is drawn into concordance with leprosy: “this business here and your own specialty are very similar. In a way, one is the dark side of the other. I’m thinking of the silver scales of leprosy that give the disease its name” (58). Dubbed “the Hubble Effect,” progressive vitrification of Earth is “closer to a cancer than anything else—and about as curable—an actual proliferation of the sub-atomic identity of all matter. It’s as if a sequence of displaced but identical images of the same object were being produced by refraction through a prism, but with the element of time replacing the role of light” (59-60). Get that?Sadly, “the real crisis is long past” (75). Everyone ignored the marginal news of “the sighting of another ‘double galaxy’” at the Hubble Institute (id.). Somehow, “without doubt, these random transfigurations throughout the world are a reflection of distant cosmic processes of enormous scope and dimensions, first glimpsed in the Andromeda spiral” (id.). Without doubt! It’s not really intergalactic invaders, but more that time is the villain: “The recent discovery of anti-matter in the universe inevitably involves the conception of anti-time as the fourth side of the negatively charged continuum. Where anti-particle and particle collide they not only destroy their own physical identities, but their opposing time-values eliminate each other, subtracting from the universe another quantum from its total store of time” (id.). Somehow this causes a depletion of time on Earth (?), “so the super-saturation of matter in our continuum leads to its appearance in a parallel spatial matrix,” i.e., the “crystalline mass” (75-76). But it is “substance without mass” (76), and it is apparently possible for “a single atom to produce an infinite number of duplicates of itself and so fill the entire universe, from which simultaneously all time has expired, an ultimate macrocosmic zero beyond the wildest dreams of Plato and Democritus” (76). Okay, that’s kinda cool, and, in some ways, the setting’s process is something of a parmenideanization of the world, the unchanging aletheia come to Earth to destroy its heraclitean polemos: indeed, “after the endless glimmer of the vitrified forest the trees along the road, the ruined hotel and even the two men with him appeared to be shadowy images of themselves, replicas of illuminated originals in some distant land” (107-08).All this stuff is just leprosy, though, which, “like cancer, is above all a disease of time, a result of over-extending oneself through that particular medium” (77). Settng’s mystery settled halfway, the remainder of the narrative is the standard JGB traipsing off into barbarian space to hoard women. Here, mine owner has some other dude’s wife set up in his chateaux, “fearing that she might die, he preferred this half-animate immolation within the crystal vaults to her physical death in the world outside” (102). Sanders’ own love interest at the leprosarium upon their reunion has “a facial rictus caused by the nodular thickening of the upper lip,” with “nodular lumps all over her face and in the lobe of her left ear,” the “so-called leonine mask” (113).Sanders’ anagnorisis comes late, when he realizes that “by some optical or electromagnetic freak, the intense focus of light within the stones simultaneously produced a compression of time, so that the discharge of light from the surfaces reversed the process of crystallization” (134). It was “this gift of time which accounted for the eternal appeal of precious gems” (id.). I guess this makes the novel an advertisement for Blood Diamonds. That snark aside, it leads novel to its best insight: Their intricate crests and cartouches, occupying more than their own volume of space, so seemed to contain a greater ambient time, providing that unmistakable premonition of immortality sensed within St. Peter’s or the palace at Nymphenburg. By contrast, the architecture of the twentieth century, characteristically one of the rectangular unornamented facades, of simple Euclidean space and time, was that of the New World, confident in its firm footing in the future and indifferent to those pangs of mortality which haunted the mind of old Europe.(134-35). It’s not everyday that someone actually invokes Lovecraft’s non-Euclidean architectures and provides a fairly plausible explanation. I can almost understand what Lovecraft means now, sorta—so this novel works also as a gloss on Lovecraft.Recommended for readers joined together in the last marriage of space and time, those who are neither animate nor inanimate, and persons in an armor of diamonds.
JG Ballard’s The Crystal World is a mindbending book that, by the last page, I was glad to end. The premise is fascinating; out of nowhere jungles across the globe begin to crystallize. The crystallization slowly spreads, enveloping everything in its path, including animals, buildings, and people. Ballard is enamored with describing the silent, alien landscape inherent in the crystal zone, definitely to the point where the jungle becomes a character and possibly to the point of overkill. The novel focuses on a doctor from a leprosy clinic searching for his former lover who may or may not be caught in the crystal zone. He meets a journalist, a strange priest, and, uh, an adventurer-type (not sure what else to call him) just outside the forest and connects and disconnects with each as he delves deeper into the jungle. The Crystal World reads like Ballard’s version of Heart of Darkness except the jungle appears to balance on the cusp between crepuscule* and blinding light. Characters dwell in the same regions (symbolically too, of course) and can get lost in either area. My main problem with the book was the fact the crystal jungle is so overwhelming the characters can seem stock and half-drawn. At one point a couple characters just…fuck. I would probably not have noticed if they didn’t reference the act later. I could see why Ballard wanted them to fuck but the sex seemed more like a plot device than anything authentic. Oh, and Ballard includes cool space/time metaphysics that flew way over my head. I can see why people like Neil Gaiman and William Gibson love Ballard. He writes tight, detached prose that fits his subject matter. I’ll read more of his material, probably Crash, this spring. Tadpole says The Crystal World isn’t one of Ballard’s major works and I’m curious enough to delve into his other books. This novel will stick with me but I didn’t love it.* Thanks, thesaurus.com!
What do You think about The Crystal World (1988)?
The story got off to a slowish start as, with most JG Ballard stories, you do need to focus on his writing style. As I got into it,I got much more involved with the plot, basically a Doctor, in Africa, travels up-river to find his friends. He discovers that the forest and area where he wishes to go is being transformed, the vegetation, even the people, into crystal. It's an interesting journey, as he becomes involved with other peoples' stories and tries to stay alive. It's worth reading if you're familiar with Ballard's other SciFi works. I also recommend The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere, if you've not read any of his work before.
—Bill
This is my third Ballard novel and I am getting used to the way he writes; heavy use of imagery, plot as a vehicle for the thinly veiled subtexts, characters on a quest to discover something about themselves and cryptic, stilted dialogue with much left unsaid leaving the reader to fill in the gaps.Thought provoking as ever, one really needs time to digest the book and no doubt would benefit from a re-read.The science behind the premise of this book is mind baffling nonsense as far as I know but then, that's not really the point. Man facing various disasters and apocalypses is a common theme Ballard visits again and again but never are we ever able to effectively fight against nature, to overcome its inexplicable shifts. For Ballard, it is more about how we come to terms with change, how we come to accept nature and our place in it.For all that, there is something about his writing that doesn't sit well with me. I am never be fully at ease with the way he writes, never quite gel with his style. I can see why many people like him a lot but I guess it is something personal, a kind of barrier. I did enjoy it though and will read more of his work in the hope that I will one day find something I can really engage with.
—Simon
SpellbindingThis is an interesting piece of literature, not quite a fantasy story, but not quite within the bounds of reality. The characters are normal people, the setting is a small town with nothing special about it, except that it is beside a jungle where jewels grow out of the ground like weeds, and as a tumor, overtake anyone or anything in their way. If you can find your way out, before becoming a frozen statue of gems, the crystals melt away as you cross an invisible threshold. It's mesmerizing, and out of this world.What I liked most, is that Ballard never offers an explanation for this garden of jewelry. The rather simple story takes our characters on adventures in and out of this jungle, where some move swiftly enough to make it through with only a thin layer of "frost" on their clothes, while others find themselves trapped, and eventually buried under a rising ocean of diamonds and sapphires.The prose is simply wonderful. Ballard is a master of language. It is a joy to find yourself tangled in the elegance of his wording, so simple and so fluid, yet as enchanting as the jewels of his strange, dreamlike jungle.If you are looking to read a story with a clear, structured plot, where event A leads to event B and is resolved by event C, then avoid this book. This does not build up to a climactic revelation, and the mystery is not solved by a dramatic courtroom confession. But if you're hoping to find yourself lost in another world, then imagine the possibilities of a place where you can fill your pockets with opals and rubies, and where lepers grow emerald limbs glazed with topaz! Definitely something I plan to read again.
—Mark McGinty
