First published in 1962. In the introduction Martin Amis writes "Ballard gives The Drowned World the trappings of a conventional novel (hero, heroine, authority figure, villain), and equips it with a plot (jeopardy, climax, resolution, coda); but all this feels dutiful and perfunctory, as if conventionality simply bores him. Thus the novel's backdrop is boldly futuristic while its mechanics seem antique ... In addition, Ballard's strikingly 'square' dialogue remains a serious lacuna. here as elsewhere, his dramatis personae - supposedly so gaunt and ghostly - talk like a troupe of British schoolteachers hoisted out of the 1930s".
The world's overheating. The population has shrunk and fertility is low. Robert Kerans is studying Europe's flooded cities. His boss Bodkin thinks that as the fauna and flora regress to Triassic forms, so human minds are regressing - "Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past". Dreams and the subconscious start to invade the present.
3 of them - Kerans, Beatrice and Bodkin - remain behind to explore their dreams, not seeing each other much. Strangman and his crew of scavengers arrive. They drain the area. They find they're above Leicester Square. Bodkin tries to re-flood the area. Strangman gets angry. Kerans' soldier friends arrive to save the day. Kerans tries to flood the place then flees to the jungle.
There's too much adventure for me, though I like the atmosphere and a few phrases - "She's a complex person, lives on many levels. Until they all synchronise she can behave as if she's insane", p.16; "the streets and shops had been preserved almost intact, like a reflection in a lake that has somehow lost its original", p.19. The collective archaeopsychic dreams disappear from the plot - a shame.
Other reviews
- Will Self
- Ted Gioia (I still have some reservations about this book. The writing may sometimes be grand, at other times wearingly grandiose. Ballard can be too heavy-handed with high-falutin’ modifiers. This man loves adjectives, and especially compound adjectives. The sentences have weight, but it seems more like flab than muscle Our hero feels an urge to dive into the water, but isn't just any body of water—it's a "luminous, dragon-green, serpent-haunted sea." You get the idea.)
- Patricia A McCarthy (Allusions in Ballard's "The Drowned World", Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Jul., 1997))
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