Book review - The Day Of Creation

For many years I’ve admired the science fiction works of J.G. Ballard, but I’d never got around to reading his non-sf novel The Day Of Creation (1987). I have now corrected that oversight.

The story is narrated by Dr Mallory, who is working for the WHO in an unnamed central African republic, near the River Kotto, yet on the edge of the encroaching Sahara. Inevitably, political and native unrest has overtaken him and the villagers in the guise of General Harare and his guerrillas. Mallory is about to be executed when the arrival of Captain Kagwa and his government troops rout the terrorists.

Shortly afterwards, as a landing strip is being bulldozed by Kagwa’s men, a huge tree is uprooted and water gushes out from the new hole. It doesn’t stop, but steadily floods the area, moving over the land. The blessing of this fresh water’s arrival affects Mallory strangely; he christens the new river with his name. Together with a twelve-year-old girl guerrilla he calls Noon, he escapes from Kagwa and commandeers a boat to head up the new river to find its source. Before long, he is also accompanied by a myopic filmmaker and his assistant.

We’re soon in the territory of an unreliable narrator. Perhaps the first clue is naming the ‘river’ after himself.  ‘The River Mallory. I felt a curious pride. Yet knowing that it  bore my name made me all the more determined to destroy it.’ (p71)  He attempted to defeat the river at the place of its ‘mouth’ but failed, so realised he must find its source in the mountains. Yet, ambivalently, ‘I was eager to see how it would grow and change.’ (p99)

Over time, the river becomes polluted with the rubbish from civilization – fridges, bottles, condoms, and the usual detritus found in a Ballard disaster novel: ‘the aerosol can and the hair-dryer, lying in the sand like objects displayed in a museum of consumer archaeology’ (p220). Is the River Mallory a metaphor for something? Maybe: man creates, then spoils, sullies and ultimately destroys?

Ballard writes ‘literary’ novels – presumably books with profound psychological depth, a message and telling metaphors. Here, there are metaphors on virtually every page. A few are strained, such as ‘I stared at the sleek swollen surface of the river, like the fleshy body of a sleeping woman’ (p112), but the majority tend to work.

Here are a few of his many metaphors:

‘Fires burned fiercely across the surface of the lake, the convection currents sending up plumes of jewelled dust that ignited like the incandescent tails of immense white peacocks.’ (p20)

‘Angry voices crossed the airstrip, an altercation that moved like a skidding stylus from French to German to Sudanese.’ (p50)

‘… cadavers in the dissection room, laid out on the glass tables like the forgotten patrons of a Turkish bath who had waited too long for physicians…’ (p70)

‘The trees leaned over the water, their roots exposed like chandeliers…’ (p92)

‘The huge trees advanced towarfds the water like an army of knights…’ (p92)

‘Hours had slipped by in seconds, falling like dust through the open grilles of my mind.’ (p106)

‘Two metal aircraft hangars stood in the grass, their curved, pockmarked roofs like the hulls of collapsed Zeppelins.’ (p224)

It’s interesting that in one point Mallory refers to Noon as a teenager, yet she isn’t; she’s twelve, pre-pubescent. She is often naked, diving for fish to feed them on their journey up-river, and Mallory seems to lust after her, though whether anything happens in fact is debatable as he becomes disoriented by disease and malnutrition. Bordering on unsavoury territory, here, perhaps.

There are moments of humour, when Noon attempts to learn English by listening to cassette tapes, though these are all Marxist indoctrination lessons for Captain Kagwa! ‘Exploitation!’ becomes her word of warning of danger.

Ballard’s lush description of the jungle and the ‘dream river’, aided by rich metaphor create good visuals, though the characters seem less substantial than the environment, perhaps because they’re translated through the fragile sanity of the narrator. Imagery supplants plot; Ballard’s imagination is seen to be formidable through his revealing prose.

Book review - Camp Concentration

This dystopian almost Kafkaesque novel was first published in 1968. It is not an easy book to get through (even though only 158 pages), yet many of its readers have praised it very highly, regarding it as a classic in the sci-fi genre.

Disch surfed into the sci-fi scene on the crest of the New Wave; this so-called movement had several strong advocates, among them Brian W Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison and J.G. Ballard. New Wave attempted to go beyond the usual tales of rocket ships, robots, time travel and telepathy, or if it did use these motifs, they’d be used in a different way; the old taboos were ditched – notably the use of swearing and ‘adult’ themes were tackled. Writers tended to examine ‘soft’ science more, and investigate ‘inner space’ rather than outer space; indeed, in this book Disch refers to ‘inner space’.

Disch was an atheist, a poet and gay though he said he didn’t write ‘gay literature’. Why mention his sexuality? Because some reviewers have accused him of homophobia in this book!

My copy was published by Panther, an imprint of Granada Publishing at the time (1977); Panther published a great number of sci-fi books in this period, most with eye-catching covers. Unfortunately, the book blurb in the front gives away too much, to my mind. As plenty of reviews already reveal much of the plot, I have no qualms about saying this is how it goes:

It’s the future (as seen from 1968) and man is on the moon and a war is being waged with nuclear and bacteriological weapons. In an attempt to boost the inventive powers of their armaments researchers, the US Army experiments on a group of prisoners in an underground facility. They intend to raise their brain power to genius level by injecting them with a strain of syphilis that’s known to achieve this end; unfortunately, it also means they will die within nine months from the disease. [I've left out the rest as they're spoilers].

As you will have gathered, it is a black comedy; it's also a dystopian moral fable, a criticism of the Vietnam War, a criticism of religion and a diatribe about distrusting government. 

Over-weight split personality conscientious objector Louie Sacchetti (a conchie) is permitted to write a journal about his incarceration. He’s a poet and a lapsed Roman Catholic, and his style of journal writing reflects this: ‘Something special about any artist… a sort of magic – in the literal sense. Unriddling the signatures of nature, and breathing the same secrets back…’ (p36)

Sacchetti is interviewed by a female psychologist, Dr Aimée Busk, of whom he states: ‘She desired not argument but, like a picador, simply to wound.’ The bull-fighting allusion continues further down the page (p82).

Some of the inmates, stretching their genius muscles, get involved in alchemy, and the fourteenth century advocate Nicholas Flamel is mentioned (the discoverer of the philosopher’s stone).

Much of the narrative is philosophical, interspersed with clever word-play and literary and artistic references, and dark humour.

The Faustian parallels are evident. The clever twist ending is gratifying, though whether the world can be saved is another matter. 

Disch committed suicide in 2008, aged 68.

Style comment

It’s a literary work, alluding to classic literature, the Bible, opera, drama and even Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fictional hollow earth, Pellucidar (p17). Disch intended to write what pleased him and took no prisoners. I do wonder that as a result of this paranoid prisoner tale being published that he was approached to write The Prisoner novel (1969) [republished as I Am Not A Number]. The disconnection with reality, the idea that isolation can reveal or perhaps subvert truth provides fertile ground to plant seeds based on the legendary TV series.

There’s an overabundance of abstruse vocabulary that the average reader will not know, me included (though I’m impressed to note that the Word dictionary recognises some: orthoepy (at least he explains this one – the study of correct pronunciation). Here are a few other words he drops in: opsimath (‘one who begins to learn late in life); perfervid; hypogean daedal; cornua; emulous; farctate; agnoiology; chthonic; epiphanous: there are others I failed to note. Anthony Burgess used to revel in using a rich vocabulary, but I suspect Disch outdid him in this novel.

There are too many characters whose names begin with the letter ‘S’: Skilliman, Schipansky, Sacchetti himself, for example.

A Departure - Book review

This book, A Departure,  has gathered quite a momentum of praise and exposure. Admittedly, some of this is due to the youth of the author. Tom Ward was about twenty-three when he wrote it. Received wisdom would have us believe that the age of the author is not relevant, it’s the story that counts – either it works or it doesn’t, it either involves the reader or it doesn’t. I’d go along with that. Still, once I’d read the book and then checked out the Amazon reviews, I was struck by the range in comments. A Departure has acquired an enviable number of reviews. Yet some of the reviews are not real reviews, simply stating something along the lines of ‘A great book, I couldn’t put it down, look forward to Tom Ward’s next one.’ Other less complimentary reviews highlighted his age and perceived inexperience, while several commented on typos. [The publisher has since attended to the typos].

Tom Ward took a risk, embarking on a debut novel in the dystopian genre. There’s a long history of this type of work, going back even before John Wyndham and Brian Aldiss, the authors who introduced me to the sub-genre . The conceit is depicting how ordinary individuals cope with their new and darkened circumstances, and to a large extent I believe Tom Ward achieves that, despite some stylistic flaws.

 

Michael Taylor is approaching the end of his teens when ‘the event’ occurs. We don’t get told what happened, though it’s hinted that it might have had something to do with global warming. Plenty of disaster novels don’t give the reasons – simply thrusting their characters into the new changed world. Whatever the cause, it seems that the vast majority of people have succumbed – simply died in their tracks. Eerily empty streets, beloved of disaster movies, are depicted realistically. Michael’s encounter with a man who intends to steal the family car is the first of several scenes where extreme violence raises its head – and it’s uncomfortable in its depiction, and in Michael’s psyche.

Michael returned home briefly after his family’s failed attempt to leave the country met with the deaths of his parents and sister. Now, he sets off in a stolen car, heading first to his grandparents’ house. Already, he’s quite hardened to the sight of dead bodies. His eventual leave-taking of his proud grandfather is moving without being mawkish. ‘Something sank in Michael’s chest as his bottom lip began to quiver. Suddenly, he was a young boy again, crying at his grandparents’ house after falling over, but this time a plaster and some Germolene would not make things better.’

He then goes south, in a hazy attempt at finding succour. On his way, he encounters a mixture of strange, interesting, violent people, all understandably affected by the apocalyptic event. He is not alone for long, soon joining up with Judith, then David and Zanna, encountering a religious group, a pseudo-government-run tent camp, a supermarket refuge for youths, and an isolated farmer and wife.

There is a danger with this kind of novel that it will be bleak throughout: ‘The corpses were scattered over the fields like seeds in spring.’

Yet we know from first-hand accounts that even survivors of the Holocaust had cause to rely on humour to get them through their horrendous ordeal. Humour is part of the human condition. And so Tom Ward gives us humour, too, for example:

 
‘Michael walked on, guitar song assaulting his ears from all directions. It seemed as though guitar players had been exempt from the apocalypse.’

There are many glimpses of good metaphor and description, too: ‘… June sun quickly turned the air thick and warm, the tent walls sagging inwards like a surrendered lung that could breathe no more of the heavy air.’ And I liked this description – ‘Judith cut in, her voice hard as a week-old scone.’

 
Unexplained disasters throw up survivors and in some way they prove the theory of the survival of the fittest; not necessarily fit in a physical sense, or exhibiting a higher capacity of intelligence; it may be something as simple as the fitness of certain genetic pointers carried by those who live on.

And the book’s title can be viewed on several levels. The story is a departure for Michael, moving from boyhood to manhood, since it’s definitely a coming-of-age tale. It is also a departure for the survivors from everything they knew, everything familiar. And ultimately it’s a departure by some survivors from the UK.

 
I particularly liked the neat ‘golden’ reference at the beginning and its echo at the end of the book.
 
A worthy debut novel. Tom Ward should be encouraged to keep writing. I would hope that he doesn't take the negative comments too much to heart and make his literary departure. For he has much to offer readers as he evolves. (I've been writing for over forty years and I'm still evolving!)

[A shorter version of the above review will be posted in Amazon and Goodreads.]