The Drought - J.G. Ballard

It's interesting to come back to some of J.G. Ballard's early novels some 40 years after I first read them, and wonder whether as novels reportedly being possible worlds set five minutes in the future, they still stand up to the changes that have happened in the modern world in the meantime. My initial impression on returning to The Drought is that Ballard's writing style doesn't hold up well - it's difficult to visualise the world or feel any connection with the people he is describing - but his ideas, his originality and his vision are still very much intact and relevant.

Anyone who has read Empire of the Sun - or seen the Spielberg movie adaptation - will know where Ballard's preoccupation of a small English community struggling for survival against a man made or natural disaster comes from. His own experience in a prison camp in Shanghai runs deep throughout his work, never more so - other than in his short stories - than in his early trilogy of disaster novels. What might be surprising in The Drought, here as much as in any of his subsequent works, is the principal character's reaction to the disaster in question: they almost welcome it, as if the change is something longed for, sweeping away the past and accepting the inevitability of a new future.

At the start of the novel, the worldwide drought is now in its fifth month. The cause is not elaborated on but is based on a feasible premise; industrial waste has formed a polymer film over the ocean, not permitting any condensation to allow the formation of clouds. Efforts have been made, but even when they succeed is creating rain clouds, they tend to rain over the sea. Hamilton, a lakeside town five miles from city of Mount Royal. is now deserted, the people moving towards the coasts. Ransom, a doctor (a typical of lead Ballard figures - Ballard himself having trained as a doctor) is part of a community living on houseboats at the river but even that is rapidly draining. With no urgent purpose, Ransom explores the small community of local eccentrics as they progressively slip into decadence and madness.

Ballard's characters, like his writing, are prone to make arch pronouncements, but they do focus on the essence of Ballard's vision. “Don't you feel, doctor, that everything is being drained away, all the memories and stale sentiments?” Catherine Austin says to Ransom, who clearly agrees and notes a few pages later that “I've always thought of life as a kind of disaster area”. Then there is Philip, a young boy like Ballard in Shanghai “Creating his own world out of the scraps and refuse of the twentieth century”. There is also Reverend Howard Johnstone, determined to fight against the drought and rally forces among the rampaging fishermen, preaching the myth of a great undiscovered river up north.

“The past no longer existed. From now on they would both have to create their own sense of time out of the landscape emerging around them”.

Ransom doesn't quite revel in the disaster but appreciates the underlying beauty of the new world, described with Ballard's poetry of dystopia, its sand dunes and desert, the shoreline distant now as seawater is distilled by communities. There isn't even a need for a doctor by the time the book reaches Part II, the infirm are already dead, the rest turning to astrology and superstition, science no longer trusted as being able to solve the problem. Ballard himself isn't interested in exploring where the water has gone either, but is more interested in seeing what the lack of it does to people and communities, and to describe it he often relies on mythical and Shakespearean figures like Neptune, Lear, Prospero, Caliban and Ariel.

What is wonderful about Ballard, encapsulated in The Drought and and the early disaster trilogy (with The Drowned World and The Crystal World), is that it is based on his own personal experience of people enduring extreme deprivation but unable to change their habits and illusions that become twisted into something unrecognisable and unimaginable in normal society. What he writes about is real, a translation of a true lived experience. It gives him a unique insight into how people might behave in other such situations and he expresses it brilliantly in his own fashion. From disaster to terrorism, from environmental disaster to social unrest, these are explored in his other novels, forming a remarkable and important body of work. The social class of English eccentrics has perhaps has dated a little, but the underlying characteristics and observations nonetheless remain true.

Reading notes: The Drought by J.G. Ballard was first published in 1967. I picked up and read a 2001 paperback Flamingo Sixties Classic series edition. I've been inspired to re-reading selected Ballard works after dipping into a collection of his interviews in Extreme Metaphors, where I have to say he expresses his ideas and incredible vision much more concisely and brilliantly than in much of his fiction. Taken together however, and in conjunction with other key works that I read many years ago, it's a reminder why Ballard made such an impression on me and influenced how I view ond measure other works on the now popular disaster/apocalyptic theme against his body of work.