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All posts tagged Joseph Conrad
The Day of Creation by J.G. Ballard (1987)
The sutures of my skull were opening, letting the cool wind into the chambers of my brain. I stared up at the cloudless, cyanide sky, like the domed roof of some deep psychosis. (p.275)
This is a poor book. It is long, packed with detail, has an exotic setting, a reliably demented protagonist on a mad, quixotic quest – and yet it feels like a shadow of Ballard's earlier works.
The Day of Creation shows the peculiar thing that happened to Ballard's writing after he had revealed the source of his strange delirious worldview by describing his boyhood in a Japanese internment camp during World War Two in Empire of the Sun. It was like cutting off Samson's hair. Overnight the neuroses which had enmeshed Ballard's fiction, were freed and disappeared. The weird alchemy which held together Ballard's first ten or so classic novels, and nearly a hundred short stories of obsession and psychological collapse, didn't exactly disappear but somehow, magically, lost their genuinely disturbing power.
One symptom of this is that Ballard's novels got longer. The Atrocity Exhibition barely stretches to 110 pages but I think it's his best book. Crash, 171 pages, Concrete Island 126 pages, High Rise 140 – he was best in short, extremely concentrated, bursts.
By contrast The Day of Creation is a bloated 287 pages long and has lost its reason for existence long before the end.
The plot – part one
The story is told in the first person by Doctor John Mallory (if I had a pound for every Ballard protagonist who is a doctor). Having been born and raised in British Hong Kong, Mallory didn't fit in at medical school in Cambridge or in England more generally, and so took up jobs with aid agencies, ending up working for the World Health Organisation.
A series of overseas assignments ends with one bringing him to the dead end town of Port-la-Nouvelle somewhere in the heart of Africa, between Chad and Sudan.
I found the opening chapters of the book deeply confusing. It took me a while to understand that it opens with Mallory being forced to his knees by a soldiers from a rebel group led by skinny, angry rebel leader, General Harare, once a dental student, now afflicted with boils and bad teeth, whose guerrillas periodically invade what is left of Port-la-Nouvelle, do a little gentle looting and return to the forest.
Specifically, he finds himself on the wrong end of a rifle held by a 12-year-old rebel girl who probably has a tale of terrible suffering behind her but when Mallory moves to take the rifle off her, she pulls the trigger. Luckily there's a duff cartridge in the chamber so the gun doesn't fire. He seizes the rifle and throws it away.
We learn that all this is being photographed by a young Japanese woman photographer, Miss Matsuoka, a type of the ambitious and amoral photojournalist. About fifteen minutes later the rebels have been fled as the town's official army force arrives led by the 'huge and clumsy', 6-foot (p.28) Captain Kagwa and the situation sort of returns to normal.
'Normal' is that Mallory has been here in this empty town for the best part of six months, living in a scruffy trailer and, by his own admission, hitting the whiskey bottle at breakfast and carrying on drinking all day (p.72).
He had a brief affair with one of the only other white people in the locality, Nora Warrender. She kept a little sanctuary for wild animals with her husband till her husband was shot dead by the rebels. Mallory caught her on the rebound and they slept together for a few days until Mallory realised she had absolutely no interest in him whatsoever.
What seems like half an hour after the traumatic encounter with the rebels, a light airplane flies in and disgorges none other than Professor Sangar, sometime biologist-turned-television documentary maker, who has flown in on some cock-and-bull mercy mission with a plane full of rice, an assistant and a camera crew for whom he can pose as saviour.
Except that, as the deeply antagonistic Mallory who takes an instant dislike to the preening fool bluntly points out to him: a) the locals don't eat rice, at all, their stock food is manioc, and b) there's no locals here, anyway; they've all long ago fled the rebel guerrillas.
Sangar is actually laconically laid back about all this but is accompanied by an extremely tense and jumpy assistant, an Indian named Mr Pal who takes umbrage at every one of Mallory's sarcastic quips.
All this is presumably intended to be satire on TV bullshit artists, particularly scientists-turned-TV gurus (remember that the car-sex-obsessed lead figure of Crash is a once-reputable scientist-turned-TV presenter). But not only is it crude satire, but it feels very clumsily deployed.
In fact the whole opening thirty or forty pages felt deeply clumsy, introducing characters pell-mell in the midst of events which are so badly described I didn't understand what was going on.
In a similar manner, it took me some while to understand the central plot of the book, in fact I only actually understood it from the blurb on the back:
Mallory has remained in Port-la-Nouvelle, despite having no patients to speak of (they've all run off to avoid the rebels) because he has developed the entirely irrational, quixotic and obsessive idea of rewatering this dry, arid part of central Africa.
The Port has jetties and quays which stretch out into Lake Kotto but this is bone dry, having dried up two years earlier, and whose bottom is not just dry but covered in parched dust.
Similarly, the one-time river which flowed into it is an arid ditch. Mallory has been using the small funds given to him by the WHO to pay for the drilling of a series of wells across the lake bottom, driven by a mad fantasy of a third river Nile to fertilise this whole region.
What happens next I found incomprehensible in every way. Mere pages after the rebels have left, and way before we have really understood and processed the depths of Mallory's quest, and entirely by accident, a bulldozer which is meant to be extending the town's small runway, lifts the immense root of a rotted old oak tree out of the sand at the end of the runway and… a trickle of water emerges. A trickle which turns into a stream, and then a good solid flow of water.
I didn't really understand how such a flood of water comes from one dislodged tree root and I struggled to understand what happens next: which is that the source of this water appears to move, to shift location from coming out of one small scooped hole, and turns into a flood which moves further and further back into the jungle. As well as flowing downstream to begin to refill the barren lake, the source moves backwards, upstream. We find Mallory wading miles into the jungle to try and find the ever-receding source.
In some mystical way the accidental breaking open of a small spring changes morphs into a mighty river whose source is deep in the jungle, and the river becomes so mighty that, as the days go by, it gets bigger and bigger, it refills Lake Kotto, so that Port-la-Nouvelle's piers and jetties are once more lapped by water and the level rises so high that it starts to threaten the runway and the lower parts of the town with inundantion.
But here's the thing which I found genuinely incomprehensible: because the water didn't come from the wells he's sunk – and despite the fact that the river is doing just what he wanted it to, namely rewatering the region – Mallory takes against it and declares the river his enemy.
As futilely as he once drilled wells in a bone dry lake-bed, now he futilely tries to block, dam and reroute the river. It's become Him against The River. I didn't understand this, follow it or believe it, but it becomes the core of the remaining two hundred or so pages.
Ballard loses it
Now, I have faithfully accompanied Ballard as he described the manias of obsessed protagonists who feel compelled to revisit the derelict gantries of Cape Kennedy, or live in hotels in abandoned resorts, or go to die on the derelict beaches of nuclear testing sites, or set off south towards the radioactive wastelands and — I understood all of them.
Ballard had the gift of taking you inside the heads of each of his deranged protagonists to the unnerving extent that you began to understand their obsessions and visions.
But not in this book. The basic obsession is overthrown in the first thirty pages. Mallory's abrupt taking against the river and declaring it The Enemy seems utterly irrational and unnecessary. His alienated relations with Captain Kagwa or the worn widow-woman Nora Warrender are, on paper, right out of the standard Ballard handbook for the detached, alienated relationships between the handful of characters which his books normally describe. But somehow, eerily, without any of the real psychological punch which all his previous novels conveyed.
Lacking the strange and uncanny setting of so many of his earlier stories, the unnamed African location comes over as strangely dull and boring. Ballard's described tropical jungle before. Compare and contrast Day of Creation with the opening scenes of The Crystal World which are dazzling, or the just-as-good opening pages of the brilliant short story A Question of Re-Entry.
Those stories had some pretty cheesy, clichéd elements (like the globetrotting media star who's turned his back on fame to live with a primitive tribe in the Amazon rainforest who is at the heart of Re-Entry). But they were carried by the fierceness of vision, the charge of Ballard's imagination, and also the sentence-by-sentence brilliance of Ballard's language.
But overnight his gift with the English language seems to have abandoned him, and the force that drives his earlier fictions – the powerful combination of intense scenario with crisp but somehow visionary prose – has evaporated. Instead the book is a collection of mannerisms. Whatever 'it' is, Ballard had lost it.
The plot – part two
The first effect of Mallory's ill-fated attempts to dam and reroute the river (why?) is that the half-built dam made of logs and empty oil drums suddenly gives way. Mallory himself is caught by the flood and tumbled down to the bottom of the gravelly torrent, is nearly drowned and only just rescued up by Kagwan's soldiers to spend the next few weeks recuperating at Nora Warrender's refuge for rare animals, where he lives in uneasy company with her group of feminist black women.
And where he learns that the collapsing dam made of oil drums and logs had caught up the Japanese snapper Miss Matsuoka and killed her. This seems to have no impact on anyone at all, least of all the reader.
After all this confused motives and off plotting, it's only around page 100 that the book finally settles into a groove. Recovered from his near-drowning, Mallory decides to steal the knackered old ferry, the Salammbo, which has just arrived at the newly navigable quayside of Port-la-Nouvelle, and to use it to follow the river to its source. I still don't understand why he wants to do this, but it is at least a comprehensible narrative device: the quest, the odyssey.
The 12-year-old girl who tried to shoot him, then ran off into then jungle, has emerged in recent days as a kind of damaged orphan and built herself a home-made coracle made from plastic wrapped over a metal frame. She's paddling around in the river in the darkness on the night when Mallory wades out into the river under the noses of a couple of Captain Kwanga's half-asleep guards, and stealthily unties the front and rear mooring ropes.
As the boat slowly starts to drift away from the quay, the soldiers realise what's up and start shouting, one of them clambers down into the shallow river and bangs with his rifle butt on the steamer's sides. But Mallory manages to ignite the starter motor, then get the big diesel motor engaged and, as the Salammbo heaves about and begins to head upstream into the magic river, two things happen: the soldiers start shooting at it, and the girl paddles enthusiastically close to the steamer but then loses control and, just as her coracle is crushed under its heavy progress, Mallory pulls her to safety, then returns to the helm.
And so they set off up this fanciful African river, this unlikely pair, Mallory the shiftless doctor, a heavy drinker crushed by a sense of failure and inadequacy, who has entered into an irrationally intense love-hate relationship with the river, and the girl whose name, we learn, is Noon, whose black face bears networks of scars she's picked up in an obviously abused childhood and who, as a result, Mallory thinks suffers from mutism. She is dumb.
It is a journey or metaphysical quest up a river in Africa undertaken by a man named Mallory, just as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a metaphysical quest up a river in Africa undertaken by a man named Marlow. Hence the Heart of Darkness-style illustration on the first edition of the book. But unfortunately, Conrad's novel is a timeless classic, whereas this novel is a confused mess.
Cover of the first edition of The Day of Creation showing the old steamboat Salammbo which Mallory steals
The steamer had been operating as a ferry. It is carrying on its deck a black Mercedes limousine, ordered by Captain Kwanga who has grand visions of himself rising to become governor of a province which is newly enriched by the new river flowing through it. For the next hundred pages or so Kwanga's repeated attempts to recapture the Salammbo are motivated by angry wish to get hold of his stolen limo.
Things happen. Noon turns out to be a handy pilot, warming Mallory about sandbanks and blockages ahead, as they chug forward under the protection of the overarching tropical canopy. There's a bag of rice in the boat, which Mallory boils a ration of each day, and Noon turns out to be a dab hand at jumping into the river and spearing fish on a spear she's made from a sharp leaf. Nonetheless, quite quickly Mallory is feeling feverish. He hadn't been eating properly to begin with, had been drinking heavily, and now is not eating enough. This combined with his weakness from his near-death experience when he was half-drowned when the ramshackle dam collapsed fifty pages earlier, all means that he is in very poor shape, and quickly becomes feverish.
And THIS, you realise, is the place Ballard wanted to get to: the first half of the book often felt clumsy and rushed because this is the point, the core, the aim, the focus of the narrative, possibly the image Ballard began with: the image of a half-mad, obsessed, feverish white man struggling to steer a decrepit steamer up a mysterious river in the heart of Africa, helped only by a dumb-mute African girl. Possibly this is the key image you're meant to take away from the novel, and it is weird and intense, if with a rather heavy sense of déjà vu.
Captain Kagwa comes chasing him in a military helicopter which, to being with, strafes the steamer with machine guns. The second time they return, the helicopter is equipped with pontoons which means they can land on the water, and discover that Mallory has run aground on the half-submerged equipment of a quarry which the river has flooded. Thus Kagwa can warily clamber out along the submerged metal to within hailing distance of the bridge.
At that point Kagwa lets off a pistol shot which misses Mallory although a ricochet cuts part of his scalp. Mallory lifts the rusty old Lee-Enfield rifle which originally belonged to Noon (the one she nearly shot him with) and shoots, not Kagwa, but one of the helicopter's landing pontoons which bursts and starts to deflate so that the helicopter almost immediately starts to lapse into the water. The pilot shouts at Kagwa who clambers his way back to it and just about manages to climb in as the chopper rises into the sky.
Exhausted, and bleeding from his head, Mallory collapses. He'd found a deckchair from somewhere and now Noon resourcefully rigs up a sun canopy over it. In this deckchair Mallory lapses into the classic Ballardian mental state of fever dreams, delirium, hallucination and driving obsession. He must get to the source of the river (whether to block it for good or rechannel it into the desert to make the Sahara bloom, is unclear and increasingly inconsequential).
There I sat like a totem, propped in the bows of this strange ship piloted by a child on its journey towards the sun. (p.139)
(This, incidentally, reminds the hard-core Ballard fan of the scene in The Drowned World where the central figure, Dr Robert Kerans, is captured by the crew of a pirate ship and tied to an old chair placed on a table and worshipped as a tribal god.)
I didn't mention something which happened earlier. Irrationally convinced that it was he who created the river (although we saw that it arose by sheer accident when a bulldozer clearing the huge stump of a dead oak tree at the end of the town's runway unwittingly releasing an underground stream), Mallory is not surprised when Sangar laconically informs him that rivers need to be registered with the authorities and with national geographic societies etc, and so he – Sangar – has used his radio to contact world geographical societies and magnanimously named the river – the Mallory.
This seemed improbable and silly at the time, and becomes more and more silly as the book progresses. But then again, the book's intention is not 'realistic', but entirely programmatic. Contriving to get the river named after him allows Mallory to hallucinate that the river is his alter-ego, his other self, an ally and an opponent, as he enters the increasingly fevered state.
After our escape from Captain Kagwa I was aware that a duel was taking place between myself and the Mallory (p.139)
This sounds intriguing, if pretty contrived, but repetition soon drains it of meaning and brings out its silliness.
Already I had begun to resent the river, and realised that in the Mallory I had created a dangerous rival. (p.143)
I needed to destroy the Mallory, but at the same time I wanted to enlarge it… (p.146)
During his numerous trips to the engine room to adjust and fix the motor, Mallory has picked up an elaborate set of oil streaks across his increasingly thin and wasted body, not to mention rust and paint marks and blood stains from the wound in his head. When Noon looks at him, Mallory realises that he is turning into a savage. Heart of Darkness all over again.
And then they bump into Sangar the documentary film-maker and his sidekick, Mr Pal again. The pair are cruising the other way down the River Mallory (with the current) in a long ancient launch, loaded, obscurely with defunct television monitors, and Sangar greets Mallory in his sly, laconic way. The ferry collides with their overloaded launch and Mallory has to help the pair aboard with as much of their equipment as they can save before the launch sinks. He discovers that both Sangar and Mr Pal are as emaciated and malnourished as he is.
Suddenly I realised that the entire dynamic of the story is from Waiting For Godot. In part one of Waiting For Godot we are introduced to a handful of characters engaged in absurd projects, led by the two tramps Vladimir and Estragon. But the play is in two parts, and part two opens to reveal the same handful of characters, but this time in a significantly advanced state of decay. Same here: Sangar and Mr Pal are in almost as bad shape as Mallory, both have lost lots of weight and have running sores.
With its swollen eyelids and fungal skin infection, [Mr Pal]'s youthful face resembled that of a starved apprentice in a backstreet tannery. (p.158)
And I thought again of Godot when I read this sentence, right at the end of the book when a weakened Mallory tries to help injured Sangar to his feet amid the mud and detritus of the burst barrage:
Together we tottered in the shifting earth, trying to find our footing in the sliding mud, two tramps dancing on a garbage hill. (p.262)
Surely that is a conscious decision to reference Godot which is about two utterly destitute tramps.
More than that, their intention of making some kind of 'documentary' about Mallory and his quixotic quest, has also degraded. They don't have batteries for their equipment. No lights, no tapes. They do appear to actually film sequences of Mallory and the girl, but it appears hopelessly random.
Ballard's intention is obviously to say something important about the TV Age. He has his illiterate, mute freedom-fighter girl-child, Noon, become entranced with Sangar's camera equipment and, finding herself caught on tape by Mr Pal, she begins to practice posing for the camera. Ballard editorialises that she has leapt from the Stone Age to the late 20th century in a few days, bypassing language on the way (p.160)
In these passages about the decrepit TV presenter and his desperately ill assistant (who ends up dying of malnutrition-caused infections) you get the strong sense that it is probably more interesting to read Ballard's interviews about the TV age and the other subjects touched on in the book, than these rather clumsily fictionalised 'ideas'.
In another surreal touch (one of many consciously surreal touches with which the book is stuffed) Sangar and Pil's equipment – cameras and tapes and monitors and mixing desks – which Mallory brought aboard the steamer from their sinking launch, contains tapes of what appear to be radio programs about Africa. These are of a jokey Marxist provenance so that the words 'neo-colonial' and 'empire' are liberally thrown around. The satirical-surreal aspect is that the mute damaged black girl, Noon, is fascinated by the tapes, and spends hours inside the limousine playing them over and over on the car's expensive sound system. Damaged, mute African girl plays expensive tapes of Western lecturers sounding off about neo-colonialism. That rustling sound you can hear is a thousand doctorates about Ballard and neo-colonialism being finalised for submission to their Cultural Studies tutors.
Sangar and Pal both go drastically downhill as the steamer putters north. Pal slips into a delirious fever and eventually dies. Sangar is covered in sores and eventually tries to attack Mallory, who pushes him overboard into the river, before passing out.
Mallory wakes up in a bed surrounded by bare bosoms. Slowly he realises he has been 'rescued' from the Salammbo by none other than Nora Wallender, now with short cropped hair, and leader of a gang of four tough, possibly vengeful black women.
He has woken up aboard the Diana, 'a bordello boat, the white ship of the widows' – previously a floating brothel to service government soldiers, hence the way its bedrooms or 'cubicles' are covered with rococo paintings of topless nymphs cavorting in a fantasy French countryside.
He remains there for three or four days, fantasising about taking control of the boat and captaining these black Amazons, only to discover he is barely strong enough to stand up, and any of the women can just nudge him and he collapses. He realises some of the women go ashore, not only to stalk and shoot birds to cook and eat, but he watches them stalk and shoot a male soldier. Maybe they're taking their revenge on all the men who ever fucked them.
Suddenly one day the Diana starts sinking. The women think it's holed, but Mallory realises the level of the river is falling. While the women try to identify the leak, Mallory grabs Noon's arm, they jump into the river and make it back to the Salammbo.
One week later they arrive at the place where passage of the river becomes impossible because of cataracts. Not only that, but local farmers have dammed one wing of the river with an extensive barrage and siphoned the water off into an extensive system of irrigation channels. 'His' river has turned the desert green again.
He is promptly arrested by General Harare and brought to him at the ruined infirmary of the abandoned French airfield at Bonneville. All of the scenes with either Captain Kagwa or General Harare are tripe. Ballard's ear for dialogue was always poor, and the 'conversations' between these characters are a mix of raw 'ideas' and show-off sentences – 'They have water now, doctor, their precious see-through gold' – with very little concern for notions of character or psychology. They all sound the same.
The plot becomes even less rational than before. Close up Mallory can see that the water from the makeshift-dammed river has been used very badly; the nomad farmers simply don't know how to manage water. Thus most of it is polluted with human faeces, and mixed with engine oil so it ends up polluting not nurturing their crops, while the nomads continue to live on hovels assembled from the detritus of the abandoned French air base, sheets of asbestos and the like.
Similarly, having been more or less co-opted into General Harare's ragtag crew, Mallory suggests that they completely dam the Mallory, dry it up and so prevent Harare's enemy, Captain Kagwa advancing up the river with his boats.
Harare agrees and so Mallory rams the Salammbo into place on the cascades between the river bank and a central island, thus creating a caisson around which the native women can build a dam across the second branch of the Mallory, damming it for good and drying up the river course all the way back down to Port-la-Nouvelle. The barrage is an impressive collection of post-industrial detritus:
Less than a month later the barrage across the river was complete, and the Salammbo, which had carried us so untiringly from Port-la-Nouvelle, sat in its last anchorage, surrounded by a refuse tip of freezers and enamel stoves, water coolers, aircraft tail-planes and radio antennae, together forming a terminal moraine of modern technology.
Ballard-land! Like the ziggurats of abandoned washing machines or televisions erected around the The Unreal City.
Mallory gets used to life in Harare's crew. They let him continue sleeping in the wrecked bridge of the Salammbo, while he treats Harare's sick soldiers with ineffectual medicine. Everyone is suffering fevers brought on by the foetid, malarial waters of the River Mallory, which have been diverted into a thousand blocked, unflowing, brackish irrigation channels, breeding grounds for mosquitoes and infectious diseases.
There is some kind of satirical irony going on here – that Mallory's intention had been to 'turn the Sahara green again' but the reality turns out to be a poisonous fiasco. Is he telling us it is pointless digging wells and irrigating the Third World?
Meanwhile, the Diana, the brothel ship, which Mallory and Noon had escaped from a few chapters earlier, shows up and moors next to the barrage built around the Salammbo. Nora Warrender and her crew of four black widows quickly recruit young widows from the surrounding nomad villages, rig up the ship's lights to a generator, open a bar and it's business as usual, with groups of soldiers rowing out to the ship to drink beer and then be taken below by the sometimes teenage whores, to be serviced.
Ballard, as usual alert to surreal possibilities, has his almost-blind and malnourished TV presenter Sangar rig up a basic closed-circuit TV network playing into a TV monitor set up in the bar, so the drunken sailors can watch themselves getting drunk. Sangar sits out of the way of the violent drunks, leaning his head against a cage of marmosets, these fierce creatures chatting away as if describing to Sangar a seen he can no longer see with his own eyes.
In a deep fever, staggering with hunger, Mallory finds himself stumbling belowdecks on the Diana, waking to find a very young whore dressed in flashy clothes wiping his feverish brow, who he then only half-remembers touching up, pushing back onto the sweat and semen-stained mattress, and fucking. He drifts back to sleep. Later, the presence of her ancient Lee-Enfield rifle clinches the fact that this was Noon.
I know Ballard's books are meant to be transgressive in all kinds of ways, but – personally – I didn't like the way the central character is described increasingly lusting after Noon's barely pubescent body, noticing her budding breasts etc, as the journey progresses.
And now this ritual deflowering. It's not so much that it's a pedophilic scene, as that it's just so horribly inevitable: hairy, sweaty, deranged middle-aged man is put into forced proximity with a 12-year-old girl who keeps stripping off to go fishing in the river and… It seems so hairily, sweatily inevitable that he'll end up fucking her. How much more interesting if they had kept up a strange adult-damaged child relationship right to the end.
I felt soiled by this scene.
Next thing that happens is Captain Kagwa's gunships and helicopter arrive, having fought their way steadily upstream despite the river being dammed up. They make a heavily armed attack on the Diana and in doing so destroy the barrage, unleashing a tidal waves which sweeps down into the pool below it, sweeping away all Kagwa and Harare's fighting men.
The next chapter starts with Mallory surveying the devastation. On the one hand this is an impressive scene; on the other, Mallory subjects it to the same rubbish, cheapjack psychology which underpins the entire narrative, the notion that Mallory somehow 'created' the river, has been engaged in a duel with it, and has finally 'destroyed' it, although not before it poisoned and infected a host of nomads who dammed it up and are now dropping like flies due to malaria.
'You poisoned her, Mallory, with your sick river, like all these desert people. They're sick with your dream…' (p.263)
He sets out in search of Noon (as he has done plenty of times before), kicking the decrepit Sangar out of the way after having a typically stagey dialogue with him about who's to blame for this disaster, 'It's all your fault etc'.
Mallory climbs the muddy, rubbish-strewn river bank up to the (by now) heavily battered limousine parked on the bank of the now empty, slimy river. Sure enough Noon is inside, sick and ill. Mallory is just trying to reassure her when Kagwa's helicopter clatters into the clearing (yet again). It lands with the same old French pilot handling a carbine and watching as Captain Kagwa gets out and walks towards the limo, unbuttoning his holster.
At that moment Noon pushes her hand into Mallory's hand. She is clutching some bit of metal which, he suddenly realises, is a bullet. For the entire length of this humungous narrative she has guarded this, the third and final of her bullets. In a typically salacious detail, Noon forces Mallory's nails into her nipple 'to give him courage'.
Mallory puts the bullet into the breech, cocks the bolt and, as Kagwa walks towards them coolly taking his gun from his holster, Mallory shoots him through the head.
That kind of blunt assassination reminds me of similar moments in previous fictions, particularly when the protagonist of The Drought simply rises to his feet and shoots dead the man who'd been preventing his people get to the beach.
Anyway, so that's General Harare and Captain Kagwa dead. Mallory goes to check on Sangar but when he gets back to the limo, Noon has gone. Again.
Cut to a few days later and Mallory has rigged up a kind of raft with an outboard motor and has headed up over the cataracts, into the upper river, looking for Noon (again). He's brought Sanger along with him. He was about to abandon him by the wrecked barrage, but suddenly saw Nora Warrender and the widow whores watching him (like a Greek chorus) and was shamed into bringing Sanger along, clutching his (by now) utterly broken and ruined cine-camera.
(This demented character clinging on to a cine-camera which is broken beyond repair but has become a psychological talisman is a direct copy of Wilder, the TV documentary maker who sets off to climb the massive luxury apartment building in High Rise, at first to make a documentary about the occupants, but by the end he has forgotten the point of his quest, and the gutted camera is just one among many trinkets and talismans he has picked up in his increasingly psychotic odyssey.)
Mallory and Sangar now enter a primeval zone of hard rocks and lizards. In case we hadn't realised it, Ballard rams home the symbolism that the journey up the river is also a journey back in time, or at least time zones. They keep glimpsing Noon in her metal skiff, just half a mile ahead then disappearing round a bend in the narrowing river.
Finally they arrive at a 'When dinosaurs ruled the earth' landscape of volcanic rock and trilobite fossils where the water smells of sulphur and hot springs and the Mallory opens out into a huge 'primeval lake… the original mud world'.
Here Mallory repeats the rather forlorn attempt to explain how the river came about: some tectonic shift fractured the bed of a huge primeval lake and created an underground river which the soldier in his bulldozer released when he dug up the giant tree root way back at the start of the novel; and then, in the bit that doesn't make any sense, the river somehow went overground, creating an actual surface river; and that's the river which the narrator, with breath-taking irrationality, is convinced that 'he created' (p.279).
I never really understood or bought into this basic premise of the book, which is why I remained outside its imaginative forcefield.
Finally, exhausted beyond endurance, the reader arrives at the final pages, in which Mallory clambers out of the river into the warm sulphur mud banks and wades through these towards the last of several pools above which rises the source of the damn river. It narrows, three feet wide, two feet wide, then only a hand's-width wide. Mallory kneels by its silvery presence amid the hot sand, trying to cradle it, to separate it from the silver sand and then:
The Mallory died in my arms.
We are now so far beyond narrative logic that we are in a Surrealist painting: a mad doctor kneels at the source of a mythical African river cradling it as it dies in his arms.
Looking up he scans around for Noon and sees her in the distance, turning to look back at him, with the body and face of a woman his own age. Surrealism. Drugs. Hallucination. And then, of course, she vanishes without a trace.
He kicks the walls of some pools which are drying out, makes them puddle together and push Noon's abandoned skiff into a further pool, he lets himself slip and be carried down back towards the raft where Sanger is still desperately clinging with his smashed cine-camera, and both of them, too weak to move, let the raft slowly set off on its last journey to the sea.
Two years later. The river has long disappeared and Lake Katto and Port-la-Nouvelle have returned to their former dusty barrenness. It took three weeks for Sanger and Mallory's raft to drift back the full length of the river, and then for them to be picked up police and taken to hospital. During his long recovery, Sanger disclaimed all knowledge of Mallory.
Did Mallory dream the whole thing? Above all, did he dream Noon? Did such a girl ever exist, or was she an entirely fictional justification for his psychotic quest to go to the source of the river?
The events definitely happened. He's been flown by government helicopters up the dry bed of the river and seen the Salammbo still embedded in the ruined barrage. But of Captain Kagwa and General Harare and their men, and Nora Warrender and her vengeful widow women, no trace has ever been found.
Mallory has got another job working for WHO 30 miles away to the south-west. But every weekend Mallory drives back to this dusty town, and scours the footprints left in the dry mud along the river bank. He swears he has seen the distinctive footprints of his dream girl-woman.
Sooner or later she will reappear, and I am certain that when she comes the Mallory will return, and once again run the waters of its dream across the dust of a waiting heart. (p.287)
Ballardian clichés
Antagonists Ballard characters, even as they go slowly mad, always need an antagonist. In some ways his stories are like narratives stripped down to the basic bare-bone structure:
Protagonist sets out on Quest; has one loyal Helper; two or three peripheral characters; and is pitched against an Antagonist, who dogs his steps and blocks his path.
In this book the Antagonist is Captain Kwanga, and this explains the surreal detail of the captain's Mercedes limousine being trapped aboard the steamer Mallory has stolen. It gives a sort of rational pretext for what is really a far deeper narrative structure which Ballard wants to construct (and which, by this stage, the regular Ballard reader may well be a bit bored with).
Calm The other characters are always telling Mallory to calm down and not get so carried away, there are continual references by everyone to his unhealthy obsessions.
I totally understand how these references are designed to portray Mallory as a deeply unreliable narrator, and how it justifies Ballard's intention to make Mallory's obsession with the river so utterly irrational. My complaint is that, in the half dozen or so narratives preceding Creation, Ballard had used just the exact same technique and precisely the same word, so that the narrator of Hello America or Empire of the Sun is repeatedly told by the other characters to calm down. I get it. He is using a tried and tested technique. Except that in the other books, it works. Here it just feels like going through the motions:
Calming myself, I stood and watched Captain Kagwa climb the gangplank
Dreams All-too-easily the word 'dream' slips off the end of Ballard's pen, to describe the protagonist's hopes, ideas and intentions. Everything becomes a dream. The whole location and situation becomes a dream.
When I returned to the launch Sangar and Mr Pal were still sitting together against the engine-locker, two Alice-like figures stranded in this backwater of the wrong dream. (p.156)
I knew now why I liked her to bathe naked in the river, to immerse herself in that larger dream that sustained our journey. (p.169)
'You're still obsessed with this absurd dream? To reach the source of the river?' (p.174)
An immense white dream flows silently across the land, spreading over the drained surface of the lake. (p.284)
Fever The narrator quickly gets a fever as most Ballard characters do. Then, up at the barrage, the rancid waters of the dammed Mallory ensure that everyone gets a fever. The word 'fever' or 'feverish' appears on every page. The idea and the word 'fever' are essential and utterly predictable elements in Ballardland.
Illness In pretty much all his core stories, Ballard characters become ill and quickly deteriorate to advanced stages of malnutrition and illness. It's where Ballard like to have his characters.
Exposure sores covered my face and forehead, flourishing in my beard like fungi in a damp meadow. (p.172)
Sangar's face was covered by the brim of his wide straw hat, but I could see that his lips and cheekbones were pocked with insect bites that had festered for weeks, his neck inflamed by a sun-induced viral response. (p.173)
Put bluntly, Ballard has to move his protagonists as quickly as possible into a condition of almost complete collapse in order to justify his prose style, which is one of almost continual fever dreams and hallucinations.
The plots are not sequences of meaningful events in the traditional sense, but scenarios concocted to position his characters into situations where they can experience Ballard's intense, weird and visionary psychological states.
There were unstated bonds between myself and this antique vessel. The metal debris in which it was embedded set up a constant wailing and groaning, and in my fever I almost believed that I was embarked on an even stranger voyage across the garbage pits of the planet. (p.235)
Ballard's imagination is a non-stop fountain of weird sentences like that, but the rest of his creative mind sometimes struggles to concoct the 'plots' or situations which can justify them.
Motives Ballard characters are always unsure of their own motives and everyone else's motives. In pre-Empire books this creates an unsettling ambience of uncertainty and human alienation. It makes all the human relationships 'ambiguous' and fractious. In the post-Empire books it is just part of his schtick.
I was wary of revealing myself to this likeable but sly opportunist, particularly as I was still unsure of my own motives. (p.157)
Naked Nakedness has become an increasingly prominent aspect of these later stories. It's a very prominent feature of The Unlimited Dream Company that the protagonist early on strips off and from then on dares the inhabitants of Shepperton to look at him and acknowledge it. It's an important part of the apparition of 'President Manson' in Hello America that he is naked, sitting naked in an old wicker chair in front of a huge array of TV monitors so that Ballard gets to describe the images projected from the screens flickering across his pale, fat naked body.
And here, in this book, it's an important element that soon after he's stolen the steamer, Mallory strips off, partly to be naked with all the continual sense of sexual arousal that implies, partly so that his body can display the increasingly complicated matrix of diesel oil smears, rust from old machinery, paint from the peeling ship's hull and bloodstains, a coded indication of his decay.
It is typical that it is only after three or four days aboard the Diana and mingling with its female crew, that Mallory realises he has been naked all along. Neither he nor any of the women have noticed or commented on it. It's as if Ballard is mounting a sustained campaign to get his readers to relax about being naked. Like every other aspect of his liberal 1960s treatment of human sexuality, this seems terribly naive and dated now, now we are in the grip of a new Victorianism which is reviving fear and revulsion at male sexuality.
Physical collapse In Empire of the Sun the extreme physical deterioration of the characters was explained by their situation i.e. years of slowly starving on minimum rations from their Japanese gaolers which, in the last months of captivity, dwindled almost to nothing.
So it's all-too-easy to believe in the bone-thin characters, wasted and exhausted, covered in festering sores and with bleeding gums, who stagger through that narrative. In this book, however, all Mallory or Sangar would have to do it contact the outside world and a World Health Organisation plane would fly in all the money and food they wanted. Thus the malnutrition to which Ballard submits both Mallory and Sangar seems utterly wilful and contrived and unnecessary and therefore silly, therefore a bit insulting to the memory of the genuinely starved characters in Empire.
The Day of Creation by J.G. Ballard was published by Victor Gollancz in 1987. References are to the 1993 Flamingo paperback edition.
The Day of Creation on Amazon
Reviews of other Ballard books
The Drowned World (1962)
The Drought (1964)
The Crystal World (1966)
Some style features of the early novels of J.G. Ballard
J.G. Ballard's literary experimentalism
The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)
Preface to the French edition of Crash
Pornography, simile and surrealism in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash
Concrete Island (1974)
High Rise (1975)
The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
Hello America (1982)
Empire of the Sun (1984)
The Day of Creation (1987)
The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962)
The Terminal Beach (1964)
The Disaster Area (1967)
Vermilion Sands (1971)
Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories (1976)
The Venus Hunters (1980)
Myths of the Near Future (1982)
Posted in Books, Novel
Tagged adventure, Africa, Ballard, Captain Kagwa, Dr John Mallory, Estragon, fiction, General Harare, Heart of Darkness, John Mallory, Joseph Conrad, Lake Kotto, Miss Matsuoka, Mr Pal, neo-colonialism, Noon, Nora Wallender, Nora Warrender, novel, Port-la-Nouvelle, Professor Sangar, satire, television, The Day of Creation, TV, Vladimir, Waiting For Godot, WHO
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/03/05/the-day-of-creation-j-g-ballard/
The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard (1964)
Ballard wrote over a hundred short stories. Nowadays they're gathered in the two massive volumes of Collected Short Stories, but they were originally published in various science fiction magazines and then brought together into occasional book collections, of which about nine were published in the 1960s alone (although the situation is confused because 1. there are UK and US editions of most of the collections, each with slightly different contents, and 2. these occasional collections didn't gather the stories in chronological order, but more randomly).
The Terminal Beach is often cited as the best single collection of Ballard's short stories, and marked a commercial and critical breakthrough. I bought a paperback copy in 1973 and some of the stories in it have haunted me ever since. The UK edition contains the following stories:
A Question of Re-entry (1963)
The Drowned Giant (1964)
End-Game (1963)
The Illuminated Man (1964)
The Reptile Enclosure (1963)
The Delta at Sunset
Deep End (1961)
The Volcano Dances
Billennium
The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon
The Lost Leonardo (1964)
This is a wonderfully slow, lazy, atmospheric evocation of the steamy, dank, rotting atmosphere of the Amazon jungle, which is a sensual pleasure to read and reread, and which has justifiably drawn comparisons with Joseph Conrad's early stories of isolated white men going to seed in the tropics.
A strange atmosphere of emptiness hung over the inland lagoon, a flat pall of dead air that in a curious way was as menacing as any overt signs of hostility, as if the crudity and violence of all the Amazonian jungles met here in a momentary balance which some untoward movement might upset, unleashing appalling forces. Way in the distance, down-shore, the great trees leaned like corpses into the glazed air, and the haze over the water embalmed the jungle and the late afternoon in an uneasy stillness… (p.15)
The tale is set in the near future. Lieutenant Connolly works for the Space Department, Reclamation Division of the United Nations. Five years earlier a space capsule, the Goliath 7, carrying astronaut Captain Francis Spender returning from a moon mission, lost contact with mission control and is estimated to have crashed somewhere in the vast Amazon jungle. Hundreds of UN inspectors have been deployed to try and locate the lost capsule which was equipped with radio and sonar beacons. Connolly spent some time working at Lake Maracaibo on the dredging project there. Now he's been redeployed to go deep into the jungle and contact native tribes to find out if any of them have seen anything.
The story opens with rich descriptions of the rotting swamps of the Amazon tributary Connolly is puttering up in a patrol launch skippered by Captain Pereira of the Native Protection Missions. They are heading up to the squalid camp of the Nambikwara tribe. This – it just so happens – is where a 40-something high-profile white man, Ryker, the former journalist and 'man of action' (sounds a bit like Ernest Hemingway) decided to flee when he got sick of Western civilisation.
Thus the scene is set for Connolly to arrive at the scrappy squalid camp of 'the Nambis' and find Ryker a tall, imposing, cynical and mysterious man. Why was he so insistent that Pereira bring him a clock, of all things, from faraway civilisation? Why was the tribe's one-time medicine man dislodged from his position, and how does Ryker maintain his hold over the natives?
Briefly, it turns out that Ryker has a set of NASA tables which show the orbiting times of massive new ECHO satellite which periodically crosses the sky as a bright stars in the sky. That's why he needs an accurate clock – in order to predict the arrival of the stars; just before it appear, Ryker leads the tribe off on whooping hollaring jaunts into the forest. It is much stronger juju than the old medicine man could ever manage. (Incidentally, glancing at the tables Connolly notes 'today's' date, March 17 1978 – must have seemed a long way in the future when Ballard wrote this story.)
That's Connolly's first discovery. His second is when the shy, ill stunted son of the rejected witch doctor makes a swap with him, Connolly's watch for some kind of shiny orb he's holding. On close examination it turns out to be the lunar altimeter of the Goliath 7, crudely prised out of its control panel.
So the space capsule did land somewhere near by! Disgusted, Connolly shows the altimeter to Pereira and lets the captain deal with Ryker. He comes back to say Ryker admits it all. Spender was still alive when they pulled him out of the capsule, but didn't last long, but making it clear that he didn't intervene to save him.
The story ends with Pereira explaining that a man who fell to earth in a shiny capsule would have been greeted as a god by the Nambis, confirming all their beliefs in cargo cults, and… the Nambikwara eat their gods!
Thus the story brings together a number of Ballard's early obsessions in a winning combination: the journey up a tropical river; a (sort of) scientist protagonist; the image of dead astronauts trapped in their burning capsules; the eeriness of the entire space programme itself seen for the first time by Connolly as not reflecting a healthy urge to explore but rather a projection of the inner neuroses of the technocratic West; and the central but obscure important of time… the scientifically accurate time needed to predict the capsules' orbits overlaying or superimposed on the native tribe's complete lack of time awareness, and behind it all the image of outer space itself which, at one point, Connolly poetically speculates, might itself be a vast unconscious symbol of time and eternity.
A pessimistic fable or fairy tale.
A giant is washed up on the beach. Over the succeeding days and weeks the unnamed narrator visits and revisits the beach and watches the amazement of the huge crowds soon give away to bored vandalism, then the dismemberment of the huge body to be used for fertiliser and the enormous bones re-used as archways into scrap yards or even houses.
In what seems to be a communist east European country, a discredited member of the Politburo – Constantin – has been tried, found guilty, and is now confined to a villa with his executioner – Malek – with whom he plays chess and has tantalising conversations, as he tries to find out… when he is scheduled to be executed. It's quite a long story as Constantin pathetically persuades himself that Malek understands, or can be made to understand that he, Constantin, is in fact innocent, that the circumstances of the trial were invalid etc etc.
This is the kind of story which undermines any claim that Ballard is a world class literary writer because, although made up of familiar tropes and settings it is, ultimately, neither as clever nor as subtle as Ballard wants his readers to think it is.
The visionary short story which he quickly turned into the full-blown 'novel', The Crystal World, this is an extraordinarily vivid account of a trip by journalists up the river Opotoka into the Florida Everglades, to the quickly emptying town of Maynard, to see for themselves the new phenomenon whereby the natural world is becoming crystallised. Told in retrospect by the narrator (one James B———) who says that 'now', a few months later, as he recuperates in Puerto Rico, the entire Florida peninsula has been abandoned and three million people displaced i.e. the phenomenon is spreading and will, in time, possibly make the entire planet uninhabitable.
If there's any plot it's that, as a wave of new crystallisation breaks over the forest B—– gets separated from the soldiers who took him into the danger zone and then quickly lost becoming a) caught up in a weird feud between the local chief of police, Captain Shelley, who has abducted the unhappy wife of an architect who's gone round the bend, Marquand, with the result that they are creeping up on each other and taking potshots, either in the ruined city of Maynard or in the remote crystallising summer house where Shelley has spirited away young and sickly Mrs Marquand, first name Emerelda.
And b) having fallen asleep and become half crystallised, B—– runs for hours, maybe days, because movement is the only thing which holds back the crystallising process, until he comes across a clearing in the crystal forest, location of a church and of the Reverend Thomas, who continues to play his organ even as the jungle around crystallises, its canopy overhead forming a vast lattice of glass, with narrower and narrower alleys of escape. With this visionary man B—– stays as long as a week until it is clear the forest is going to swamp them at which point he thrusts the huge jewel-encrusted altar cross into B——'s arms and pushes him out into the crystal forest, protected by the jewels, to blunder towards the frozen river and make his way slowly through the weirdly bejewelled landscape, finally emerging into reality, the army, and hospital.
But writing now, some months later in Puerto Rico, he finds reality bland and boring. And tells us that he knows he is fated, doomed and destined to return to the forest, at the earliest possible opportunity, in order to find his destiny among the jewelled tropical forest.
This story exemplifies Ballard's ability to imagine something unlike anyone else, to root it in the workaday world of the present day, to give rein to his extraordinarily lush and purple prose and yet, at the same time, to be somehow completely unconvincing at a human level about any of the characters.
Ballard creates an over-intellectual, frustratedly verbose academic, Roger Pelham, who has taken his dim unintellectual wife to the beach which is packed out, with spotty bodies and blaring transistor radios. A report on the radio that a new satellite is being launched from Cape Canaverel prompts him to half-heartedly try to explain the theory of a colleague of his, Sherrington, that orbiting satellites emit infrared light which our unconscious minds can detect – and that the colleague, Sherrington, thinks it might trigger innate releasing mechanisms or IRMs. And that there might be connections with mass graves of Cro-Magnon Man which have been found under what were in his day lakes.
He's still trying to explain it when a strange mood comes over the beach, silence descends, people begin to stand, some walk down to the sea and form an orderly line along the surfline, Pelham seems to be the only one not affected as people in the cafe where they're sitting lurch to their feet and make their way to the shore. Pelham calculates that the new satellite is in fact orbiting right over them and… at that moment the lines of silent zombie people begin to walk quietly into the sea.
This is a shilling shocker, short and sharp and lurid, and all the better for it.
The Delta at Sunset (1964)
Charles Gifford is the senior archaeologist leading a small archaeological expedition to a ruined Toltec site presumably somewhere in Central America. He is accompanied by his long-suffering wife, Louise, and a young academic assistant, Dr Richard Lowry, and a number of native Indian bearers and servants.
A few weeks earlier Gifford had some kind of bad accident at the excavation site which crushed his ankle. Now he is confined to a kind of stretcher-chair (p.127) with the sheets propped up so as not to touch his bandaged ankle. The ankle is starting to smell (presumably gangrene) and Gifford – not a nice man to begin with – has become deliberately provoking and vicious to Louise and Lowry alike, passing in and out of increasingly intense fevers, with dreams and visions.
Above all he is obsessed with the great mass of writhing snakes which emerges out into the dried-up delta they can see from their camp on a bluff. Every night they come out at the same time and wriggle and writhe across the dry mud flats
The story drops heavy hints about time – pondering the inscrutable faces of the native Indians, Gifford reflects that they are more in tune with the millennial-old forest than the average American with their obsessive time-consciousness, trying to cram 'significant' experiences into their lives.
At one point he turns lyrical about the snakes writhing down in the delta, speculating that they must carry in their DNA ancestral memories of 'a coded internal landscape, a picture of the Paleocene'. As he sinks into fever he conceives of the delta as a zone of timelessness, where all time co-exists, and hallucinate the Toltec ruins reverting to some primeval level, being reassimilated into the jungle as they're covered with moss and creepers.
So the reader is fairly prepared for the bombshell at the climax of the story when, listening yet again to her husband's feverish descriptions of the snakes, Louise bursts out in exasperation that there are no snakes – the dry delta is bare as a bone!
So the obvious question is, Is Gifford feverishly hallucinating? Or is he he having a genuine experience and, psychologically, travelling back in time to the Paleocene era? Exactly as in the 1963 story Now Wakes The Sea when a white collar American, recovering from an illness, begins to hallucinate the deep ocean of the Triassic Era is washing over his suburb although it is a thousand miles from the nearest sea.
(Although it's titled 'The Delta' Gifford increasingly visualises it as a beach, or beaches, 'the white beaches of the delta', and the last words describe 'the snakes on the beaches'. Beaches,Ballard's primal location.)
Traven used to be a military pilot. Then his wife and six-year-old son were killed in a car crash. He's spent six months travelling across the Pacific and on the last leg borrowed a boat from an Australia which has now finally brought him to the abandoned island of Eniwetok where the Americans carried out their atom bomb tests.
The small atoll is littered with rows of concrete bunkers, a network of concrete blocks, sunken lakes, figures of mannequins left out exposed to the blast and half melted. In this psychic zero zone he intends to stay and starve and die. He forages for the emergency rations left in the wrecks of the Superfortress bombers. There's a strip of shops and bars where the Americans used to do R&R. Everything is abandoned. No people are there.
In a premonition of the technique of The Atrocity Exhibition the text is divided into short passages of a few paragraphs each with a heading, such as The Corpses, the Blocks, The Terminal Bunker. He is seeking to escape from time. Time ceases to be linear. Time becomes quantised, passing in sudden discrete jumps. His wife and son appear to him, standing perfectly still and expressionless. He makes a bed out of dried-up American magazines from the derelict shops. One of them has a photo of a six-year-old girl in it and he cuts it out and pastes it to the wall of the squalid concrete bunker where he sleeps as time disintegrates.
A pair of biologists arrive on the island in a light aircraft. They have a temporary office and lab there where they carry out tests on the irradiated fauna. the old biologist, Osbourne, is tetchy with Traven for nicking their food. The young woman assistant (and pilot) sympathises with him when she hears about his dead wife and son. She warns him a naval party has been sent to catch and repatriate him. Traven easily eludes them and they give up, get drunk, and detonate one of the old petrol dumps.
At the 'climax' of the story Traven comes across the mummified corpse of a dead Japanese and after holding a Sam Beckett-style conversation with the dead man, hauls it on a makeshift sledge back to his bunker and ties it to a chair where it sits in the moonlight like a tutelary deity.
Earth is populated by the elderly, at least those who haven't yet died from its terminal pollution. Holliday, aged 22, is one of the few people left under the age of 50, everyone else has migrated to the colonies on Mars. The story is set in an abandoned seaside resort with its characteristically empty hotels. Holliday is holed up in the penthouse room of an abandoned hotel but he knows the foundations are rotting and it's sinking and also the sand is drifting up against it; soon he'll have to move (very like Paul Bridgman, the protagonist of the 1962 story, The Cage of Sand, who is holed up in a ruined hotel in a deserted holiday resort which is buried by slowly drifting Martian sand, but has to keep moving on.)
An emigration officer, Buller, is making his last rounds of Earth's few remaining occupied places, and is encouraging Holliday to leave the planet. The oceans have long retreated, consumed by mining processes that generated oxygen to terraform the colonised planets, leaving a residue of hydrogen which makes the former continents uninhabitable. Only in the former ocean depths can the last few humans survive (p.171).
Thus the old Atlantic Ocean has now shrunk to a remnant named Lake Atlantic, ten miles long and one mile wide, and thus it is that Holliday walks across what was once the ocean floor looking up at the hills which were once the Bahama islands. He feels some obscure compulsion to remain behind and 'keep watch over a forgotten earth'.
The huge launching platforms on which people transferred to the long-haul ships to Mars are mostly abandoned and hundreds of them are due to fall back into the atmosphere and to earth. Only two are left functional. It's now or never if he wants to leave.
As he chats to Granger in the Bar Neptune a launching platform crashes nearby and they decide to go and see it. It's smashed into one of the pools close to Lake Atlantic. The mere fact of being drained holds a powerful psychological hold on Ballard's imagination – puddles and pools where lakes and seas had been recur again and again, as in the drained lake at the start of The Drought.
It was here that Holliday and Granger discovered the fish, a two-foot-long dogfish (it's handy that Granger used to be a marine biologist with a memory of thirty years back, when the oceans had only been half drained). It's flopping as the water in its shallow lake drains away (water is always draining away) and so Holliday work hard for a couple of hours not only to shore the leaks but use their car to press the mud in closer to raise the water level to two feet deep so the fish can cruise around in style.
Tired and dirty, they drive back to the town, take showers, have a rest. Holliday is inspired, now, to stay on earth, he has something to live for, the fish is a symbol of the new life that can be created here. Which makes it all the more crushing when they drive back out to the ruined space platform and the pond the next morning and find three of the town's remaining teenagers (due to leave on the last spaceship out of town) have kicked breaches in the wall, emptied the pond of its water (water is always draining away) and amused themselves by stoning the dogfish to death.
Holliday had that very morning told Bullen he was not leaving on the last ships from earth, but was staying to guard its wildlife and its future, and now… Such is Homo sapiens – Homo interfector more like.
The Volcano Dances (1964)
A short short story, only 6 pages long. Charles Vandervell has rented a house on the side of a smouldering volcano, which he shares with his girlfriend Miss Gloria Watson. At night the fires illuminate the sky, during the day he pays a ragged shaman – the 'devil sticks man – who lives in caves across the road to dance to keep the volcano's might at bay. For a reason we never find out, Vandervell is obsessed that a friend or acquaintance or colleague named Springman has been here, and he asks the estate manager who comes to tell him to leave and the car hire men who come to reclaim the rented car, whether they've seen him.
Over the course of a few days Vandervell refuses all the pleas for him to leave, obsessing about this Springman, while the volcano becomes more and more active. One afternoon Gloria wakes to find him gone – up into the cone? She waits till five, then takes the cash from his jacket and drives down the mountain.
Billennium (1961)
In the future the world is horribly overcrowded. Not a square foot of countryside remains, it is all factory farming, while every metre of space in every building in the vast sprawling cities is carefully measured and allotted out. Ward and Rossiter club together to rent a poky little one room apartment when they make an amazing discovery – they can get access to a long-sealed-off whole attic space!
At first they frolic in the kind of open space no-one anywhere on the planet enjoys any more. Then one of the girls they fancy asks if she can move in, so they say yes and the two girls move in and they set up a partition. The girls would feel more comfortable if Judith's aunt could move in, too, as a sort of chaperone. Which she does.
Then they learn that Helen's mother is ill and Helen would really like her to move in, too, so she can look after her. Then Helen's father. All of them wanting partitions. At which point, right at the end of the story, Ward realises they now have less room per person than people renting the same space downstairs.
The moral of the story – that wherever people go and whatever they do, they will, through a hopeless, helpless kind of logic, screw up, poison and wreck whatever good they have – has stuck with me for the last forty years.
The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon (1964)
The Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci
A Gothic horror. After a minor eye injury became infected, Richard Maitland required surgery and bandages over his eyes for a month. His wife Judith accompanies him to his mother's house high on the banks of a river estuary leading down to the sea. Blindfolded, he is plagued by the sound of the thousands of gulls but even more by an increasingly urgent vision, of a walled house high on cliffs, which reminds him of the mysterious grotto behind the Virgin in the Leonardo painting. In his daydream he enters the caves at the foot of the cliffs and climbs stairs up through the eerie caverns, towards a tall, green-robed figure… the lamia.
Over the next few days he reverts to this image, he can't wait for his wife to stop fussing so he can return to it again and again, exploring the blue grottos down by the surf-wracked cliffs, and taking his time walking up those steps to confront that face.
When Dr Phillips tells him his bandages can come off in a few days and shoves a pencil flashlight in his face, it takes Maitland a few days to recover from the all-blotting daylight and retreat back into the blue grottos which emerge from the utter darkness of the blind.
And thus it is, that utterly transfixed by the power of the grottos and their Lady, when Dr Phillips finally removes the bandages and leaves Maitland with only a pair of sunglasses to protect his eyes… next morning Maitland makes a tour of his mother's garden, looks out over the river and the cliffs opposite and thinks how utterly dull and flat it is and so… in a sudden movement which synchronises or is triggered by the sudden eruption into the air of the thousands of gull, in an impulsive move he blinds himself and his wife hears his exultant yell of pain and triumph.
The story is short and has a powerful if, somehow, predictable arc. Ballard's achievement is to make you believe it, which rests on the haunting power he manages to pack into the descriptions of the blue caves. There's plot alright in these early stories but Ballard's ability at description which captures a mood is also vital.
This is an oddity, a detective story told in the calm, bachelor tones of Dr Watson writing up one of Sherlock Holmes's cases. Reminds you how utterly staid and jolly decent Ballard was, and how the decency of most of his characters is so tremendously at odds with the deranged situations and psychic states they find (or put) themselves in.
A priceless painting by Leonardo is stolen from the Louvre. The narrator, Charles, a director at Northeby's auction house (barely disguised parody of Sothebys) flies over to Paris to meet a French gallery owning friend. Over the coming weeks the friend, George de Stael, assembles the evidence for a mind-blowing suggestion: that the Leonardo is just the latest in a long line of depictions of the crucifixion which have been stolen over the past two hundred years, and in every case tampered with in a small way – the face of Ahasuerus, the Jew who allegedly insulted Jesus as he carried the cross towards Calvary, and who was as a result condemned to wander the earth forever – the Wandering Jew – well, this figure's faces has been altered to appear more saintly, mild and compassionate.
Is it possible, George suggests, that Europe's great paintings have been systematically stolen and the face repainted by the Wandering Jew himself, Ahasuerus, in a desperate bid to curry favour with He Who he Insulted.
Then comes a telegram from Georg saying he's spotted their man at an auction in Paris and Charles flies over in a hurry, and the pair give chase to the man who is now calling himself Count Enrique Daneliwicz, but who stays one step ahead of them, fleeing Paris for Spain and then emptying and abandoning the rented villa just before they get there, our dashing heroes just catching sight of him as their cars pass in the narrow lane to the villa, Ballard giving us an impressive description of this aged, weathered and despairing figure, dressed smartly in a pinstriped suit, a man who saw the Messiah in the flesh and has suffered for it for nearly 2,000 years.
A clever, eerie yarn but insofar as the narrator is a perfectly sane, balanced, successful man of the world, entirely unlike the characteristic Ballard protagonist who is usually going to pieces in a world overcome with decay.
As a collection, though, it's an impressive display of range and styles and voices, and contains four or five really timeless, hard-core Ballard classics.
Urban or exotic?
Ballard is often hailed as the poet laureate of a certain kind of urban alienation, yet a glance through these stories suggest he was almost the opposite of urban: virtually all of them are set in deeply exotic, non-urban locations. The only one actively set in London, he Lost Leonardo, is by far the most conservative in tone and subject:
A Question of Re-entry – Amazon jungle – RIVER
The Drowned Giant – unknown beach near a city – SEA
End-Game – East European villa – COUNTRY
The Illuminated Man – the Florida Everglades – RIVER
The Reptile Enclosure – a seaside resort – SEA
The Delta at Sunset – Central America – DRIED RIVER
The Terminal Beach – a Pacific island – SEA
Deep End – dried-up SEA
The Volcano Dances – Mexico – a VOLCANO
Billennium – a futuristic city – CITY
The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon – country house overlooking an estuary leading to the SEA
The Lost Leonardo – LONDON/PARIS/SPAIN
The Drowned World is set in a world overcome by sea. The Drought follows its desperate characters to the sea. Arguably Ballard is more the poet laureate of The Beach than of the City.
Ballard's Complete Short Stories volume 1 on Amazon
Ballard short story bibliography
Other science fiction reviews
Late Victorian
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen
1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the 'owner', Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of 'Cavorite' to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the 'little people'
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth's atmosphere and brings about 'the Great Change', inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by 'the Machine' until one of them rebels
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of 'crowdism'
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover…
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling 'history' of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the most sweeping vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet's new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like 'proles' and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about 'positronic' robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity's destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind's colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as 'the Mule'
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the Foundation Trilogy, which describes the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence, powered by 'spindizzy' technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them until one fireman, Guy Montag, rebels
1953 The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – a breathless novel set in a 24th century New York populated by telepaths and describing the mental collapse of corporate mogul Ben Reich who starts by murdering his rival Craye D'Courtney and becomes progressively more psychotic as he is pursued by telepathic detective, Lincoln Powell
1953 Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the 'Overlords' who arrive from space to supervise mankind's transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into 'Spacers' who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or 'caves of steel', and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov's science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fast-paced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard-man, Gulliver Foyle, is looking for revenge
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding novel of Blish's 'Okie' tetralogy in which mayor of New York John Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1959 The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – Winston Niles Rumfoord builds a space ship to explore the solar system where encounters a chrono-synclastic infundibula, and this is just the start of a bizarre meandering fantasy which includes the Army of Mars attacking earth and the adventures of Boaz and Unk in the caverns of Mercury
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Kerans is part of a UN mission to map the lost cities of Europe which have been inundated after solar flares melted the worlds ice caps and glaciers, but finds himself and his colleagues' minds slowly infiltrated by prehistoric memories of the last time the world was like this, complete with tropical forest and giant lizards, and slowly losing their grasp on reality.
1962 The Voices of Time and Other Stories – Eight of Ballard's most exquisite stories including the title tale about humanity slowly falling asleep even as they discover how to listen to the voices of time radiating from the mountains and distant stars, or The Cage of Sand where a handful of outcasts hide out in the vast dunes of Martian sand brought to earth as ballast which turned out to contain fatal viruses. Really weird and visionary.
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space-travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1962 Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut – the memoirs of American Howard W. Campbell Jr. who was raised in Germany and has adventures with Nazis and spies
1963 Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – what starts out as an amiable picaresque as the narrator, John, tracks down the so-called 'father of the atom bomb', Felix Hoenniker for an interview turns into a really bleak, haunting nightmare where an alternative form of water, ice-nine, freezes all water in the world, including the water inside people, killing almost everyone and freezing all water forever
1964 The Drought by J.G. Ballard – It stops raining. Everywhere. Fresh water runs out. Society breaks down and people move en masse to the seaside, where fighting breaks out to get near the water and set up stills. In part two, ten years later, the last remnants of humanity scrape a living on the vast salt flats which rim the continents, until the male protagonist decides to venture back inland to see if any life survives
1964 The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard – Ballard's breakthrough collection of 12 short stories which, among more traditional fare, includes mind-blowing descriptions of obsession, hallucination and mental decay set in the present day but exploring what he famously defined as 'inner space'
1964 Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter George – a novelisation of the famous Kubrick film, notable for the prologue written as if by aliens who arrive in the distant future to find an earth utterly destroyed by the events described in the main narrative
1966 Rocannon's World by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin's first novel, a 'planetary romance' or 'science fantasy' set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and 'starlord' Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the 'farborn' colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1966 – The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Sanders journeys up an African river to discover that the jungle is slowly turning into crystals, as does anyone who loiters too long, and becomes enmeshed in the personal psychodramas of a cast of lunatics and obsessives
1967 The Disaster Area by J.G. Ballard – Nine short stories including memorable ones about giant birds, an the man who sees the prehistoric ocean washing over his quite suburb.
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat's eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind's true history
1966 The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis –
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and 'retire' escaped 'andys' – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by 'inertials'. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen's inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undertake a gruelling trek across the planet's frozen north with the disgraced native lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut's breakthrough novel in which he manages to combine his personal memories of being an American POW of the Germans and witnessing the bombing of Dresden in the character of Billy Pilgrim, with a science fiction farrago about Tralfamadorians who kidnap Billy and transport him through time and space – and introduces the catchphrase 'so it goes'
1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I've ever read
1970 The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard – Ballard's best book, a collection of fifteen short experimental texts in stripped-down prose bringing together key obsessions like car crashes, mental breakdown, World War III, media images of atrocities and clinical sex
1971 Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard – nine short stories including Ballard's first, from 1956, most of which follow the same shape, describing the arrival of a mysterious, beguiling woman in the fictional desert resort of Vermilion Sands, the setting for extravagantly surreal tales of the glossy, lurid and bizarre
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that is dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George's powers to alter the world for the better with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world's plastic, leading to harum scarum escapades in disaster-stricken London
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it 'New Tahiti') and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1972 The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – a mind-boggling trio of novellas set on a pair of planets 20 light years away, the stories revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets' shape-shifting aboriginal inhabitants who murdered the first earth colonists and took their places so effectively that they have forgotten the fact and think themselves genuinely human
1973 Crash by J.G. Ballard – Ballard's most 'controversial' novel, a searingly intense description of its characters' obsession with the sexuality of car crashes, wounds and disfigurement
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1973 Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut's longest and most experimental novel with the barest of plots and characters allowing him to sound off about sex, race, America, environmentalism, with the appearance of his alter ego Kilgore Trout and even Vonnegut himself as a character, all enlivened by Vonnegut's own naive illustrations and the throwaway catchphrase 'And so on…'
1974 Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – the short and powerful novella in which an advertising executive crashes his car onto a stretch of wasteland in the juncture of three motorways, finds he can't get off it, and slowly adapts to life alongside its current, psychologically damaged inhabitants
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the 'ordinaries' and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything
1974 Inverted World by Christopher Priest – vivid description of a city on a distant planet which must move forwards on railway tracks constructed by the secretive 'guilds' in order not to fall behind the mysterious 'optimum' and avoid the fate of being obliterated by the planet's bizarre lateral distorting, a vivid and disturbing narrative right up until the shock revelation of the last few pages
1975 High Rise by J.G. Ballard – an astonishingly intense and brutal vision of how the middle-class occupants of London's newest and largest luxury, high-rise development spiral down from petty tiffs and jealousies into increasing alcohol-fuelled mayhem, disintegrating into full-blown civil war before regressing to starvation and cannibalism
1976 Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut – a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife
1979 The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard – a strange combination of banality and visionary weirdness as an unhinged young man crashes his stolen plane in suburban Shepperton, and starts performing magical acts like converting the inhabitants into birds, conjuring up exotic foliage, convinced his is on a mission to liberate them
1979 Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut – the satirical story of Walter F. Starbuck and the RAMJAC Corps run by Mary Kathleen O'Looney, a baglady from Grand Central Station, among other satirical notions including the new that Kilgore Trout, a character who recurs in most of his novels, is one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prison at the gaol where Starbuck serves a two year sentence, one Dr Robert Fender
1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – set in an England of 2035 after a) the oil has run out and b) a left-wing government left NATO and England was promptly invaded by the Russians – 'the Pacification', who have settled down to become a ruling class and treat the native English like 19th century serfs
1980 The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard – seven very early and often quite cheesy sci-fi short stories, along with a visionary satire on Vietnam (1969), and then two mature stories from the 1970s which show Ballard's approach sliding into mannerism
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the 'Golden Era' of the genre, basically the 1950s
1981 Hello America by J.G. Ballard – a hundred years from now an environmental catastrophe has turned America into a vast, arid desert, except for west of the Rockies which has become a rainforest of Amazonian opulence, and it is here that a ragtag band of explorers from old Europe discover a psychopath has crowned himself President Manson, has revived an old nuclear power station in order to light up Las Vegas, and plays roulette in Caesar's Palace to decide which American city to nuke next
1981 The Affirmation by Christopher Priest – an extraordinarily vivid description of a schizophrenic young man living in London who, to protect against the trauma of his actual life (father died, made redundant, girlfriend committed suicide) invents a fantasy world, the Dream Archipelago, and how it takes over his 'real' life
1982 Myths of the Near Future by J.G. Ballard – ten short stories showing Ballard's range of subject matter from Second World War China to the rusting gantries of Cape Kennedy
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – Gibson's stunning debut novel which establishes the 'Sprawl' universe, in which burnt-out cyberspace cowboy, Case, is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool, at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson's 'Sprawl' universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the 'Sprawl trilogy'
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a 'thriller' notable for Clarke's descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley's Comet and Europa
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson's 'Sprawl' trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall, who they plan to kidnap but is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero; while the daughter of a Japanese gangster who's sent her to London for safekeeping is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative version of history, Charles Babbage's early computer, instead of being left as a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population suppressed
Posted in America, Science Fiction, Short stories
Tagged A Question of Re-entry, Ahasuerus, Amazon jungle, Ballard, Bar Neptune, Billennium, Buller, Cape Canaverel, Captain Francis Spender, Captain Pereira, Charles Gifford, Charles Vandervell, Constantin, Count Enrique Daneliwicz, Deep End, Dr Richard Lowry, Echo satellite, Emerelda, End-Game, Eniwetok, futuristic, George de Stael, Goliath 7, Granger, Holliday, innate releasing mechanisms, Joseph Conrad, Judith Maitland, Lake Atlantic, Lieutenant Connolly, Louise Gifford, Malek, Maynard, mental illness, Miss Gloria Watson, obsession, Osbourne, psychosis, Richard Maitland, Roger Pelham, Rossiter, Ryker, science fiction, Sherrington, short stories, Springman, The Delta at Sunset, The Drowned Giant, the Florida Everglades, The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon, The Illuminated Man, The Lost Leonardo, the Nambikwara tribe, The Reptile Enclosure, the river Opotoka, The Terminal Beach, the Toltec, The Volcano Dances, The Wandering Jew, Traven, United Nations, Ward
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/01/26/the-terminal-beach-j-g-ballard/
My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl (1979)
'Is this exactly what happened?' Sir Charles asked me.
'Every word of it, sir, is the gospel truth,' I lied. (p.45)
Apart from his well-known children's novels, Dahl also wrote movie screenplays, TV scripts, and some fifty-four short stories for adults which appeared in various magazines throughout his career, the first in 1942, the last in 1988. It was these which formed the basis of the Tales of the Unexpected TV series I watched as a teenager in the 1970s.
My Uncle Oswald is his only full-length novel for adults, sort of. The fictional character of Oswald Hendryks Cornelius is described as:
'the connoisseur, the bon vivant, the collector of spiders, scorpions and walking sticks, the lover of opera, the expert on Chinese porcelain, the seducer of women, and without much doubt, the greatest fornicator of all time.'
He first appeared in two short stories, The Visitor and Bitch, first published in Playboy magazine and published in book form in the 1974 collection Switch Bitch, which I've reviewed.
It's no surprise that Uncle Oswald eventually had a novel devoted to him, indeed it's a surprise it took so long, he is such a garish, larger-than-life and transgressively monstrous creation.
As 'the greatest fornicator of all time', by the age of seventeen he's already 'had' some fifty English lovelies, and goes to stay in Paris, where he swives nubile French daughters (Madamoiselle Nicole), the wife of the British ambassador (Lady Makepiece) and an energetic Turkish gentlelady.
After you adjust to the bantering tone about sexual conquests and the deliberately obscene subject matter, you begin to realise that arguably the real appeal of the book is the deliberately dated and nostalgic setting. The nameless narrator claims to be quoting verbatim from scandalous Uncle Oswald's multi-volume diaries, specifically Volume XX, written in the 1938 when Oswald was 43 years old and much of the texture of the book is filled with young Oswald's appreciation for fine wine, gourmet meals, and very early motor cars.
Thus the opening sequence is set as long ago as 1912, during the pre-Great War imperial heyday, when a chap could still travel the world flourishing his big British passport.
1. The Sudanese Blister Beetle aphrodisiac (1912)
The first story tells how Uncle Oswald made his fortune by learning, from a disreputable relation of his, about the most powerful aphrodisiac in the world made from the ground shells of the Sudanese Blister Beetle. Inspired, he sets off himself to the Sudan where he does a deal with the head porter at his hotel to get a few bags full of the precious powder, and brings it back to Paris.
Here he is staying with friends of his posh father (William Cornelius, member of the Diplomatic Service) and sets up a little chemistry lab in the rooms he's been allotted, and proceeds to produce home-made aphrodisiac pills which, with an eye for marketing, he describes as products of a certain Professor Yousoupoff's secret formula (foreign names impress the gullible).
Put in summary form like this, you can see that – although the theme is supposedly pornographic, as Oswald couples with women tall and short, foreign and British – in fact the basic ideas and the childish way they're described ('the greatest fornicator in the world', 'the most powerful aphrodisiac known to man') are closely related to his children's books (Danny the Champion of the World, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), and so is the often funny and deliberately ludicrous way he describes his umpteen couplings:
'Were you ever a gym teacher?' I asked her.
'Shut up and concentrate,' she said, rolling me around like a lump of puff pastry. (p.34)
Also played for laughs is the conceit that Oswald is subject to vivid hallucinations while he is on the job – thus the second time he swives the nubile 19-year-old daughter of his hosts in Paris, we are treated to an extended and deliberately comic comparison of the whole thing to a medieval tournament, in which he appears as a knight in armour with an unusually long, firm lance and goes about his business to the enthusiastic cheers of the crowd – 'Thrust away, Sir Oswald! Thrust away!' (p.27)
There is also a good deal of humour at the expense of national stereotypes, especially in the dinner he gets invited to at the British Ambassador's residence in Paris, attended by ambassadors from Germany, Russia, Japan, Peru, Bulgaria and so on, each a lively cartoon version of their national stereotype from the short, ultra-polite Japanese to the gruff German with his thick accent. It is to this assembly of bemedalled men that Oswald first explains the nature of the powerful aphrodisiac he has discovered.
The little Mexican clapped his hands together hard and cried out, 'That is exactly how I wish to go when I die! From too much women!'
'From too much goats and donkeys iss more likely in Mexico,' the German ambassador snorted. (p.43)
When we are told (a bit later on) that a sexy young woman student he embroils in his schemes is named Yasmin Howcomely (p.90) we remember that Dahl worked on two movie adaptation of Ian Fleming novels – You Only Live Twice and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (the female lead of which is named Truly Scrumptious). And these connections made me see the gruff and candid German ambassador in this scene being played by the fabulous Gert Fröbe, who plays Goldfinger in the film of the same name, and the cartoon dictator, Baron Bomburst, in Chitty Chitty
Anyway, Oswald manages to enchant these rich VIPs with visions of the staying power afforded by his aphrodisiac pills and (very cannily) gives them each a free sample presented on a puff of cotton wool in a stylish little jewellery box. Soon they are coming back for more and he sells them for an outrageous amount (1,000 Francs) to the national ambassadors and, by word of mouth, to their fellow countrymen who come flocking.
So that's how wicked Uncle Oswald made his first fortune.
2. The freezing sperm scam (1919)
The Great War comes, Oswald serves his country and ends the war as a captain with a Military Cross. He goes up to Cambridge and studies Chemistry with a brilliant if rather shabby tutor, A.R. Woresley, whose moustache is coloured yellow by his pipe.
One evening, over a fine bottle of port (Oswald who is, as you might expect, a confident connoisseur of wines and spirits) Woresley tells him a cock and bull story about how he has carried out extensive experiments and perfected a method for freezing sperm, specifically bull sperm.
This is the pretext for a grotesque story about the tutor and his brother stealing the sperm of the prize bull of his brothers neighbouring farm, by taking along an in-heat cow one night, smuggling it into the field with the bull and, as the bull gets and erection and goes to cover the cow, instead manhandling his pizzle into a fake rubber cow vagina, which then captures the bull's ejaculate, with the tutor then getting onto his pushbike to wobble off along country lanes carrying a bag with a fake cow vagina full of bull semen back to the lab they've rigged up at his brother's farm complete with liquid nitrogen to freeze the semen.
(In case it wasn't obvious before, this story makes you realise the book is not intended as pornography, even soft pornography, but is instead a Rabelaisian satire on the whole preposterous subject of sex and its indignities and absurdities.)
Student Oswald goes home and lies in bed at night pondering the implications of his tutor's experiment and realising… there is a fortune to be made selling the frozen semen of Great Men and Geniuses to women who want to be the mothers of the children of Great Men.
He recruits a lively young filly from Girton – the half-Persian Yasmin Howcomely mentioned above – who is sex incarnate.
The plan is for her to seduce the great and the good, writers and discoverers and scientists, with a sideline in the kings of Europe – slipping them each a dose of beetle powder, then clapping a sturdy rubber johnny over their manhoods as they attain rutting speed, in which the precious spermatazoa can be collected, before she makes her excuses and dashes back to Uncle Oswald who'll be somewhere with the liquid nitrogen ready to pack and store the precious fluid.
What could possibly go wrong with such a hare-brained scheme?
The tutor thinks it can't possibly work, at which point Oswald – who loves a challenge – makes Woresley his first conquest, sending Yasmin to him, getting him to sign a form for her (supposed) autograph book, and then to eat a chocolate with the fateful beetle powder in it. From his concealed position Oswald watches while stuffy, staid old Woresely is transformed into a virile stud and ravishes young Yasmin, who manages to collect a rubber johnny full of his sperm. Next day Oswald brandishes a container of the sperm and his signature in the tutor's face. QED. Theory proved.
So they form a team and draw up a hit list of the Great Men of the age (an interesting list in itself). When it comes to the royals, Oswald reveals that he has faked introductory letters from King George V to all the crowned heads of Europe introducing Yasmin as an aristocratic lady in need of a private audience about a sensitive matter.
Imagine a particularly bawdy, not to say crude pantomime, and you have the spirit of the thing. The whole world of the arts and sciences is reviewed not in terms of achievement, but their potential spunk donations. The only snag is that the list of Great Men to be despunked includes some rather elderly ones that they worry might have a heart attack during the process.
'Now see here, Cornelius,' A.R. Woresley said. 'I won't be a party to the murder of Mr Renoir or Mr Manet. I don't want blood on my hands.'
'You'll have a lot of valuable sperm on your hands and that's all,' I said. 'Leave it to us.' (p.115)
Woresley will remain Cambridge, doing his day job but also setting up the permanent sperm bank, while Oswald and Howcomely tour Europe collecting the sperm of Great Men!
So they set off on a grand tour of Europe and the first king to be milked is King Alfonso of Spain who, we discover (in this scandalous fiction at any rate), has a clockwork sofa which moves up and down and so does all the hard work for him while he remains more or less motionless 'as befits a king'. Yasmin bounces out of the palace a few hours later with a johnny full of royal sperm and Oswald motors her back to the hotel where he's set up a small lab to mix it with preservative, and then freeze it in liquid nitrogen.
And that sets the pattern for the following fifty or so pages. Next up is 76-year-old Renoir who is confined to a wheelchair, but still manages to deliver the goods and who leaves Yasmin in raptures about his greatness.
Followed by: Monet, Stravinsky, Picasso, Matisse, Proust (for whom Yasmin dresses like and pretends to be a boy, the seduction treated like a Whitehall farce), Nijinsky, Joyce, and then Puccini in his Italian villa – in the moonlight by the lake where Oswald prepares Yasmin by teaching her one of the maestro's favourite arias. Thus when she starts singing it outside his window, Puccini is smitten, and swiftly has his way with her, but is charming and amusing and courteous.
Compare and contrast with Sigmund Freud, who admits this troubled young lady to his consulting rooms who promptly gives him a chocolate (laced with the aphrodisiac), the whole encounter a broad satire on Freud (who Dahl obviously despises).
And so on. It might have seemed a funny idea at the time but this litany of encounters with famous men soon pales, not least because the pattern is the same time – Yasmin introduces herself, offers them a chocolate spiked with beetle dust and precisely 9 minutes later they are stricken with untamable lust, she pops a rubber johnny over their member, then lets herself be ravished, then finds some way to extricate herself (sometimes being forced to use a hatpin to jolt the man off her) before rushing outside to hand the johnny full of Great Man sperm over to Oswald, who motors them both back to his hotel room where he mixes it with a preservative, secretes it into tooth-pick thin straws (a convenient way of dividing up the sperm), then pops these into the cabinet of liquid nitrogen.
In Berlin they harvest Albert Einstein – the only one of the victims to smell a rat – and then worthy-but-dull Thomas Mann, before returning to Cambridge to deposit the straws of frozen semen at the master vat kept by Dr Woresley. And then an English tour taking in Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and an extended passage satirising pompous, opinionated, dray-as-dust vegetarian George Bernard Shaw.
I suppose a lot of the pleasure of the book is meant to come from a) the outrageousness of the central premise, compounded by b) satirical portraits of various great men, plus c) the comic vulgarity of the actual sexual descriptions, which often sound like a grown-up children's story. Of the encounter with George Bernard Shaw:
'There's only one way when they get violent,' Yasmin said. 'I grabbed hold of his snozzberry and hung on to it like grim death and gave it a twist or two to make him hold still.'
'Ow.'
'Very effective.'
'I'll bet it is.'
'You can lead them around anywhere you want like that.'
'I'm sure.'
'It's like putting a twitch on a horse.' (p.182)
In the book's closing passages Oswald and Yasmin embark on another European tour, milking the kings of Belgium, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Denmark, Sweden but are finally brought up short with the king of Norway (the country of Dahl's parents). For here Yasmin makes her first mistake and is merrily badmouthing the King of England and even pointing out the queen's lovers, all on the basis that the beetle powder will kick in and transform the king when… the beetle powder kicks in on her. She has taken the wrong chocolate! She tries to jump on king Haakon and ravish him but he has his guard throw her out, where she reports all to Oswald and they decide to make a quick getaway to Sweden and so back to Cambridge.
And here the partnership falls apart. Yasmin has had enough, and who can blame her. Oswald wants to press on to America – Henry Ford, Edison, Alexander Graham Bell – but Yasmin insists on a month long break and says she's going to stay with an uncle in Scotland.
They agree to reconvene in a month's time and Oswald buys tickets on the Mauretania to sail to the States. Then he goes on a massive bender in London, bedding a different member of the aristocracy every night. Until a terrible day. He is dallying in the bath with a duchess who decides she's had enough and wants to go home. Oswald is unwisely rude to her and she – having got out the bath, dried and got dressed – contrives to lean over the bath and play with his parts while secretly removing the bath plug. Result: there is a sudden tremendous suction of water and Oswald's goolies are sucked down the hole. His screams of agony can be heard all across Mayfair! Which leads him to warn us against aristocratic women or, as he puts it in a long-cherished motto:
Ladies with titles
Will go for your vitals
It takes weeks to recover and he is still hobbling with swollen privates when he arrives back in Cambridge at old Woresley's house to discover a note pinned to the door. They've scarpered! Yasmin has married Worsely! And they've done a bunk with all the Great Men sperm. All except Proust that is, who Yasmin didn't take to at all.
Oswald goes mad and trashes Woresley's house, demolishing every single piece of furniture. Then conceives his final plan. On the last page of the book he tells us how he finally made his fortune. He goes back out to Sudan and buys up the entire area where the rare Blister beetle breeds, sets up plantations with native labour and builds a refining factory in Khartoum. He establishes secret sales operations in the world's leading cities (New York, London, Paris etc)
There is some last-minute throwaway satire on generals, for Oswald discovers that retired generals are his best sales agents. Why? Because there are retired generals in every country; they are efficient; they are unscrupulous; they are brave; they have little regard for human life; and they are not intelligent enough to cheat him.
If you add this to the page or so satirising aristocratic ladies a few pages earlier, it confirms your sense that, although the theme of the book is sex, its real purpose is to be a scattergun, blunderbus satire against all respectable values, people and institutions.
Kings, queens, aristocrats, inventors, Oxbridge dons, men and women all come in for Uncle Oswald's robust, take-no-prisoners attitude. It is a bracing and hilarious read and like many an older satire, if the narrative structure, if the 'plot', feels patched together and made up as he goes along, that, too, is part of the satirical intent.
If the reader was expecting anything remotely serious or dignified or carefully planned, then the joke is on us, too.
My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl was published by Michael Joseph Ltd in 1979. All references are to the 1980 Penguin paperback edition.
My Uncle Oswald on Amazon
My Uncle Oswald page on the Roald Dahl website
Related review
Switch Bitch (1974) by Roald Dahl
by Simon on December 28, 2019 • Permalink
Posted in Books, Comedy, Novel
Tagged 1912, A.R. Woresley, Albert Einstein, aphrodisiac, Arthur Conan Doyle, Baron Bomburst, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cambridge, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, comedy, Denmark, Freud, George Bernard Shaw, Gert Fröbe, Girton College, Goldfinger, Greece, H.G. Wells, Ian Fleming, Italy, Joseph Conrad, Joyce, Khartoum, King George V, King Haakon, Kipling, Lady Makepiece, Madamoiselle Nicole, Manet, Matisse, Nijinsky, Norway, Oswald Hendryks Cornelius, Picasso, Professor Yousoupoff, Proust, Puccini, Rabelais, Renoir, Romania, satire, sex, Stravinsky, Sudan, Sweden, the Great War, the Sudanese Blister Beetle, Truly Scrumptious, Uncle Oswald, Yasmin Howcomely, You Only Live Twice, Yugoslavia
Posted by Simon on December 28, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/12/28/my-uncle-oswald-roald-dahl/
The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton (1904)
In his prime, between 1910 and into the 1930s, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was a hugely successful 'writer, poet, philosopher, dramatist, journalist, orator, lay theologian, biographer, and literary and art critic'.
He wrote a vast amount of essays, reviews, columns, articles and literary criticism – notably helping a revival of interest in Dickens with his 1906 biography of the great man – and also wrote extensively about religion, leading up to his own conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1922.
Probably Chesterton's most enduring legacy is the 53 Father Brown detective stories published between 1910 and 1936, which are regularly dramatised for TV or radio. His next most famous works are probably the novels The Man Who Was Thursday, and The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
Edwardian humour
The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a comic novel, full of satire and high spirits, not all of which are easily understandable. Some of the incidental humour is pretty laboured and dated.
For example, book three (of five) opens with an extended satire on the kind of poetry published around 1904 and the kind of criticism it received, in the form of an extended joke about a volume of poetry, Hymns on the Hill. This fictional book of poetry is described as being reviewed by the king, no less, who uses the pseudonym 'Thunderbolt' and is described as being a member of the so-called 'Hammock' school of criticism. This 'hammock' school of criticism gets its name because so many of their reviews start by referring to the great pleasure the book brought the reviewer as he lazed in his hammock on a seasonal summer's afternoon.
I understand how this is a gentle satire on the state of literary criticism circa 1904, and it is sort of funny, in its way, but it requires a bit of effort to cast your mind back to that kind of era and worldview.
Similarly, book one opens with a chapter satirising the fashion for 'prophecies of the future' which were so popular in Chesterton's day and which is obviously designed to skewer not only H.G. Wells – by then the leader of a whole school of scientific prophecy – but all the other prophets of socialism and pacifism and vegetarianism and so on which proliferated at the turn of the century. Chesterton mocks them all by describing their prophetic predictions, and then extending them to ludicrous extremes.
Then, having itemised all the individual prophets and their foibles, Chesterton demolishes the lot with one grand fictional gesture. Which is to make this novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, another grand social prophecy, to set it in the far distant remote year of 1984, and then to assert the simple fact that, contrary to all the predictions of all the so-called prophets… nothing whatsoever has changed!
All the great catastrophes and collapses and social revolutions predicted by the prophets… have failed to transpire.
For, as Chesterton writes, with a broad smile on his face, the people – the uneducated, uninterested masses – have listened to the Great Prophets, have read their books and articles and… ignored them, and just got on with their lives.
They have played the traditional game which Chesterton puckishly names 'Cheat the Prophet', with the result that:
When the curtain goes up on this story, eighty years after the present date, London is almost exactly like what it is now.
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
In fact the England of 1984 is a despotism but in the nicest possible way. Democracy has faded into the rule of one man, a titular 'king', overseeing committees of efficient civil servants. But there have been no devastating wars, society carries on much as it always has, chaps still wear frock coats and top hats, ladies wear elaborate Victorian dresses with corsets and bustles, horse-drawn hansom cabs rumble through the streets. The only change that concerns us is that the ruler of the country, the so-called 'king', is chosen at random, from a long list of eligible citizens.
In the first couple of pages we are introduced to a trio of young men – the Honourable James Barker ('one of the most powerful officials in the English Government'), Wilfrid Lambert (a 'youth with a nose which appears to impoverish the rest of his face', 'a fool') and their short friend Auberon Quin, who:
had an appearance compounded of a baby and an owl. His round head, round eyes, seemed to have been designed by nature playfully with a pair of compasses.
Some of the early incidents, before the story really gets going and taking up several chapters – are offputtingly inexplicable. In one they bump into the exiled President of Nicaragua in Whitehall, and watch as he goes to mad extremes to recreate the flag of his lost country – first sourcing the colour yellow by tearing a rip in an advertising hoarding for Coleman's mustard, then the colour red by plunging a knife into his own hand and staining a handkerchief red. After spouting much inconsequential Latin fieriness, the ex-President walks proudly off into the night never to be met again. I found this scene incomprehensible.
Quin, Lambert and Barker are strolling through Kensington Gardens one fine day, Quin infuriating the other two with his latest tom-fool idea which is that the secret of humour is telling elaborate stories which don't have a point. He is just sticking his head between his legs and making a cow noise when… two equerries walk up and announce that the new King of England, picked by random lot is…. Quin! He will be King Auberon!
While the other two go pale with horror, Quin preens and plumes himself and struts around.He wanders up into Notting Hill, where a serious little boy wearing a toy knight in armour costume, prods him in the tummy with a wooden sword, whereat Quin very seriously tells the young man he must defend his home turf, the Hill of Notting, with all his strength and honour, before strolling off dispensing similar 'advice' to puzzled passersby.
But this brief encounter with the little boy sets Quin thinking. What if he used his power to make the rulers of all of London's boroughs wear medieval armour and halberds and…? And so when his friend Barker visits 'his majesty' a few days later, he finds Quin on the floor surrounded by poster paints, playfully sketching out new coats of arms and coloured standards for each of the 32 London boroughs.
The King was happy all that morning with his cardboard and his paint-box. He was engaged in designing the uniforms and coats-of-arms for the various municipalities of London. They gave him deep and no inconsiderable thought. He felt the responsibility. (Book 2, chapter 2)
As the last sentence indicates, the whole thing is told with an amused, tongue-in-cheek drollery.
Cut to ten years later: Quin is still King Auberon and still the joker. the 32 London boroughs really have become self-governing fiefdoms and all their officials forced to wear the ridiculous cod-medieval outfits Quin has designed for them.
One day a building developer ('Mr Buck, the abrupt North Kensington magnate') comes to complain about delays in getting a new road and housing development which he is managing. It is intended to go from Hammersmith up through Notting Hill and beyond but the rulers of Notting Hill are being obstructive. Soon he is joined by the Provosts of West Kensington and so on – all dressed in the ceremonial costumes which Quin still childishly insists they all wear, announced by medieval pages and so on.
They're all complaining to Quin about the hold-ups and delays blocking the project, and the costs and the overheads and profit margins, when a remarkable thing happens — the Provost of Notting Hill arrives and, at a stroke, reveals that he takes all Quin's nonsense about medieval pageantry perfectly seriously!
He speaks medieval phraseology as if he means it. He says 'my liege' and 'my honour' and waves his doughty sword and generally takes Quin's silly joke at face value.
'I bring homage to my King. I bring him the only thing I have – my sword.'
And with a great gesture he flung it down on the ground, and knelt on one knee behind it.
There was a dead silence.
'I beg your pardon,' said the King, blankly.
Stunned, Quin looks closer and realises this chap is none other than the little boy who prodded him in the tummy with a toy sword ten years earlier. His name is Adam Wayne and now, aged 19, he announces that he is prepared to defend the Hill of Notting to the death! Well, well.
The novel then tells us something about Adam Wayne's character. Never having been out of London – or even Notting Hill – he is a genuine modernist, in the sense that he finds poetic beauty in the urban landscape, finds fairyland in railings and gas lamps and hansom cabs, and in the silhouette of terraced houses against the night sky. (This is, again, satire on what Chesterton takes to be the absurd pretentiousness of modernist poets and writers.)
Above all Wayne takes absolutely seriously the notion that Notting Hill is a precious land, worthy of his patriotism, worthy of defending.
In a comic sequence we are shown Wayne canvassing opinion among the shop-keepers on Notting Hill, visiting a grocer's, a chemist's, a barber's, an old curiosity shop and a toy-shop. The comic premise is simple: Wayne enters each shop and speaks the 15th-century register of patriotism and heroism and defending the Hill – and the (generally) short, round, balding shop-keepers are comically nonplussed.
(It's interesting to learn just how long short, irascible shopkeepers have been a reliable staple of English humour – from H.G. Wells's numerous retailers [I've just read about Bert Smallways, keeper of a bicycle hire shop in The War In The Air] to Jones the butcher in Dad's Army and Arkwright in Open All Hours, the blustering, bumbling shopkeeper is a comic staple.)
Anyway, Wayne meets with predictable, and comic, incomprehension until he comes to the sweet and toy shop of Mr Turnbull, who stuns him by revealing that, in his spare time, he plays wargames with his lead soldiers and – has even built a model of Notting Hill which he uses to play wargames!
What a find! A man after Wayne's own heart!
The Pump Street fight
Anyway, the Provosts of the boroughs affected by Wayne's refusal to let the new road development cut up through Notting Hill put their case before King Auberon for his approval. Specifically the plans call for the demolition of a few buildings in Pump Street. Wayne says no. Led by Buck, the businessmen offer Wayne three times the properties' value. But Wayne refuses point blank to see any part of his kingdom despoiled, and leaves the meeting.
At which point Buck and the other speculators say they will simply send men in to knock down the buildings, halbardiers from each of the allied boroughs, Wayne or no Wayne – and the king sadly acquiesces. He had intended to create fun, frivolity and fantasy, and now it's all got a little out of hand.
The king has only just moved on to begin a champagne dinner, arranged by servants in Kensington Gardens, when things really do get out of hand.
He hears the sound of shouting, footsteps running closer, and then – to his and his courtiers' astonishment – wounded halberdiers come running and stumbling from Notting Hill, beating down a flimsy wall which separates Kensington Gardens from the public thoroughfare and then, in the gap, appears a god-like figure, blazoned with light – it is Adam Wayne, General of the army of Notting Hill!
A dazed Barker (one of Quin's friends who we met back at the start of the book), who had been involved in the battle, stumbles south to High Street Kensington where he bumps into the entrepreneur Buck closing up his shop, and tells him what has happened.
Buck is immediately on his mettle, rallies the Provosts of all the nearby London boroughs, quickly assembles a few hundred soldiers from each of them, and leads them on a march converging on Pump Street, which has now become the symbolic epicentre of the war.
But the Notting Hillers take control of the nearby gasworks and turn off the gas supply to the streetlamps, plunging all the roads into darkness. Intimately familiar with their home turf, the Hillers launch devastating attacks, genuinely hurting, maiming and killing their opponents.
Chesterton manages to gloss over the seriousness of injury and death, instead inserting writing a funny chapter where King Auberon storms into the offices of his favourite newspaper, The Court Journal. Here he terrorises the editor into giving him huge placards to write incendiary headlines on, and then sets about concocting an entirely fictional description of the battle – in the manner of a modern newspaper – presumably this is all satire on journalism and newspapers' readiness simply to invent the stuff they print – when real eye witnesses to the fighting, Barker and Buck, stumble into the offices.
Immediately the whimsical king nominates himself Foreign Correspondent to the paper and sets off 'for the front', in his usual, comically histrionic style:
'I have an idea,' he said. 'I will be an eye-witness. I will write you such letters from the Front as will be more gorgeous than the real thing. Give me my coat, Paladium. I entered this room a mere King of England. I leave it, Special War Correspondent of the Court Journal. It is useless to stop me, Pally; it is vain to cling to my knees, Buck; it is hopeless, Barker, to weep upon my neck. "When duty calls"… the remainder of the sentiment escapes me.'
There follows an increasingly complex description of the various battles now being fought across the borough, which climax with man-to-man fighting around the waterworks on Campden Hill.
Meanwhile Buck has sent for reinforcements from the further-flung London boroughs, who have all promptly sent a few hundred men each. He now has a substantial force at his disposal. During a lull in the battle Buck sends an emissary to Wayne pointing out that they now outnumber the Notting Hillers by ten to one. In the manner of confident business men he makes a bet with the king that Wayne will promptly surrender. The king suspects not.
And is proved correct when an emissary from Wayne arrives, arrayed in full medieval gear, and blandly asks the assembled army of the boroughs to surrender.
Buck and his entourage burst out laughing, what a preposterous idea. But the emissary goes on to point out that Wayne has secured Campden Hill reservoir and, if a surrender is not given in ten minutes, will open it, flooding and drowning the entire army which is standing in the valley below.
Astonished, Buck realises they will have to surrender. The mischievous king is delighted with this turn of events. And so the Empire of Notting Hill commences.
Now the novel cuts to twenty years later. Notting Hill is an empire to which the other London boroughs pay obeisance. It is entered via nine huge, elaborately carved gateways on which are depicted events from the battle for Independence.
King Auberon is walking its quiet and amazingly prosperous streets. He notes how the five shopkeepers who Wayne visited all those years ago now rule over colourful emporia and use the elaborate diction of medieval merchants. In fact Wayne's victory is not so much a military conquest of the rest of the London as the discovery that everyone turned out to want to live a life of medieval colour and romance, to want more than the simple Edwardian money-grubbing. Dressing and speaking as medieval burghers and courtiers turns out to be surprisingly liberating.
The king bumps into Barker, who begins explaining that the men of Kensington sometimes get exasperated by the Notting Hillers' lordliness when… the lights abruptly go out. A local inhabitant tells our puzzled protagonists that this happens every year on the anniversary of the Great Battle. Then the Hillers start singing a martial song of victory — and this pushes the ever-touchy Barker over the edge. He grabs a sword, yells 'South Kensington' and leaps at passing revellers. Some of the other passersby turn out to be from other London boroughs, and join in. From nowhere appears Buck, leader of the allied boroughs in the earlier war and so soon there is a massive battle taking place… again.
And these final pages are odd, strange and puzzling. One of the reasons I read older books is because they come from a foreign country, where lots if not most of the assumptions are different – about society, class, technology, gender, race, about language itself – and you find yourself being brought up dead on every page by words, expressions, ideas, things taken for granted by the author and their Edwardian readers which we, a hundred years later, find outlandish or inexplicable – all of which force the modern reader to stop and rethink their prejudices, values and opinions.
I find this approach much more challenging than reading modern fiction, which mostly just confirms our current liberal pieties. It is more bracing to be challenged.
In these last passages the reader is really challenged.
Chesterton descends into a kind of romantic fugue state, the battle becomes a vision of romantic fighting from the period of King Arthur, all swords and halberds, and quickly relinquishes all contact with reality.
At the climax of the battle Wayne stands with his back against a huge old oak tree, symbolic of deep English character. Repeated waves of attackers can't separate him from it until, in finally pulling him from it, they only manage in pulling the whole tree up by its roots, which promptly falls onto the crowd of soldiers killing all of them.
This is obviously a hugely symbolic moment but… symbolic of what, exactly?
I read in the introduction to the book that Chesterton was criticised, then and now, for glorifying war, for thinking of war as a redeeming cleansing activity. For example, critics quote King Auberon musing as he walks round the empire of Notting Hill:
'Old Wayne was right in a way,' commented the King. 'The sword does make things beautiful.'
But the use of the word 'sword' immediately reveals that Chesterton is not really thinking about war as such. The book was written in the aftermath of the Boer War with its barbed wire, concentration camps and machine guns which had very much dominated British culture. No fool glamorises that kind of war. The key is given by the king's very next remark:
'It has made the whole world romantic…'
The book doesn't glamorise war, it praises the life-enhancing qualities of medieval romance – while at the same time richly satirising it. The book tries to have its cake and eat it. Right up until the end, when something much stranger happens.
This strangeness reaches a new height in the very last chapter – titled 'Two Voices' – when out of the ruins and grim silence at the end of the last battle, from out of the darkness of the night amid the landscape ruined with corpses, arise two voices.
I've read the chapter twice but still don't really understand what they're saying. It seems to be a sort of conservative hymn to the notion of undying, unchanging values.
'If all things are always the same, it is because they are always heroic. If all things are always the same, it is because they are always new. To each man one soul only is given; to each soul only is given a little power – the power at some moments to outgrow and swallow up the stars. If age after age that power comes upon men, whatever gives it to them is great. Whatever makes men feel old is mean – an empire or a skin-flint shop. Whatever makes men feel young is great – a great war or a love-story.
'And in the darkest of the books of God there is written a truth that is also a riddle. It is of the new things that men tire – of fashions and proposals and improvements and change. It is the old things that startle and intoxicate. It is the old things that are young. There is no sceptic who does not feel that many have doubted before. There is no rich and fickle man who does not feel that all his novelties are ancient.
'There is no worshipper of change who does not feel upon his neck the vast weight of the weariness of the universe. But we who do the old things are fed by nature with a perpetual infancy. No man who is in love thinks that any one has been in love before. No woman who has a child thinks that there have been such things as children. No people that fight for their own city are haunted with the burden of the broken empires. Yes, O dark voice, the world is always the same, for it is always unexpected.'
The text then takes on a theological tone. Suppose he is God, says one voice, and he made the whole universe as a joke, as a jeu d'esprit, knocked it off for his own amusement and then forgot about it.
At which point dawn begins to lighten the eastern sky (with rather crashing symbolism) and one of the two voices is revealed as that of King Auberon and the other, that of Wayne.
'Wayne,' says the king, 'it was all a joke. I meant it as a joke.' 'Then that makes it all the more real,' says Wayne.
All criticism of Chesterton sooner or later mentions his fondness for paradoxes, for the unexpected, for reversals. And that's what happens here. Somehow, the very fact that the entire premise of the story was one man's childish joke — makes its unintended consequences all the more profound and serious.
Wayne says it doesn't matter what motivated Auberon: all that matters is that the two of them – the two poles of human nature – the over-satirical and the over-earnest – came together to restore humanity to the poetic way of life, vision and diction which it deserves.
It isn't war as such: it is the romance of human life which Chesterton is asserting, in this strange visionary conclusion to what had been, up until these last few pages, a fairly easy-to-assimilate satire.
'I know of something that will alter that antagonism, something that is outside us, something that you and I have all our lives perhaps taken too little account of. The equal and eternal human being will alter that antagonism, for the human being sees no real antagonism between laughter and respect, the human being, the common man, whom mere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god.
'When dark and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure fanatic, the pure satirist. We have between us remedied a great wrong. We have lifted the modern cities into that poetry which every one who knows mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the commonplace.
'But in healthy people there is no war between us. We are but the two lobes of the brain of a ploughman. Laughter and love are everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the child, the lover laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friend at the friend.
'Auberon Quin, we have been too long separated; let us go out together. You have a halberd and I a sword, let us start our wanderings over the world. For we are its two essentials. Come, it is already day.'
In the blank white light Auberon hesitated a moment. Then he made the formal salute with his halberd, and they went away together into the unknown world.
As I say, I read older books because they are so often challenging, not because of their plots or characters, but because of ideological or political or theological or cultural assumptions which underly them are so often hard to understand or sympathise with. Making the effort to do so, in my opinion, whether you agree with them or not (indeed, whether you completely understand them or not) expands your mind.
Better than TV. Better than movies. Better than drugs.
A hint of modernism
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Thus T.S. Eliot wrote in The Waste Land, published in 1922 but much of it written much earlier. Accidie and world-weariness were clearly common feelings among Edwardian writers – passages in Conrad and Wells spring to mind – and I was struck how vivid and forceful the same feeling appears in Chesterton.
He is eloquent on the sheer oppressive boredom of London's long, blank streets. Adam Wayne is a figure of fun, but in his innocence he often speaks truth:
'I sometimes wondered how many other people felt the oppression of this union between quietude and terror. I see blank well-ordered streets and men in black moving about inoffensively, sullenly. It goes on day after day, day after day, and nothing happens; but to me it is like a dream from which I might wake screaming. To me the straightness of our life is the straightness of a thin cord stretched tight. Its stillness is terrible. It might snap with a noise like thunder.'
Maybe it was Tennyson who introduced this mood of specifically urban despair into English poetry. Here's a lyric from his long, desolate poem In Memoriam, commemorating his best friend who died young.
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
A hand that can be clasp'd no more –
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
Dickens knew that long bald street, and so did Chesterton.
The blank white morning had only just begun to break over the blank London buildings when Wayne and Turnbull were to be found seated in the cheerless and unswept shop.
Blankness upon blankness. And:
'I have walked along a street with the best cigar in the cosmos in my mouth, and more Burgundy inside me than you ever saw in your life, and longed that the lamp-post would turn into an elephant to save me from the hell of blank existence.'
So although most of the book bubbles with (sometimes incomprehensible) satire and good humour, and then metamorphoses into a hymn to medievalism – nonetheless, not far from the surface and bubbling up in random locations, is Chesterton's awareness of the bleak boredom of city life.
The Napoleon of Notting Hill online
Review of The Man Who Was Thursday
by Simon on November 22, 2018 • Permalink
Posted in Books, Comedy, Fantasy, Novel
Tagged 1904, 1984, Adam Wayne, Auberon Quin, Buck, Campden Hill, Chesterton, comedy, Dad's Army, Dickens, Father Brown, G.K. Chesterton, H.G. Wells, Hammersmith, humour, James Barker, Joseph Conrad, metaphysical, North Kensington, Open All Hours, President of Nicaragua, Roman Catholicism, T.S. Eliot, Tennyson, The Court Journal, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The War in the Air, The Waste Land, theology, West Kensington, Wilfrid Lambert
Posted by Simon on November 22, 2018
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/11/22/the-napoleon-of-notting-hill-g-k-chesterton/
The Food of the Gods, and How It Came To Earth by H.G. Wells (1904)
Bensington drank that delight of human fellowship that comes to happy armies, to sturdy expeditions – never to those who live the life of the sober citizen in cities.
Science fantasies
In numerous interviews, prefaces and articles H.G. Wells explained the strategy behind his 'scientific fantasies'. The idea was to take one big, reasonably scientific idea and develop it to extremes in a world which, in all other respects, remains perfectly ordinary and mundane.
Thus in The War of The Worlds the Martians travel across the solar system and arrive in… Dorking. In The Time Machine the traveller visits the ruins of a future civilisation in… what was once Richmond-upon-Thames.
In the same way, almost all of this garish fantasy happens in rural Kent, described with loving humour and social satire which often threatens to eclipse the main science fiction narrative.
Wells's development
There's a fairly obvious development in Wells's output: right at the very beginning (1895) he was exploding with cracking science fiction ideas which he set down in a tearing hurry in short stories and novellas which use the minimum literary devices necessary.
But after only a few years, by the turn of the century, he'd become interested in doing more than just tell a ripping yarn. He began writing novels about love and social comedy (Kipps, Love and Mr Lewisham) and was also acutely aware that a number of his contemporaries were experimenting with literary ideas. In particular, Wells followed Henry James and Joseph Conrad's experiments with different types of narrator, seeing what kind of light it sheds on a story to be told by a limited, obtuse or unreliable narrator, to use frame narratives, and so on.
By 1904, when he published The Food of the Gods and How It Came To Earth, Wells was well into this later phase and the book suffers terribly because of it.
The executive summary is: a pair of doddery 'scientists', Mr Bensington and Professor Redwood, discover a form of alkaloid which stimulates growth in all organic life forms. They tentatively experiment with baby chicks on a farm they hire in Kent but the chemical – Herakleophorbia IV – quickly gets into the environment, producing giant ants, wasps and rats which attack local rural types and interrupt the vicar's croquet party, in scenes of broad social satire.
But the scientists also give it to humans. Redwood gives it to his baby son while a doctor friend slips it to the new baby of a foreign Royal Family which he's treating. And a doughty, macho engineer, Cossar, who helps them put down the infestation of giant rats and wasps in Kent, also feeds it to his three baby boys.
The result is that a) around Britain, and then further afield around the world, leaking packs of Herakleophorbia IV transform the environment, creating giant flora and fauna, grass like trees, flowers like rainforests, insects the size of horses, and b) a cohort of giant young people come to maturity some 20 years after the initial discovery and become impatient with a world run by 'little people'.
The climax of the novel comes when a political leader, Caterham, comes to power on the back of concerns about the wrecking of the environment and by stirring up anger against the handful of 'giants'.
These 'giants' – the three Cossar brothers, Redwood's son, the grandson of the old couple who the scientists set to manage their farm in Kent, and who they secretly fed Herakleophorbia IV (named Caddles), and the princess from the foreign royal family who comes to join them – have grown increasingly resentful as they are hemmed in to a smaller and smaller 'reservation' in Kent or – in the case of Redwood's son and the princess – when the powers that be tell them they are not 'allowed' to fall in love (as they are doing) — these giants rebel.
In a colourful and weird scene the giant Caddles storms up to London where he finds himself straddling Piccadilly, beset by thousands of gawping onlookers and angrily chastised by Lilliputian policemen. After a prolonged chase Caddles settles in a garden in Highgate where he refuses to move and is eventually attacked by the army, killing quite a few riflemen before himself dying.
This death prompts all-out war between giants and humans. Wells gets round the details of the actual fighting by having the whole thing be described at one remove through the worries and speculations of the (by now) old inventor Redwood, who is placed under house arrest by Caterham's new government, but can hear the bangs of artillery and see the night sky lit by flares and explosions.
After a few days of captivity Redwood is released and taken to see Prime Minister Caterham who explains that the normal-sized people's initial attacks on the giants have resulted in stalemate. Some giants have been killed (though not the five or so key ones I've listed above) and lots of normal sized troops.
More devastatingly, the giants have been using artillery which they have constructed to fire canisters of Herakleophorbia IV far and wide, trying to biologically engineer a new, giant, ecosystem to suit them.
The Prime Minister asks Redwood to undertake a mission to the giants' fortress in Kent, to offer a truce and a deal. The giants will be sent to a 'reservation'anywhere in the world they want, to live out their lives as they see fit – but must not reproduce and must stop showering Herakleophorbia IV everywhere.
Redwood agrees and goes to see them, walking perilously across no-man's-land to the giants' base. But the giants reject the deal.
In the final scene, the leader, Cossar's eldest son, says that growth is the law of nature – the death of the old, the birth of the new – and that giants will inherit the earth come what may, as part of the never-ending process which will carry the human race towards complete knowledge of the universe.
'It is not that we would oust the little people from the world,' he said, 'in order that we, who are no more than one step upwards from their littleness, may hold their world for ever. It is the step we fight for and not ourselves…. We are here, Brothers, to what end? To serve the spirit and the purpose that has been breathed into our lives. We fight not for ourselves – for we are but the momentary hands and eyes of the Life of the World. So you, Father Redwood, taught us. Through us and through the little folk the Spirit looks and learns. From us by word and birth and act it must pass – to still greater lives. This earth is no resting place; this earth is no playing place, else indeed we might put our throats to the little people's knife, having no greater right to live than they. And they in their turn might yield to the ants and vermin. We fight not for ourselves but for growth – growth that goes on for ever. To-morrow, whether we live or die, growth will conquer through us. That is the law of the spirit for ever more. To grow according to the will of God! To grow out of these cracks and crannies, out of these shadows and darknesses, into greatness and the light! Greater,' he said, speaking with slow deliberation, 'greater, my Brothers! And then – still greater. To grow, and again – to grow. To grow at last into the fellowship and understanding of God. Growing…. Till the earth is no more than a footstool…. Till the spirit shall have driven fear into nothingness, and spread….' He swung his arm heavenward: – 'There!'
His voice ceased. The white glare of one of the searchlights wheeled about, and for a moment fell upon him, standing out gigantic with hand upraised against the sky.
On which note, the novel ends.
Well, it's quite an enjoyable book if you don't mind it being a complete mess of style and story. Wells has set himself the task of describing the next stage in human evolution around the planet, but chooses to do so through the antics of a couple of silly scientists, a gung-ho adventurer (Cossar) and a great deal of social comedy taking the mickey out of provincial vicars and rural workers.
Doesn't bear much thinking about. For some time we've known that the larger an animal's size the heavier its bones or exoskeleton need to be, and that there is a natural limit to this. Having 50-foot Caddles clump around Piccadilly is good cinema but not very persuasive science.
Another obvious problem is that, nowadays, we know that all ecosystems include vast amounts of organisms which human beings don't notice or even know about, vast numbers of bacteria, fungi and viruses. In Wells's simplistic view just a handful of the obvious, visible plants grow to giant size. In reality, it would be not only well-known flowers and bushes, but all manner of micro-organisms, fungi and bacteria which would grow enormous – with peculiar visual and physical complications.
Wells hedges and glosses over how there came to be the 50 or so giants around the world by the time their rebellion breaks out. But still, 50 isn't nearly a large enough number to create even a self-sustaining colony, let alone replace the swarming billions of madly-reproducing normal-sized humans. The plot is willed rather than shown.
Anybody who wrote about the leak of a life-changing chemicals into the environment, now, today, in 2019, would have to describe a) ecological catastrophe and b) the swift response of international health and scientific agencies.
None of this existed in Wells's day. In fact a striking aspect of the story is the complete absence of the police or army in any of the outbreaks of giant rats, ants, wasps and so on, which have to be dealt with by comic local villagers equipped with antique blunderbusses, or outraged vicars wielding croquet mallets.
There are two great literary predecessors, the French novel Gargantua and Pantagruel published in the 1530s, and Gulliver's adventures in Lilliput, published by Jonathan Swift in 1725.
On an obvious level, Wells namechecks both of these antecedents, having Redwood nickname his fast-growing baby Panty, after the giant Pantagruel.
Although Wells (fortunately) skips over most of the twenty years in which the giant babies grow up, he does have several scenes describing the giant playroom which is built for Redwood's son, the enormous nursery which Cossar builds for his three infants, and the strain which baby Caddles imposes on the charity of the local lady of the manor, Lady Wondershoot, who finds herself trying to supply adequate food and clothing for the monster.
In each of these scenes I could hear reminiscences of Gargantua in particular, detailed lists of the vast amount of bread and milk and meat the giants require, told in a humorous mix of awe and broad comedy.
The narrator is what I think is categorised as an 'omniscient first-person narrator'.
That's to say, a first-person narrating 'I' appears a few times during the story – once or twice mentioning that he was eye-witness to this or that event, once or twice mentioning that he 'heard' about this or that incident from people that were there, giving the sense that you are listening to a particular person.
But this presence is mixed up with a third-person narrator i.e. someone who gives a reliable and authoritative overview account of all the different scenes – whether the two scientists in their London apartments, the rural goings-on in Cheasing Eyebright, the streets of London during Caddles' adventures, and so on.
The combination – or the sudden appearance of a first-person I into an otherwise straight third-person story – is inconsistent, stylistically odd and disconcerting.
But whoever exactly is telling it, the story is dominated by a tone of facetiousness, irony and sarcasm which gets pretty wearing.
Sometimes Wells delivers broad social comedy that would have been recognisable to 17th century Restoration wits or to Sheridan in the 1770s, describing the jocose activities of characters with names like Sir Arthur Poodle Bootlick, the Bishop of Frumps and Judge Hangbrow, as frivolous and jokey as can be.
This tone is particularly prominent in the long middle section which describes the growth of baby Caddles in the little Kent village of Cheasing Eyebright. This section is devoted to all manner of rural comedy and social satire. The village is dominated by the patronage of Lady Wondershoot, supported by the old buffer obtuseness of the local vicar, both of whom have to deal with comically inarticulate and stumbling peasants such as the giant's mother and grandmother.
At moments there are straight descriptions of rural life which read like Thomas Hardy.
She [the old woman] was engaged in pulling onions in the little garden before her daughter's cottage when she saw him coming through the garden gate. She stood for a moment 'consternated', as the country folks say, and then folded her arms, and with the little bunch of onions held defensively under her left elbow, awaited his approach.
At other points there is acute social satire.
Lady Wondershoot liked bullying Caddles. Caddles was her ideal lower-class person, dishonest, faithful, abject, industrious, and inconceivably incapable of responsibility.
Sometimes we have a self-dramatising narrator who uses the mock-solemn tone which characterises so much 18th century comic fiction:
It was an anonymous letter, and an author should respect his character's secrets.
Sometimes he is the intrusive 18th century narrator, forcing his opinions on us.
There are vicars and vicars, and of all sorts I love an innovating vicar – a piebald progressive professional reactionary – the least.
Sometimes there are prolonged passages which read like late Dickens.
[Lady Wondershoot's] coachman was a very fine specimen, full and fruity, and he drove with a sort of sacramental dignity. Others might doubt their calling and position in the world, he at any rate was sure – he drove her ladyship. The footman sat beside him with folded arms and a face of inflexible certainties. Then the great lady herself became visible, in a hat and mantle disdainfully inelegant, peering through her glasses. Two young ladies protruded necks and peered also.
But looming over all these different voices is the threat that Wells will at any moment resort to his grandest, most pompous, history-of-the-world manner.
To tell fully of its coming [the food of the gods] would be to write a great history, but everywhere there was a parallel chain of happenings. To tell therefore of the manner of its coming in one place is to tell something of the whole. It chanced one stray seed of Immensity fell into the pretty, petty village of Cheasing Eyebright in Kent, and from the story of its queer germination there and of the tragic futility that ensued, one may attempt – following one thread, as it were – to show the direction in which the whole great interwoven fabric of the thing rolled off the loom of Time.
The book is characterised throughout by the same tonal and attitudinal mish-mash.
Thus the rise of the nationwide anti-giant party led by Caterham is described in a tone half-satirical – as if the author and reader are both men of the world who know that all political parties are rackets – but which sometimes stumbles into a completely different register: suddenly Wells is making perfectly serious points about the way the mob can be whipped up against 'outsiders', a mood that unnervingly reminds you of Hitler and all the other 20th century demagogues.
At moments like this there is a kind of momentary flash of something you could take seriously, Wells giving a true insight into his life and times and then… he crushes it with another slather of heavy-handed facetiousness.
The same thing happens at the end of the novel. When Redwood is taken from his house arrest to go and meet the newly elected Prime Minister Caterham, who has just triggered the 'war on the giants', he is struck by how much smaller, older and tireder the man seems than his photos and caricatures in the press. For a moment there is a gleam of what you could call adult insight into the wearing effects of power.
But then it is gone and the narrative focuses in on Caterham's 'offer' to the giants and Redwood's defence of the giants and you realise that – you are in the middle of a preposterous load of tosh.
The influence of Henry James
I wondered whether, in this book, Wells was deliberately copying and/or satirising Henry James's style, with its proliferation of elaborate and would-be meaningful. This crossed my mind when a baby fed with Boomfood becomes too heavy for 'maternal portage'. Hmm. That's a late-Jamesian periphrasis.
The public mind, following its own mysterious laws of selection, had chosen him as the one and only responsible Inventor and Promoter of this new wonder; it would hear nothing of Redwood, and without a protest it allowed Cossar to follow his natural impulse into a terribly prolific obscurity.
What does that last phrase even mean?
Before he was aware of the drift of these things, Mr. Bensington was, so to speak, stark and dissected upon the hoardings. His baldness, his curious general pinkness, and his golden spectacles had become a national possession. Resolute young men with large expensive-looking cameras and a general air of complete authorisation took possession of the flat for brief but fruitful period
'Complete authorisation' is good but unlike Wells's usual style.
He was the sort of doctor that is in manners, in morals, in methods and appearance, most succinctly and finally expressed by the word 'rising'.
This ornate positioning of the narrative voice to prepare us for exquisite phraseology is surely Jamesian.
Bensington, glancing from the window, would see the faultless equipage come spanking up Sloane Street and after an incredibly brief interval Winkles would enter the room with a light, strong motion, and pervade it, and protrude some newspaper and supply information and make remarks.
There is yet another tonal intrusion or flavour in this mad mix, one Wells uses to describe the whole sub-plot about the baby of an (unnamed) foreign royal family, who a scheming doctor of Redwood and Bensington's acquaintance (the absurdly named Dr Winkles) speculatively (and, to the modern mind, wildly irresponsibly) feeds the wonder food.
This baby grows up to be a beautiful, fifty-foot-tall, young woman who comes on a state visit to England and falls in love with Redwood's own giant son.
Her entire existence, growth and the passages describing the couple's love affair are told in an extraordinarily mimsical, sentimental, almost fairy-tale style.
Now it chanced in the days when Caterham was campaigning against the Boom-children before the General Election that was – amidst the most tragic and terrible circumstances – to bring him into power, that the giant Princess, that Serene Highness whose early nutrition had played so great a part in the brilliant career of Doctor Winkles, had come from the kingdom of her father to England, on an occasion that was deemed important. She was affianced for reasons of state to a certain Prince – and the wedding was to be made an event of international significance.
All the rest of her story is told in the same over-ornate style. 'Now it chanced in the days…' That's Biblical phraseology, isn't it, deployed to create the semi-mythical tone of a rather ponderous fairy tale.
It is yet another peculiar tone of voice, one more contribution to the extraordinary mess of voices and registers which characterise this enormous hodge-podge of a text!
If you could colour-code styles and tones of voice, this book would look like a Jackson Pollock painting. There are loads of local enjoyments (the social satire is, in fact, often very funny) but the net effect is a mess, and you can see why The Food of the Gods is never included among Wells's key science fiction masterworks.
The Food of the Gods online
The Food of the Gods Wikipedia article
Other H.G. Wells reviews
1895 The Time Machine – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the 'owner', Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come – set in the same London of the future described in The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love but descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps
1901 The First Men in the Moon – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of 'Cavorite' to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants' rebellion against the 'little people'
1906 In the Days of the Comet – a passing comet trails gasses through earth's atmosphere which bring about 'the Great Change', inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1914 The World Set Free – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling 'history' of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the 'trilogy' describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1957 The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle A vast cloud of gas enters the solar system and blots out the heat and light of the sun causing cataclysms on Earth, until a small group of astronomers discover it is actually filed with intelligent life
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish's Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard New York
1963 Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle French journalist Ulysse Mérou accompanies Professor Antelle on a two-year space flight to the star Betelgeuse, where they land on an earth-like plane to discover that humans and apes have evolved here, but the apes are the intelligent, technology-controlling species while the humans are mute beasts
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and 'retire' escaped andys
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by 'inertials'. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after a catastrophe on the moon
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world's plastic
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War has become an authoritarian state. The story concerns popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world in which he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the 'ordinaries' and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Forever War by Joe Haldeman The story of William Mandella who is recruited into special forces fighting the Taurans, a hostile species who attack Earth outposts, successive tours of duty requiring interstellar journeys during which centuries pass on Earth, so that each of his return visits to the home planet show us society's massive transformations over the course of the thousand years the war lasts.
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s
by Simon on November 8, 2018 • Permalink
Posted in Adventure, Books, Novel, Science Fiction
Tagged Bensington, Boomfood, Caddles, Caterham, Cheasing Eyebright, Cossar, Dr Winkles, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Gulliver, Henry James, Herakleophorbia IV, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Conrad, Kent, Lady Wondershoot, Lilliput, Mr Bensington, Professor Redwood, science fantasies, science fiction, Wells
Posted by Simon on November 8, 2018
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/11/08/the-food-of-the-gods-h-g-wells/
King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild (1999)
Can't remember the last time a book made me feel this physically sick. About half way through another description of the murders, rapes, dismemberments, garrotings, hangings, torture and shootings carried out by Belgian rubber companies in the forced labour system set up by king Leopold II in his colony in the Congo (1885-1909), I thought I might throw up.
Leopold II, king of the Belgians, and his genocide
If you like historical horror stories, you'll love this book. It intertwines a biography of lonely unloved Leopold, aloof, shy king of the Belgians who conceived a great ambition to own one of the chunks of the developing world being claimed as colonies by all the other European nations – with detail of how, once he'd settled on the Congo, he commissioned the greatest explorer of the age, Henry Morton Stanley, to open it up; and then created a system of concessions to commercial companies which more or less guaranteed that at every level and in every way, the native peoples of the vast Congo basin would be worked to death, exploited, punished and murdered every bit as cruelly and needlessly as the genocides carried out by Hitler or Stalin.
Villages were razed to the ground, women and children were casually shot, or taken as hostages to force the menfolk to drain rubber from the vines which grew high up into the rainforest canopy. If enough rubber wasn't collected, the women or children were murdered. Or their hands were cut off. Or their brains were dashed out with rifle butts. Or they were raped or tortured to death, or beaten, or tied in sacks and thrown into the river, or flogged to death, or left chained to trees till they died of thirst. And much more.
Leopold's loot
This happened for 20 years or more over an area the size of western Europe. The profits to the Belgian, French and British companies who extorted raw rubber were big, but nothing compared to Leopold's take. The book details the countless cunning ways the king screwed the maximum revenue out of every aspect of the operation. Hochschild quotes the scholar Jules Marchal who estimates Leopold's total haul at around $1.1 billion in today's money.
Leopold's follies
This loot Leopold spent on turning his palace on the outskirts of Brussels into a new Versailles, building grandiose public monuments in cities around Belgium, on collecting a suite of villas on Cap Ferrat in the south of France, and on an impressive series of prostitutes and mistresses, until he fell in love with a 16 year old, Caroline Delacroix when he himself was an ageing 65.
The genocide
Modern scholars estimate the population of the Congo region was halved, from about 20 million to around 10 million, during the decades of Leopold's homicidal rule. Hochschild quotes Alexandre Delcommune, 'a ruthless robber baron', saying that, if Leopold had ruled the Congo for another ten years, there probably wouldn't have been a single rubber vine left, or, quite possibly, a single native. The genocide would have been complete.
It goes without saying the all this was done in the name of 'civilisation' and 'justice', of 'law' and 'morality'. It is particularly disgusting that the Catholic church, right up until the end and beyond, supported Leopold, a crime just as egregious as its over-analysed relation with the Nazis.
Speaking of Christians brings us to the resistance to Leopold's bloody rule and among these were many Protestant missionaries, especially the non-conformists. It is reasonably well-known that what eventually became a worldwide campaign against Leopold's rule was run by two passionate advocates, the doughty English businessman-turned-crusader-for-justice ED Morel, and the febrile but effective Irishman, Roger Casement. Through a brilliant series of books, pamphlets, newspapers, speeches, through fundraising and lobbying, they managed to discredit Leopold's rule and make the scandal one of the great issues of the Edwardian world.
And Hochschild says their campaign was the most important and sustained crusade of its type between the mid-Victorian abolitionist movement and the worldwide boycott of South African apartheid in the 1970s and 80s.
Black heroes who campaigned against the horror
But above and beyond Morel and Casement, Hochschild goes out of his way to bring attention to the work of several remarkable black missionaries and campaigners, namely George Washington Williams, William Henry Sheppard and Herzekiah Andrew Shanu who, often at great risk, travelled far, took testimony, and publicised the horrors of what Model called 'that infamous System'.
I read Hochschild's book immediately after Thomas Pakenham's wonderful Scramble for Africa, which covers the same period and a lot of the same subject. Pakenham's book has the breadth and scale and depth of War and Peace. It is an epic which also includes detailed portraits of key individuals, ranging across the whole continent throughout the scramble, 1880-1914.
Pakenham's tone is judicious and, for the most part, detached; only occasionally does he pass judgement on the men he's describing, and his biting criticism is all the more powerful for being rare. By contrast, Hochschild's book is much shorter, much lighter, and he is ready with sarcasm and criticism from the start. He is sarcastic about Britain's claims to abolish slavery after the 1830s, he is sarcastic about the so-called civilising mission of the explorer and colonisers, he is quicker to dismiss all high-falutin rhetoric and, in doing so, he misses the complexity to which these rhetorics, these discourses, were put. Many people believed what they said about bringing civilisation to the savages. A number of native tribes did practice cannibalism. The slave trade was rampant in east Africa and British authorities did do their best to stamp it out.
Pakenham's book, maybe four times longer than Hochschild's, has the space and depth to explore the highly complicated ways scores and scores of contemporaries struggled to make sense of their world and of the made scramble for African colonies. As such it is a much deeper and more satisfying read.
But what it lacks in scale and depth, King Leopold's Ghost makes up for in intensity and horror. After you've read a certain amount, it's hard not to share his sense of indignation, his anger, that human beings from so-called civilised, so-called Christian, Europe were allowed to get away with such barbarity and depravity for so long.
Leopold died of cancer in 1909. Despite the worldwide success of the campaign against him, in the end he was only forced to sell the Congo to the Belgian state a year or so before his death (he had planned to leave it to the Belgian people in his will). And in a depressing final chapter Hochschild makes clear that, although the scale of wanton murder was reined in, forced labour of some sort continued in Congo, and in neighbouring European colonies, well into the 1930s, and was even intensified during the Second World War with the Allies' bottomless need for tyres for all types of war machinery.
One of the most powerful lessons for me was the link Hochschild draws between the occasional tribes who managed to rebel against the system, who stole arms and killed their white torturers and escaped into the jungle to wage prolonged guerrilla campaigns against their oppressors – and the similar tactics adopted by anti-colonial nationalists fighting the British and French following the Second World War, the Mau-Mau et al. If, as Hochschild book makes you, you powerfully and emotionally root for the first group of freedom fighters – then surely you must, at the very least, sympathise with their descendants.
European civilisation
Leopold II, king of the Belgians. Note the smart uniform, the shiny medals, the impeccable manners. What a Christian gentleman!
Leopold II, king of the Belgians
And now some of the hundreds of thousands of Africans whipped, chained, mutilated, raped and murdered by Leopold's officers to incentivise them or their parents to gather more rubber for the wise and good king.
Children in the Belgian Congo whose hands have been cut off to encourage their parents to gather more rubber for King Leopold
Buy King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild on Amazon
Review of King Leopold's Ghost in the London Review of Books
Paul Vallely article about the continuing impact of Leopold's crime on the catastrophe that is modern Congo
Posted in Africa, Books, History, Slavery
Tagged Arthur Conan Doyle, Belgian Congo, Belgium, Congo, ED Morel, George Washington Williams, Herzekiah Andrew Shanu, history, Joseph Conrad, Leopold II, Leopold king of the Belgians, Roger Casement, William Henry Sheppard
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/king-leopolds-ghost-adam-hochschild/
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
Heart of Darkness was published in three monthly instalments in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in February, March and April of 1899. (The Victorian Web has an essay describing the other articles which Heart of Darkness appeared among.) The final text was still divided into three equal sections when it was published in book form in 1902.
Heart of Darkness is a masterpiece and as such can be approached from scores of different angles, interpreted in countless ways.
In line with my earlier comments about Conrad, I think its success is partly because, in the horrific facts of the Belgian Congo which he experienced on his 1890 trip up the river, Conrad found external realities which, for once, justified the extremity of his nihilistic worldview and the exorbitance of his style.
For stomach-churning details about the Belgian Congo read King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild
The Congo really was a vast immensity of suffering and pain. When he uses his almost hysterical language about Almayer's daughter abandoning him, or Willems's native mistress seeing through him, or Hervey's wife leaving him, Conrad's lexicon and syntax seem overwrought, hyperbolic. In King Leopold's Congo there really was a subject which justified the obsessive use of words like 'horror', 'suffering', 'immense anguish' and so on.
Frame device
In Youth Conrad invents the frame device of the group of five mature men of the world sitting around smoking after-dinner cigars while one of them, Marlow, sets off to tell a long yarn.
Having come across this device in Youth Conrad immediately reused it for House of Darkness. Precisely the same five good fellows who we met in Youth are aboard the yacht Nellie, moored in the Thames at dusk, as Marlow recounts the story of his trip up the Congo.
So the book has two narrators: the anonymous one who describes the 'we', the five chaps; and then, via his narrative, we hear Marlow's story – a story within a story.
Matching the tale to the teller, and creating subtle ironies between the actual events and the way they are told, are devices as old as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio's Decameron, older. Thus, once Marlow finishes his story, the narrator returns for the concluding paragraphs, to describe the haunting final vision of the darkness of the Thames after sunset, when the full repercussions of Marlow's story sink in.
The frame device:
guarantees a happy ending – we know that Marlow returned alive
guarantees a kind of sanity – periodically, when Marlow's story rises to heights of absurdity or psychological stress, the narrator reminds us of the calm, bourgeois, urban setting the tale is being told in:
There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match flared, and Marlow's lean face appeared, worn, hollow, with downward folds and dropped eyelids, with an aspect of concentrated attention; and as he took vigorous draws at his pipe, it seemed to retreat and advance out of the night in the regular flicker of the tiny flame.
above all, it replaces suspense – what happened? – with reflection – what does it mean? It legitimises the way Marlow frequently stops the tale to ponder the meaning of his experiences, or stops to tell his audience how he's struggling to convey the feelings he experienced – something that would be harder for an omniscient narrator to do.
Marlow takes a commission from a Belgian company to captain a steamboat up the Congo to find one Mr Kurtz, a prize ivory trader. Before he's even set foot in Africa he sees signs of the greed and folly of the European imperial mission to Africa – ta lone warship pointlessly firing cannon randomly into the jungle – and as soon as he arrives at the first station up-river he finds the building of the so-called railway a shambles where Africans are chained like slaves and worked to death.
When Marlow reaches the legendary Kurtz he finds he has sunk into horrific barbarity, savagely marauding through neighbouring country, killing natives and stealing their ivory, his campong lined by stakes on which are impaled human heads.
The young idealist Kurtz had written an eloquent pamphlet on how to bring 'civilisation' to the natives. Across the bottom the older, degraded Kurtz has scrawled, 'Exterminate all the brutes.'
Kurtz is a symbol of the hypocritical cruelty and absurd folly of imperial enterprises. Marlow gets his native bearers to carry the sick and dying Kurtz onto his steamer, turns around and heads for the coast. Kurtz dies onboard and his last words – 'The horror, the horror' – have become classic, referenced by T.S. Eliot, the climax of Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 movie adaptation, 'Apocalypse Now', I've seen them on t-shirts.
Not British
Although Conrad doesn't name the colonial power, he gives broad enough hints that it was Belgium. The Congo was the personal possession of King Leopold of Belgium, who modern historians nowadays place alongside Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot as one of the great modern mass murderers of all time, with an estimated 8-10 million Africans dying in the Congo as a direct result of the slavery he instituted during his reign (1885-1908).
But the point is – it isn't British. This genocidal regime wasn't British. Conrad was anxious about how his blistering critique of Imperialism would be received in his new home, the greatest empire the world had ever seen.
Later the same year Heart of Darkness was published, in October 1899, the Boer War broke out and whipped the country into a furore of Imperialist jingoism. Conrad knew it was impossible to criticise the British Empire, and he certainly goes out of his way in the opening pages to emphasise that he is NOT talking about the British Empire, and that the British Empire is qualitatively different from the imperial folly he attributes to Belgium.
'On one end a large shining map, marked with all the colors of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red – good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there…'
What's more, the opening pages contain a great and deliberate hymn to the history and integrity of the British Empire.
I wonder what obligation Conrad felt under to clarify that, although he appeared to be saying that all empires are hypocritical, rapacious follies… he in fact meant, all empires except your empire of course, chaps.
'The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled—the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen's Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests—and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith—the adventurers and the settlers; kings' ships and the ships of men on 'Change; captains, admirals, the dark "interlopers" of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned "generals" of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.'
Furthermore, at a few key moments in the story, the English auditors interrupt the story to object to Marlow's tone and implications.
These interruptions mark the boundaries, indicating not so much to the fictional audience but to us, the readers, that even Marlow's overflowing style and withering irony has limits, is safely contained. That Conrad knows where the borders of taste are and is policing them:
'I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your respective tight-ropes for – what is it? half-a-crown a tumble – '
'"Try to be civil, Marlow," growled a voice, and I knew there was at least one listener awake besides myself.
'"I beg your pardon," [said Marlow]
Because the bulk of the narration is meant to be spoken by Marlow, an Englishman telling his story to other Englishmen, Conrad is forced to rein in his style.
Much more of the narrative deals with facts, factually conveyed, than in his earlier texts such as the lyrical Youth, the first Marlow text.
Coming fresh from reading Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands and Karain, the style of Darkness seems mercifully sober and controlled.
But coming from outside Conradworld, to most ordinary readers the style will still seem extraordinarily florid, with long descriptive passages larded with lush adjectives, and Marlow's comments on his experiences forever tending to the same nihilism and fatalism which drenched the narratives of Almayer, Outcast, Karain, Lagoon and The Return.
There include the liberal use of triplets –
'all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.'
The long sentences which use multiple sub-clauses to repeat and amplify the message of despair.
Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.
And the endlessly creative ways he finds to express the same underlying mood of despair:
…my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform somberness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion.
…in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair.
A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.
The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence.
…a gesture that took in the forest, the creek, the mud, the river, – seemed to beckon with a dishonouring flourish before the sunlit face of the land a treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart.
The pattern itself
There are insights to be had about the role of women – about the contrast between the savage woman of the jungle and the white purity of Kurtz's Intended who Marlow visits back in Brussels and whose innocent, naive love for Kurtz he is compelled to preserve.
There's also a lot to write about the concept of the Voice – Marlow experiences Kurtz as predominantly a fluent, deep, authoritative voice – but then Marlow himself becomes nothing but a voice on the deck of the unlit yawl – the two are ironically yoked together.
Books can and have been written about Conrad's racism, his fundamentally insulting opinion of Africans or 'savages' etc.
In all three 'issues' or themes or motifs (and in a host of others) Conrad deliberately creates multiple ironies, multiple systems of comparison and contrast. But however easily these patterns can be reduced to feminist or post-colonial or post-structuralist formulas, rewritten to support early 21st century political correctness, I also regard the patterning of the text as almost abstract, as an end in itself which can be enjoyed for itself.
The repetition of key words and phrases – the repetition of leading motifs – the multiple ironies i.e. the ubiquitous techniques of doubling and comparison – because they are expressed in words are susceptible of logical interpretation. But I suggest they can also be seen as abstract designs, comparable to the Japanese designs so appreciated by contemporary Aesthetes – or to the new languid style of Art Nouveau, the delicate intertwining of tracery meant to be enjoyed for its own sake and nothing more.
I think of the turn to patterning of a painter like Edward Burne-Jones who, in his final years, acquired a symbolist depth. His later paintings are full of grey-eyed women in increasingly abstract patterns or designs.
Symbolist poetry and painting was the new thing in the 1890s, paintings and poetry full of shimmering surfaces to be appreciated for their own beauty, without any straining after meaning. Like the intricate line drawings of Aubrey Beardsley where the style is much more important than the 'subject matter'; or the 'impressionist' music of Claude Debussy.
Conrad hints as much in an oft-quoted passage right at the start, where the anonymous narrator is setting the scene and introducing Marlow:
The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.
In 1917 Conrad wrote prefaces to a new edition of his works, and wrote the following about Heart of Darkness, explicitly comparing it not to a tract, a fiction, even to a painting, but to music:
Heart of Darkness is experience, too; but it is experience pushed a little (and only a little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers. There it was no longer a matter of sincere colouring. It was like another art altogether. That sombre tone had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that, I hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck.
In my opinion, you can write whole books about Conrad and Women, Conrad and Empire, Conrad and Race, and these will be interesting investigations, but all these approaches can (should?) be subsumed by a sensitive, receptive appreciation of the multiply-layered phrasing, of the styling and patterning of motifs and rhythms, tones and colours, words and clauses, sentences and paragraphs, of his grandiloquent and haunted prose style.
To appreciate it like a work of art or the intricate patterning of an exquisite piece of music. To penetrate to a deeper appreciation of the sheer sensual pleasure of this extraordinary text.
Reviews of other fiction of the 1880s and 1890s
Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (1895)
An Outcast of The Islands (1896)
The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897)
Tales of Unrest (1898)
Youth (1898)
Heart of Darkness (1899)
George du Maurier
Trilby (1895)
King Solomon's Mines (1885)
She: A History of Adventure (1887)
Allan Quatermain (1887)
Maiwa's revenge, or The War of The Little Hand (1888)
Allan's Wife and Other Tales (1889)
Nada the Lily (1892)
A Study in Scarlet (1887)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (stories 1891–1892)
The Sign of the Four (1890)
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (stories 1892–1893)
The Shadows of Sherlock Holmes (detective stories influenced by Conan Doyle)
The Prisoner of Zenda (1894)
Rupert of Hentzau (1898)
E.H. Hornung
Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman (1899)
The Aspern Papers by Henry James (1888)
The Light That Failed (1891)
Life's Handicap (1891)
Barrack Room Ballads (1892)
Many Inventions (1893)
The Jungle Books (1895, 1895)
The Seven Seas (1896)
The Absent-Minded Beggar (1899)
Captains Courageous (1897)
The Day's Work (1898)
Stalky and Co (1899)
Arthur Morrison
Tales of Mean Streets (1894)
Martin Hewitt, Investigator (1894)
A Child of the Jago (1896)
The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897)
The Hole in The Wall (1900)
New Arabian Nights (1882)
The Silverado Squatters (1883)
More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885)
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
Kidnapped (1886)
The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887)
The Black Arrow (1888)
The Master of Ballantrae (1889)
South Sea Tales (1891-93)
The Wrecker (1892)
The Ebb-Tide (1894)
The Amateur Emigrant (1895)
Weir of Hermiston (1896)
Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
The Time Machine (1895)
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
A Story of the Days To Come (1899)
The Happy Prince and other stories (1888)
The Decay of Lying: An Observation (1891)
The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)
by Simon on September 19, 2012 • Permalink
Posted in Books, English literature
Tagged 1899, Adam Hochschild, Africa, Apocalypse Now, Art Nouveau, Aubrey Beardsley, Belgian Congo, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Boer War, Canterbury Tales, Chaucer, Claude Debussy, Conrad, Edward Burne-Jones, frame device, Francis Ford Coppola, Heart of Darkness, jingoism, Joseph Conrad, King Leopold, King Leopold's Ghost, Mr Kurtz, Nellie, novel, Symbolism, Symbolist, T.S. Eliot, Thames, The Congo, The horror, Youth
Posted by Simon on September 19, 2012
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/09/19/heart-of-darkness-joseph-conrad/
Youth by Joseph Conrad (1898)
Youth, the shortish short story (30 pages) Conrad completed in June 1898, sees the debut of Charles Marlow, Conrad's alter-ego, the fictional narrator of this and his two most famous stories, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Marlow's arrival marks a step change in the quality of Conrad's work.
Marlow enforces discipline
Because the story is narrated by a character, not by the omniscient narrator he'd used in all his previous works, Conrad has to make a big effort to rein in the stylistic excesses I have described in previous posts. For example, Conrad's short story The Return strikes me as being almost unbearable to read for its sustained note of manic hysteria. Conrad uses free indirect style to take us inside the mind of Alvan Hervey as his wife's infidelity triggers what feels, trapped inside his head, like a nervous breakdown. In fact, this is just another outing for the hysterical, panic-stricken, horror-obsessed nihilism which characterises all of Conrad's fiction up to this point.
It is with immense relief that one turns to Youth because this hysteria is reined right in and Conrad's stylistic excesses, though still noticeable at moments, are in general held in abeyance in order to foreground the practical, no-nonsense voice of Charles Marlow.
The plot is simple. The 20-year-old Marlow is second mate on the Judea, contracted to take coal from Newcastle to Bangkok. The boat encounters a number of problems which repeatedly delay its departure from England, then it hits storms off Africa, and then the coal in the hold begins to spontaneously burn as they enter the Indian Ocean.
Eventually the crew are forced to abandon ship, and Marlow docks in the East having commanded a 14-foot ship's boat and crew of two for the last week of the ill-fated journey.
The style is blessedly restrained. Both the character of Marlow and the nature of the 'story' i.e. a detailed account of the maritime problems encountered by the ship – dictate a much more factual style than anything Conrad had previously written.
We had been pulling this finishing spell for eleven hours. Two pulled, and he whose turn it was to rest sat at the tiller. We had made out the red light in that bay and steered for it, guessing it must mark some small coasting port. We passed two vessels, outlandish and high-sterned, sleeping at anchor, and, approaching the light, now very dim, ran the boat's nose against the end of a jutting wharf.
Shorter sentences. Fewer subordinate clauses. Much more factual content. A lot less tautology or redundancy. A blessed relief, though the old Conrad is still there, straining at the leash:
O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight—to me she was the endeavour, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret.
There was not a light, not a stir, not a sound. The mysterious East faced me, perfumed like a flower, silent like death, dark like a grave.
This was the East of the ancient navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and somber, living and unchanged, full of danger and promise.
But the familiar lyricism, the repetition and apposition, is justified by the fundamental idea – that this is the character Marlow's paean to the vividness and optimism of naive and romantic youth. Well, just about justified.
Framing device
Youth starts with the identical setting made famous by Heart of Darkness, i.e. after dinner in London five mature and successful men of the world who have all experienced the sea sit and smoke cigars, chatting. The anonymous narrator is one of them; he sets this scene, describes the audience a little, and then lets Marlow begin his tale.
The frame device, the tale-within-a-tale, does several things:
It distances the tale. No matter what happens we know that Marlow survived and is telling it to us now. Though we are caught up in the events he narrates, we are not actually lost in a moment-by-moment helter-skelter of hysteria with a totally unpredictable outcome, as we are in the key scenes of Almayer or An Outpost
Marlow is telling his tale to a suave and knowing audience. This has an important effect in toning down the hysterical style of the earlier novels and stories. Although Marlow is still given lines of improbable lyricism, Conrad is conscious of them, limits them, and excuses them – Marlow himself justifies them as he speaks them – because this is a tale of high spirits and boyish optimism.
Marlow is English. Unlike the protagonists of Almayer and Outcast and Outpost and Karain. It is as if hysteria is characteristic of the lesser Europeans, the Dutch and Belgians. Conrad emphasises Marlow's Englishness by making him use the upper-class slang of the day – 'Pon my soul', 'The deuce of a time'. And the Englishness of narrator and audience guarantees a sang-froid, the famous stiff upper-lip, which limits and disciplines Conrad. Enforces restraint. And his prose is all the more effective for it.
For those who like patterns, it is pretty that Conrad published Youth, Heart of Darkness and The End of The Tether in one volume in 1902 (Youth, A Narrative, and other tales) – one representing youth, one representing maturity, one representing old age.
Youth online
Posted in Books, English literature, Literature, Short stories
Tagged 1898, Alvan Hervey, Bangkok, British, Charles Marlow, Conrad, English, Heart of Darkness, Indian Ocean, Joseph Conrad, Karain, Lord Jim, lyricism, Marlow, Repetition, short stories, short story, The End of The Tether, the Judea, The Return, Youth
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/youth-joseph-conrad/
Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad (1898)
After his first two novels Conrad turned to shorter forms, to novellas and short stories. He followed 1897's novella, The Nigger of the Narcissus, with five short stories collected in 1898's Tales of Unrest, being:
His first short story, written March 1896.
The Lagoon
What Conrad considered his first authentic short story, written in July 1896. A white man stops at a gloomy lagoon where a solitary Malay has his hut along with his woman. The woman is dying of fever. Through the night the Malay tells the story of their doomed love, how they ran away from the king and queen who owned her as a servant girl, how they were pursued, how his brother gave his life to save them. At dawn she dies and the man is left utterly bereft.
Quintessential Conrad – a tale of utter bleakness, told in lush, decadent, tropical prose.
An Outpost of Progress
Published in two parts in Cosmopolis magazine in June and July 1897, Conrad considered this his best short story.
It is set in the Congo, drawing on his experiences there seven years earlier, and strongly linked with Heart of Darkness i.e. pretty much the same plot. Two white men are left high up the river, deep in the Dark Continent, to run a trading station. They fall to pieces physically and mentally and the end comes when a group of African slavers steal away their native staff, leaving ivory tusks in payment.
Having lost their self-respect they go quickly downhill, bicker about nothing until, after a trivial argument, one shoots the other then hangs himself.
Conrad all over. The tropical setting; the complete degradation of the protagonists; the vision of futility; the lush prose.
It is a bit mind-boggling that 'An Outpost' appeared just at the moment of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, June and July 1897. On 22 June there was a vast procession of colourfully-dressed colonial subjects through London to an open air service outside St Paul's cathedral. On 23 June the Queen met some young Indian princes. On 2 July the Queen surveyed her colonial troops at Windsor. Both the June and July editions of Cosmopolis included length celebrations of the greatness and benefits of Empire (some quoted in this article). The Times published Kipling's great poem, Recessional, on 17 July.
And over exactly this same period, Conrad was publishing this bleak nihilistic tale. You wonder how he avoided being lynched!
Completed in early 1897. In his preface Conrad says he hated writing this story. Arrogant, successful middle-aged businessman Alvan Hervey returns on the Tube to his smart West London house to find a message from his wife saying she has left him for a magazine editor. He is devastated, his world collapses, everything he has valued is torn away from under him etc.
He is just starting to feel like all the turmoil which Conrad heroes usually luxuriate in, when his wife, embarrassingly, returns. She's changed her mind!
How does Conrad make such a slight incident (man comes home, reads note, is unhappy, wife walks back in) last 60 pages?
With great torrents of prose describing Hervey's anguish, mental collapse, fury, despair. Despite its untypical setting (London) it is classic overripe, hysterical Conrad, redolent of Strindberg or of a strung-out existentialist play like Jean-Paul Sartre's play, Huis Clos.
Karain: A Memory
Published in Blackwoods Magazine in November 1897.
From the safety of Blighty the narrator remembers the days when he was a gun smuggler around the Malay archipelago. The striking figure of the native chief, Karain. Fine figure of a man. Everyone loved him. Yet he seemed somehow nervous. One stormy night (lol), he swims aboard the white trader's schooner and tells them his story, viz:
A Dutch trader steals away a woman from his tribe. He and his best friend vow to track them down and erase the shame. For years they are on the trail together, travelling all over the archipelago in pursuit. But slowly the beautiful girl's voice and then figure come to him in dreams and visions, talking, defending herself. Finally they find the Dutchman and the girl and his friend gives Karain a rifle and tells him to shoot the white man while he slays the girl with his dagger.
But, as his dearest, oldest friend leaps from the bushes to carry out this plan, Karain is overcome by the secret memory of the voice of the girl and her secret presence. Before he knows what he has done, he has shot his friend. He has spared the vile white man's life. He gets away. But that night the girl's voice doesn't come to him. His friend's voice and shape come to him. And from that night onwards he is pursued, followed, haunted…!
Conrad excelsis: a frame narrative around a tale of betrayal, despair and haunting.
Tales of Unrest online
Tagged 1897, 1898, Alvan Hervey, An Outpost of Progress, Blackwoods Magazine, Conrad, Cosmopolis, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, Karain: A Memory, Kipling, Malay Archipelago, novella, Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, Recessional, short stories, Tales of Unrest, The Idiots, The Lagoon, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', The Return
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/tales-of-unrest-joseph-conrad/
Conrad's style (3) the Nihilist worldview
In the previous post on Conrad's style I looked at his use of repetition, trying to analyse or list out the different ways Conrad uses repetition to amplify and embellish his prose. In this post, I look at his bigger, structural use of repetition – and something of what that tells us about his overall purpose.
The repetitiveness of Conrad's plots
Seems to me that the obsessive repetition we observe in Conrad's fiction at the level of the sentence and paragraph is repeated in bigger structures ie in the plots or narratives of entire stories and novels. Again and again men are abandoned.
Almayer, abandoned, dies of despair in the heartless jungle.
Willems, abandoned, dies a bloody death in the heartless jungle.
The nigger of the Narcissus dies a lonely death at sea.
Arsat's woman dies leaving him abandoned by tribe and family.
Karain is a haunted outcast, abandoned by his tribe, betrayer of his best friend.
Kurtz has left behind every vestige of civilisation and dies, abandoned, in the heart of darkness; and so on and on.
The plots' sole purpose is to place the wretched protagonists in situations of abandonment and despair, conveyed in a prose which is obsessively compelled to repeat descriptions of the same desolations again and again. Not once but a hundred, a thousand times, Conrad is compelled to tell us just how meaningless life is, how hollow the conventions of 'civilisation' are, and how indifferent the heartless universe is to our wretched fates.
The repetition of Conrad's Existentialist worldview
Because to read Conrad is to enter not only the richness of his exotic settings and lush descriptions, but to become quickly aware of a compelling and coercing worldview. The same ominous, existentialist, stricken nihilistic message is rammed home in almost every one of the longer, descriptive paragraphs. There is, in fact, a fair bit of tautologia in Conrad – being 'The repetition of the same idea in different words, but (often) in a way that is wearisome or unnecessary'.
The white man came out of the hut in time to see the enormous conflagration of sunset put out by the swift and stealthy shadows that, rising like a black and impalpable vapor above the tree-tops, spread over the heaven, extinguishing the crimson glow of floating clouds and the red brilliance of departing daylight. In a few moments all the stars came out above the intense blackness of the earth, and the great lagoon gleaming suddenly with reflected lights resembled an oval patch of night-sky flung down into the hopeless and abysmal night of the wilderness. (Lagoon)
Over the lagoon a mist drifting and low had crept, erasing slowly the glittering images of the stars. And now a great expanse of white vapour covered the land: flowed cold and gray in the darkness, eddied in noiseless whirls round the tree-trunks and about the platform of the house, which seemed to float upon a restless and impalpable illusion of a sea; seemed the only thing surviving the destruction of the world by that undulating and voiceless phantom of a flood. Only far away the tops of the trees stood outlined on the twinkle of heaven, like a sombre and forbidding shore – a coast deceptive, pitiless and black. (Lagoon)
Arsat had not moved. In the searching clearness of crude sunshine he was still standing before the house, he was still looking through the great light of a cloudless day into the hopeless darkness of the world…" [Last words of The Lagoon]
He had plumbed in one short afternoon the depths of horror and despair, and now found repose in the conviction that life had no more secrets for him: neither had death! (Outpost)
It was the very essence of anguish stripped of words that can be smiled at, argued away, shouted down, disdained. It was anguish naked and unashamed, the bare pain of existence let loose upon the world in the fleeting unreserve of a look that had in it an immensity of fatigue, the scornful sincerity, the black impudence of an extorted confession. (Return)
With a short thrill he saw himself an exiled forlorn figure in a realm of ungovernable, of unrestrained folly. Nothing could be foreseen, foretold—guarded against. And the sensation was intolerable, had something of the withering horror that may be conceived as following upon the utter extinction of all hope. (Return)
He remembered all the streets—the well-to-do streets he had passed on his way home; all the innumerable houses with closed doors and curtained windows. Each seemed now an abode of anguish and folly. (Return)
To-morrow had come; the mysterious and lying to-morrow that lures men, disdainful of love and faith, on and on through the poignant futilities of life to the fitting reward of a grave. (Return)
The revelation was terrible. He saw at once that nothing of what he knew mattered in the least. The acts of men and women, success, humiliation, dignity, failure—nothing mattered. (Return)
Never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle, the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness. (Heart)
Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. (Heart)
Conrad's Repetition Compulsion: a Freudian interpretation
It's a basic idea of Freud's that a range of symptoms of human behaviour, speech and thought are determined by early childhood traumas which our conscious minds repress but which have such overwhelming power that they seek to rise again into the conscious mind; and that the struggle of the conscious mind to control and suppress these feelings leads to peculiar and repeated types of behaviour or speech; in some people these expressions go beyond the bounds of 'normality' to become neuroses, obsessions, hysterias. Thus, according to Freud, the suppressed content returns, disguised, in dreams, in jokes, in obsessive patterns of behaviour, in verbal (Freudian) slips, in the taboos of primitive societies and the religious rituals of more 'advanced' cultures.
When you learn (from Wikipedia) that Conrad's father was condemned to exile by the Russian authorities for his Polish patriotic views, that he grew up in a gloomy exiled household dominated by the failure of his father's Romantic hopes, and that first his mother died (when Conrad was 7) and then his father (when the boy was 11) – then you don't have to be Dr Freud understand why so much of Conrad's fiction is drenched in obsessive, compulsive repetitions of this primal childhood abandoning, an abandonment so complete as to dominate almost every sentence he wrote, and to set the deeply pessimistic tone and dictate the forlorn plots of almost all his fictions.
Conrad and Freud
Conrad was born in 1857. Freud in 1856.
Freud had the conceptual breakthrough which led to his theories in 1895, the same year Conrad published his first novel.
Both were uber-civilised, central European gentlemen driven to find prose outlets for their devastatingly nihilistic and pessimistic views of human nature.
Were they twins, secretly separated at birth?
The Europeanness of Conrad's temperament stands out even more when you compare him with two Englishmen born in 1857 – Edward Elgar and Robert Baden-Powell. For subtlety, intelligence and culture, Conrad has vastly more in common with the Austrian doctor than with the composer of the Pomp & Circumstance marches or the founder of the Boy Scouts.
Conrad's prose style (1) Decadence and foreignness
Conrad's style (2) Repetition
Posted in Books, English literature, Literary criticism
Tagged Conrad, Conrad's style (3) the Nihilist worldview, criticism, Joseph Conrad, literary criticism
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/joseph-conrad-3-nihilist-worldview/