J G Ballard - The Drought

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'The world, without rain, is drying up. Rivers are a trickle and we see the shrivelling of the species far from its sources and headed lemming-like for the sea. Time has burst its dams and seeps inside the race-structure with bizarre results A strange and rather wonderful book full of haunting landscapes, phantasmagoria and disaster that clangs on the mind. An impressive novel at any level. Its obscurities and surrealist flourishes only heighten the dreamlike atmosphere.' Guardian

This is the third of Ballard's informal quartet of books that nod in cursory fashion toward the elements. Like the others, it might be described as a science-fiction novel of the sub-genre 'disaster'. But like every other Ballard novel it is so much more.

When toxic waste dumped into the oceans is cooked into a molecular layer that prevents evaporation, drought inevitably follows. Not the parched summer of an English countryside, but the blistering furnace of a tropical desert. Society collapses, draining away as quickly as surface water. It is a stark contrast to the amniotic lushness of The Drowned World.

Across this parched landscape a small group of characters play out their lives. They are the usual collection - a mixed bunch of misfits whose casual acquaintance in normal circumstances brings them close together when their inner landscapes become an outer reality. We are shown brief, bright glimpses, like the painful glancing reflections of sunlight from a mirrored surface. And if we dare to approach that mirror, we will see something of ourselves.

There are moments in the book when you can wish a tighter editorial control had been exercised. Some descriptions fail because the language gets in the way - there are only so many time you can use 'river bed' in a paragraph before it becomes obtrusive. On the whole, however, the writing shimmers like heat from a baked landscape, offering glimpses and mirages, distortions of a reality that show truths with an unrelenting harshness.

It is also a poetic work. The images and themes are displayed and developed with a concentrated intensity that prefigures the direction Ballard takes with some of his middle period work. Whilst it would not work as a poem, it does show what a poetic sensibility can bring to prose. It certainly makes me look forward to the next book in this chronological re-read of Ballard's work.

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J.G. Ballard
The Drought

(First published in 1964)

PART I

Chapter 1 - The Draining Lake

At noon, when Dr. Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the entrance to the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot son of the old woman who lived in the ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating in the water below his feet. The reflection of his swollen head swam like a deformed nimbus among the limp plumage. The caking mudbank was speckled with pieces of paper and driftwood, and to Ransom the dreamfaced figure of Quilter resembled a demented faun strewing himself with leaves as he mourned for the lost spirit of the river.

Ransom secured the bow and stern lines to the jetty, deciding that the comparison was perhaps less than apt. Although Quilter spent as much time watching the river as Ransom or anyone else, his motives would be typically perverse. The continued fall of the river, sustained through the spring and summer drought, gave him a kind of warped pleasure, even if he and his mother had been the first to suffer. Their derelict barge-an eccentric gift from Quilter's protector, Richard Foster Lomax, the architect who was Ransom's neighbor-had now taken on a thirty-degree list, and a further fall of even a foot in the level of the water would split its hull like a desiccated pumpkin.

Shielding his eyes from the sunlight, Ransom surveyed the silent banks of the river as they wound westwards to the city of Mount Royal five miles away. He had spent the previous week alone on what was left of Lake Constant, sailing the houseboat among the draining creeks and mudflats as he waited for the evacuation of the city to end. After the closure of the hospital at Mount Royal he had intended to leave for the coast, but at the last moment decided to give himself a few final days on the lake before it vanished for good. Now and then, between the humps of damp mud, he had seen the distant span of the motorbridge across the river, the windows of thousands of cars and trucks flashing like jeweled lances as they set off along the coast road to the south.

Ransom postponed his return until all movement along the bridge had ended. By this time the lake, once a clear stretch of open water thirty miles in length, had subsided into a series of small pools and channels, separated by the banks of draining mud. A few last fishing craft sailed forlornly among them, their crews standing silently in the bows.

By contrast, something about the slow transformation exhilarated Ransom. As the wide sheets of water contracted, first into shallow lagoons and then into a maze of narrow creeks, the wet dunes of the lakebed seemed to emerge from another dimension. On the last morning he woke to find the houseboat beached at the end of a small cove. The slopes of mud, covered with the bodies of dead birds and fish, stretched above him like the shores of a dream.

As he approached the entrance to the river, steering the houseboat among the stranded yachts and fishing boats, the lakeside town of Larchmont was deserted. Along the fishermen's quays the boathouses were empty, and the drying fish hung in the shadows from the lines of hooks. A few refuse fires smouldered in the waterfront gardens, their smoke drifting past the open windows that swung in the warm air. Nothing moved in the streets. Ransom had assumed that a few people would remain behind, waiting until the main exodus to the coast was over, but Quilter's presence, like his ambiguous smile, in some way seemed an obscure omen, one of the many irrational signs that had revealed the real progress of the drought during the confusion of the past months.

A hundred yards to his right, beyond the concrete pillars of the motorbridge, was the fuel depot, the wooden piles of the wharf clearly visible above the cracked mud. The floating pier had touched bottom, and the flotilla of fishing boats usually moored against it had moved off into the center of the channel. Normally, at late summer, the river would have been almost three hundred feet wide, but it was now less than half this, an evil-smelling creek that wound its way along the flat gutter of the banks. The caking mud was firm enough to support a man's weight, and a series of gangways led down to the water's edge from the riverside villas.

Next to the fuel depot was the yacht basin, with the Quilters' barge moored against its boom. After signing the vessel over to them at the depot, Lomax had added a single gallon of diesel oil in a quixotic gesture of generosity, barely enough fuel for the couple to navigate the fifty yards to the basin. Refused entry, they had taken up their mooring outside. Here Mrs. Quilter sat all day on the hatchway, her faded red hair blown about her black shawl, muttering at the people going down to the water's edge with their buckets.

Ransom could see her now, beaked nose flashing to left and right like an irritable parrot's, flicking at her dark face with an old Chinese fan, indifferent to the heat and the river's stench. She had been sitting in the same place when he set off in the houseboat, her ribald shouts egging on the group of weekend mariners laying a line of cement-filled bags across the entrance to the yacht basin. Even at flood barely enough water entered the circular harbor to irrigate its narrow docks, and this had now leaked back into the river, settling the smartly decked craft firmly into their own mud. Deserted by their owners, the yachts were presided over by Mrs. Quilter's witchlike presence.

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