Customer Reviews

The Day of Creation

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

 

 

What I liked best about this novel was the images that Ballard was able to evoke. To be honest, I started reading it and lost interest. I picked it up some years later and was hooked. He truly can create amazing pictures in the mind unlike most writers. It is perplexing to me to see a book like The Firm getting such good reviews and being read by millions when this one is hardly even a footnote, when this book is superior in just about every way. It is not his best. I would say Crystal World, High-Rise and The Drowned World are his best, but this is a very original novel.

This is one of those books that clearly isn't meant to be taken entirely literally, the kind where all the events have some kind of metaphorical significance and the exterior landscape is an obvious externalization of an interior one. When done well, this can result in extraordinarily rich and rewarding fiction, the sort of story that does profound things to deep parts of your brain and can provide new insights and emotional resonances every time you return to it. Sadly, when it's done, er, less well, what you end up with is a story that fails to work on two levels instead of just one. And while it does have a few points of interest -- enough that I almost talked myself into giving it three stars instead of two -- this novel unfortunately is one of the latter kind. The metaphors and the imagery they're captured in never seem quite rich enough or subtle enough to be really engaging, either emotionally or intellectually, and the plot in and of itself is neither particularly interesting nor especially plausible. It's been quite a while since I've read any of Ballard's other work, but from what I remember he's not exactly untalented at this sort of thing. Even talented writers occasionally fall flat, however. I wanted to like and appreciate this story, I really did. But, in the end, I was counting down the pages until I was finished and could go and read something else instead. I suspect I only finished it because I'm stubborn. My advice: If you've never read anything by Ballard, start somewhere else. And if you like some of his stuff but don't feel a burning desire to read every word he's ever read, you might as well skip this one.

Ballard's 1987 novel "The Day of Creation" is a sinuous odyssey through a surrealized Africa drunk on the potential of Western technology. Ballard's narrative voice is rich and engaging, the fluctuating exterior and interior landscape rendered with delirious conviction. "The Day of Creation" reads like a particularly brutal 20th century fable, deftly pointing the cool lens of technology on our secret fascination with the Dark Continent.

"The Day of Creation" has been compared to Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." But Ballard's novel is at once deeper and more topical; by infusing his story with a compelling and unlikely romance, Ballard reveals a sensual versatility lesser writers would gladly kill for. Read as an adventure story or as erotic allegory, "The Day of Creation" is a pleasure.

A doctor, sick of the corporate shill he is becoming goes to work in Central Africa. He gets obsessed with finding water, as well as being in the middle of a small military conflict.

When lots of water does happen to come around he starts to get loopier and loopier, hunting for its source, with a young girl he has a demented Lolita thing for, while he does his little Heart of Darkness adventure on a boat.

After the successful "Empire of the Sun" Ballard obviously wanted to continue in the adventure world. Indeed, this was obviously written for his newfound audience as one finds no traces of the sexual/violent extremes some of his earlier work embraces. What he does embrace is the character of one Dr. Mallory, and the river he inadvertenly "invents." Mallory is a mercurial ride in narrator fashion, though you never get much further than his obsession with the river. This, in fact, is the problem with the entirety of the book. Everyone, including the river itself, is given a complex single-faceted personality (make sense?) and what this inevitably leaves the reader with is a spark of intrigue, but never a feeling of real involvement. That greatly hurts an adventure work, such as this one, where Ballard doesn't have his tremendous imagination to fall back on. Overall, a pretty good time, but definitely not one of his best

This is not so much a story as a fable, or fever-dream.

'Dr. Mallory' arrives in a poverty-ridden African country to run a WHO clinic. Messing about, Mallory improbably exposes a natural spring in the arid landscape, which rapidly becomes a substantial river.
Mallory names the river after himself and sets sail along it in a derelict ferry, the Salammbo, to discover its source, along with characters such as a former guerrilla, a 12-year-old girl he names Noon. Strangely some of the characters resemble real people I have met, myself, in parts of Africa.

One of the most interesting characters is the half-blind Mr Pal, who entertains us with an occasional monologue of the passing scenery:

" . . . wild magnolias and many small tamarinds, with comfortable footing for passerine birds . . . the river is some eight metres in depth, moving through an ample basin of washed granitic marl, well stocked with aquatic life. The warm waters offer friendly refuge to snakes and lizards . . . "
"Mr. Pal . . . " I cut the throttle in protest. "For God's sake - you sound as if you're stocktaking on the last day of creation . . . "
"Well put doctor, that describes it exactly . . . "


Mallory finds that the 'benefits' of the river are becoming cancelled by its dangers, and decides he must destroy it, but he disintegrates into delirium as he tries to reach the source, harrassed by the guerillas, the local 'peace forces' - arguably more 'evil' than the guerillas - and nature itself.

Ballard has long impressed me with his incredibly vivid ability in imagery, evident as long ago as his early work "The Drowned World" (now prophetically coming true as the ice caps melt); but in this book, The Day of Creation, Ballard revels in imagery at the cost of making the story realistic. There were too many spots where this reader simply felt 'thrown out' of the narrative, caused by a failure to suspend disbelief in this outrageous tale, due to the extreme improbability of certain of the events.

RIDING HIS PREVIOUS COATAILS INTO OBLIVION ...ONCE HE WAS GOOD, AND THEN HE JUST GOT WORSE AND WORSE .PROiSE IS REALY DEAD. THIS BOOK IS LEADEN .ITS CURSED. I KEPT TRYIND ;..TO READ ON and on, BUT IT WAS EXCRUCIATING IN ITS EMPTINESS, like in the sixties HE WAS GOOD, in the seventies, he was almost brilliant, AND THEN THE MIND ROT [ THE ENTROPY.. the callousness the alien here, in the everyday, hOw wasTHE so goodEXAMPLE day of forever SUPERENCLOSEDURE brillianceExclipsed by the MADDENING BAD? ]anything after the very early early eighties] TAKES OVER.. HIS WRITINGS, AND SAD, HE BECOMES WHAT HE PREACHES AGHAST at ;SURELY GHOSTILY MAYBE ITS POST MODERNISM OR SOMETHING this is the most tedious book ive ever had the un pleasure of not finishing,