Customer Reviews

Crystal World

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Even by the most basic definition of "science-fiction" this book barely makes the cut . . . it doesn't really take place in the future, doesn't feature new technology, doesn't try to rewrite the laws of physics, you can even understand it without a degree in higher mathematics. Ballard's always been too concerned with the psychological and what lies inside the human heart to be a real SF writer but in the end, it's the story itself that counts, whatever genre label you want to slap onto it. What makes this book so effective is the calm contrast of the utterly unfathomable with the completely normal. Dr Sanders receives a letter from friends in a part of Africa saying really weird stuff about everything turning to crystal . . . curious, he travels there and finds that there weren't speaking metaphorically . . . everything, trees and all, are slowly being converted to crystal, and there's mounting evidence that the rest of the world is going to soon follow suit. Against this backdrop Ballard lets Sanders attempt to make some sense of what's going on. The unwaveringly calm tone of the novel only accents the subtle creepiness of the whole affair and every time you think Ballard's run out of ways to describe crystals and jewels, he figures out yet another one. Symbolism and imagery run amok in this story, there's definitely some sort of quasi-religious (or at least good/evil) aspect to all the crystalization going on but I'll be darned if I can figure it out. Which is another good thing about the book, unlike most SF writers Ballard doesn't take the conceit that everything we encounter in this Universe we can understand and while possible explanations for what's happening abound (most of which don't make any sense anyway) there's never a definitive reason given, so at the end of the book you're left with a lot of questions, but the good kind, the kind that make you think. Thus readers expecting neat and tidy endings are advised that will be disappointed if they go into this book with that sort of attitude. In the end it's Ballard's realistic tone set against fantastic events and his ability to draw the reader into his world and make it come alive (even while the world itself is fossilizing) that causes the book to linger in your mind. His haunting depiction of a crystal world won't be something you'll easily forget.

Owing more than a passing salute toward Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS, J. G. Ballard's THE CRYSTAL WORLD also resembles a more obscure work by one David Lindsay, A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS. Just as in Conrad's masterpiece, Ballard's complicated protagonist Dr. Edward Sanders must venture up a West African coastal river to discover not only his own fate, but the fate of the world. Once a devoted caregiver to lepers in a hospital in Fort Isabelle, Sanders goes to find two friends, Dr. Max Clair and his wife, Sanders' ex-lover and aide-de-camp at the leproserie, the lovely but dark Suzanne, living now at a jungle clinic in a remote outpost far upriver. He has received a strange letter from Suzanne in which she describes the great forest as "glistening like St. Sophia," herself as "becoming excessively Byzantine," and the native peoples as "walk[ing] through the dark forest with crowns of light on their heads." Understandably, Sanders is both intrigued and distressed--and, we soon decipher, still very much in love with Suzanne, or at least his memories of her.

First Dr. Sanders, who appears to us as something considerably less than Burrough-esque but more than a mere clod, is forced to wait in the river station of Port Matarre for someone willing to take him further up the Matarre River to the almost mythical Mont Royal, where the Clairs may be found. Port Matarre is an exceedingly strange, purgatorial place, steeped in shadow, a place where, as Sanders remarks to a traveling priest, "The sun seems unable to make up its mind." Here he meets a young journalist, Louise Peret,who bares more than a passing resemblance to Suzanne Clair, although Louise is lighter of complexion, a somehow brighter version of her "somber twin" Suzanne Clair. This play of contrasts, of light and dark, good and evil, perfection and corruption, is maintained throughtout Ballard's work here.

Sanders does finally locate a willing host to take himself and Louise Peret upriver to Mont Royal. There they find the military has been busy attempting to cordon off huge tracts of the forest in an attempt to slow the creeping transformation of it into a world of bright crystal-like encrustations, beautiful, we are made to understand, even beyond Ballard's brave and incessant attempts to describe. (This same phenomenon is being reported in other parts of the world, notably Miami, FL.) This veritable cancer of crystals proves too malignant for all the men and their science to withstand, and soon Ballard's story itself seems hopelessly trapped inside it. The claustrophobic quality here is palpable and disturbing. In the end, we are confronted with a fantastic vision of Sanders tramping through a jeweled nature, glittering in crystalline petrifaction, bearing a large wooden crucifix encrusted with crystal-solvent gemstones, which he desperately waves around like some mad Christian. Suzanne, having contracted some latent form of leprosy, has been lost to the forest, "frozen like an icon," while two men Sanders can never really know are locked in battle over the fate of a dying woman, until the forest claims them too.

Just as in Lindsay's A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS, Ballard has given us metaphysical allegory dressed up as science fiction. While Ballard's work seems to me more Christian in its manifest accretions than Lindsay's more gnostic, Blakean rendering, still they tell much the same story: The hero's journey through a world of opposites, constantly in flux, always toward something not yet seen, that, once envisioned, proves powerfully seductive, yet noble enough to cause our hero to sacrifice himself or herself to it completely, to dissolve back into that world that was always there but never fully realized until the end.

J. G. Ballard's THE CRYSTAL WORLD is science fiction genre writing about as much as Plato's REPUBLIC is a tableau about table manners. Good writing always transcends genre. (For myself, genre has ceased to exist. There is only good writing, bad writing, and everything in between.) In the end, what is truly remarkable about THE CRYSTAL WORLD is Ballard's deftness to ally ourselves with him on Sanders journey into light and darkness. In very short order, we are swept up, unquestioning the astonishing, deeply disturbing world he creates for us. And that, my friends, is just good writing.

Responding to a cryptic letter from a former lover, Dr. Edward Sanders journeys into the African interior and discovers that, through a solar prodigy, an expanse of rain forest and all within it have begun to crystallize. As Sanders is drawn deeper into this mysterious experience he discovers the same dark human venality at work, played out against scenes of paradisal wonderment. As he did in Empire of the Sun, Ballard imagines a strange, new world; hidden just beneath and quite at variance with this one The Crystal World is an eerily beautiful book. Richly imagined and written by one of the premier writers of our time. Read and enjoy.

I enjoyed this book, but I think it could have been told better as a short story or novella. The basic plot is good, and the implications for the fate of the universe really got me going, but the plot tends to drag, and the characters go in circles, not accomplishing much. Mind you, I think it's pretty apparent from the writing that this was intended: fairly thin characters serving to introduce the reader to an interesting situation (and not even explaining it, necessarily). Overall, however, I don't think that this style would appeal to first-time readers, and I can understand why some don't get into his works.

Ballard's "The Crystal World" was published in 1966 and followed several Science Fiction books, his novels "The Wind From Nowhere" and "The Drowned World", and a series of stories - one of which formed the basis for this novel - written at the beginning of his career. Although the theme of "The Crystal World" - the end of the world - picks off from his two earlier novels, Ballard here ups the ante, with a more complex storyline, more effective narrative, and a decidely elevated level of imagination.

Set in equatorial Africa, in a mythical ex-French colony, the novel recounts the impact of an overwhelming and unstoppable natural disaster. Ballard creates his own fantastic science fiction deux ex machine - the crystalization of the jungle - then inexorably documents destruction. Ballard bounces back and forth - not always with aesthetic success - between the wonder of the events and the human response as the jungle changes from organic life forms into a new and startling inorganic creation. The main character Dr. Sanders filters these events through a consciousness gradually drawn deeper and deeper into a romantic search for which he finds less and less validity. Ballard makes comparisons with Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" so deliberately obvious one is forced to accept "The Crystal World" as less a novel modeled after the famous novella as updated commentary on Conrad's ideas. The work never relinquishes a long lineage of apocalyptic Science Fiction stories, including the author's own previous efforts.

In "The Crystal World" Ballard has not yet reached his full maturity as a writer, and some of the character development remains flat. He's quite a ways yet from the author who gave us the remarkable highly personal testimony of "The Empire of the Sun". Yet a close re-reading of "The Crystal World" shows Ballard already working with a keen eye for the extreme contrast between the individual viewpoint and the mass during moments of catastrophic social upheaval. Generally Ballard's descriptions are often deliberately flat and clinical, as might be found in the French new novels of the era. However, Ballard overlays his dispassionate words with sudden glimpses of some of the richest and most ornate prose he would ever attempt, producing striking verbal contrasts in heaped up adjectives and adverbs vying for the most striking colors and tones. These poetic effects of Baroque imagery are all the more vivid when set off against the narrative's simpler prose.

As the novel builds Ballard falls into a ever more generalized storyline, and much of the force of "The Crystal World" is abated in Science Fiction cliches. The limitations of the earlier novels, with their single idea fixee, have not yet been overcome, and what might have been a classic, falls into some of the same problems that afflicted the earlier novels.

Fans of early Ballard will definitely find "The Crystal World", with its engrossing tale and - for Science Fiction - superior writing, an excellent if challenging read. Serious readers may find the book's attempt to maintain its suspenseful dramatic edge suffers from a surfeit of the more banal qualities of Science Fiction writing - tawdry character development that reads more like movie characters than personages formed by a major novelist's imagination, and a too ready tendency to fall back on Tom Swift action lines instead of a more deeply realized series of incidents carrying forward to a tragic catharsis.

I wish I could have believed more fully in Ballard's creation, "The Crystal World". However, I just can't fully accept the fantasy - for me he doesn't sustain the suspense or the magic. Writers have to convince their readers that the world they write about exists and is as palpable as the reader's world, or even more so! Ballard reaches pretty far, but here he seems to fall a bit short.

Having knocked the book around a bit, I must confess "The Crystal World" is a book I have read several times. Ballard's strange story of the crystals has an ineluctable and undefineable fascination only special books achieve. One remembers it when other books are utterly forgotten. Maybe it actually is a classic, though a flawed one.

Ballard's The Crystal World is more Christian allegory than science fiction. In it, Ballard presents the theme of man's spiritual and psychological struggle between light and darkness, good and evil, Heaven and Hell, and, especially, perfection (symbolized as crystals) and corruption (symbolized as the flesh, especially leprous flesh). Ballard's tone is subdued, his characters more derived more from archetype than reality ('The Woman of Darkness,' 'The Woman of Light,' 'The Pilgrim Journeying to the Sacred'), and his images beautiful. It is Dante journeying through a leprous Hell and a crystal Paradise, attempting to find meaning in his life.

The only flaw in the book is that, in places, Ballard feels the need to point out the symbolism in this book and translate its meaning. This is the job of the critic, not the writer, and one suspects that Ballard was instructed to do this by a nervous editor who was afraid the book was to 'literate' for a mass audience. But whatever the reason, it is a flaw of the book that detracts from its crystal perfection.

i've read ballard at his extremes (crash, empire of the sun) and found this short book to be economically told, filled with wonder and dread. what i truly appreciated was ballard's willingness to leave things open-ended, to describe rather than explain, and to let his nightmare world function fully under it's own logic. now if i can just get these crystals out of my arm...

I confess to having mixed feelings about this novel. On the one hand, there is an aspect to it which resonates, in a visionary way, with the dream time. Especially when you consider how the crystalization process derives from variances of temporal phasing. This visionary, mystical aspect of the story is both compelling and disturbing--both beautifully transfixing, and ominous and threatening.

Crystals, in the natural world tell a story of order and high organization. With most natural processes, the order is hidden in Fibonacci sequences and fractals,that, at first glance, appear to be chaotic, but crystals volunteer a material manifestatioin of intersecting geometric planes, without inducement. I think of the Dead Sea, and the artifacts of old covered in glistening crystalized salt; or the salt pillars of Lot's Wife.

And the additional sense of mystery and dread surrounding the river port, and the journey up the river, with all it's resonance to Conrad and 'Heart of Darkness', again, very atmospheric and arresting.

But there really is no plot, to speak of, and the engine that drives the story forward is the mystic revelations of the progagonist, which, apart from their aesthetic considerations, are all very implicit, and not fully realized, or finely detailed. A kind of progressive spiritual elevation is somehow telegraphed as a sort of irrepressible diseased horror. This produces a sense of double binding conflict and contradiction that is both unpleasant and unresolvable. When the protagonist, at last, leaves a perfectly charming companion to head back into the danger zone, it is reminiscient of the end of Ballard's The Drowned World, but it is incomprehensible to the reader who has sustained all of the danger and anxiety of the mysterious crystallization, with little sense of real understanding as to why he is so compelled to do so--only that he must. In the final analysis, for all it's novelty, I was left with a set of ambiguous feelings about the whole prospect, and no real sense of resolution or satisfaction.

This is an interesting piece of literature, not quite a fantasy story, but not quite within the bounds of reality. The characters are normal people, the setting is a small town with nothing special about it, except that it is beside a jungle where jewels grow out of the ground like weeds, and as a tumor, overtake anyone or anything in their way. If you can find your way out, before becoming a frozen statue of gems, the crystals melt away as you cross an invisible threshold. It's mesmerizing, and out of this world.

What I liked most, is that Ballard never offers an explanation for this garden of jewelry. The rather simple story takes our characters on adventures in and out of this jungle, where some move swiftly enough to make it through with only a thin layer of "frost" on their clothes, while others find themselves trapped, and eventually buried under a rising ocean of diamonds and sapphires.

The prose is simply wonderful. Ballard is a master of language. It is a joy to find yourself tangled in the elegance of his wording, so simple and so fluid, yet as enchanting as the jewels of his strange, dreamlike jungle.

If you are looking to read a story with a clear, structured plot, where event A leads to event B and is resolved by event C, then avoid this book. This does not build up to a climactic revelation, and the mystery is not solved by a dramatic courtroom confession. But if you're hoping to find yourself lost in another world, then imagine the possibilities of a place where you can fill your pockets with opals and rubies, and where lepers grow emerald limbs glazed with topaz! Definitely something I plan to read again.

Mark McGinty is the author of "Elvis and the Blue Moon Conspiracy"

Like the jungle slowly being covered in magnificent jewels within the novel, Ballard's dreamy prose and elegant writing style cover a rather banal and uninteresting story that never arrives anywhere. Casually tied to the bones of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, The Crystal World is clearly an early attempt at philosophical introspection by an author whose style would mature much later. The Crystal World's setting is indeed fascinating as a piece of speculative fiction, but not much was done with it except as a background for some thin romance and confused, meandering characters. As noted previously the colonial mindset will also grate on modern PC sensibilities.