Customer Reviews

Rushing to Paradise (Isis)

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

 

 

In Rushing to Paradise, J.G. Ballard paints a memorable and disturbing picture of idealism run amok within the paradise of a Pacific atoll. It is a book that glitters with dark ironies; from the opening paragraphs, with deranged femme-fatale Dr. Rafferty bullhorning slogans to the deserted beaches of Saint-Esprit, to her commune's timely rescue from this obsessed woman by the hated French military. Rushing to Paradise is likely to outrage some with its dry send-ups of environmentalism and feminism. Nonetheless, it is worthy book; strange, vivid, unpredictable, and at times...wonderful. I recommend buying two copies in the event one is lost.

And I'm glad to say it was easy for him to chew. This is a perceptive and actually pretty nasty take on the more extreme ends of enviromentalism and feminism, the points where the former becomes psychosis and the latter becomes sexism of a virulent and violent sort.

What I love most about Ballard is his willingness to probe the darker corners of the human psyche. It's a rare gift to want to explore these places, let alone use them to comment on our society. This is an excellent book and worth your cash!

I really liked Rushing to Paradise and I don't see how it generated such negative reviews; except to say that it IS a "politically incorrect" book. Author Ballard has strange, almost hallucinatory descriptive powers which he delivers in cool, matter of fact language. Above all, the book resonates with a twilight of the gods atmosphere. Maybe not for everyone, but this doesn't make it a bad book. Quite the contrary.

I have read several of Ballard's books, and many of his favorite ideas are here: tyranny, the cult of personality, "the kindness of women" (a real joke, that), destruction of environment, the violence of the mob, etc. etc. but I got the impression he was just going through the motions--it was very similar in concept to the last chapter of HIGH RISE, which I liked better.

As a woman who barely survived a 70's radical feminist "collective"/communal household, though, I found his evocations of aggressive, politically-minded women together quite frighteningly real!

An extremely important work and one that should be read by anyone interested in the uses of Political Correctness for repression. In ordinary circumstances a person like Dr. Barbara would either remain harmless or would swiftly be judged an intellectual fraud and a homocidal maniac. What this woman succeeds in doing, however, is to use the "liberal" predilections of other people against them to contrive dystopic circumstances that are extraordinary, putting her outside the possibility of judgment and allowing her to murder at will. The models for Dr. Barbara derive from such ancient sources as the myth of the Women of Lemnos and such modern ones as Moby Dick: she is a feminist Captain Ahab and is endowed with all of Melville's madman's persuasiveness and executive skills. A brilliant book, which belongs on the same shellf with Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Lord of the Flies.

Rushing To Paradise reads more like a sub-par novel from Michel Houellebecq or Alex Garland and pales in comparison to almost every other J.G. Ballard title. This one far and away is the worst of the lot. It's not that the writing is bad or that the plot is terrible. It's just that NOTHING ever really goes anywhere, the characters are two-dimensional even more so than is common in Ballard books. In most Ballard books we are confronted with a "normal, professional" person subjected to some sort of extraordinary situation that reveals something about humanity and the world that we live in or one day might find ourselves in. However, in Rushing To Paradise we are given no chemistry for this process to happen. The characters and location never really click making any revelation impossible. Skip this one and read the short Terminal Beach instead, similar set up with a compelling insight that is utterly lacking in this novel.

I actually enjoyed reading the book even though I wasn't very impresses. It is, well, mind entertaining... I am interested in reading more Ballard's books now

I give this book 2 stars only as I read it avidly. Two reasons for this. First, there was always the chance of a sexual or violent encounter on any page and Ballard seemed to do well on this terrain. Unfortunately there is very little. Second, I was desperate to discover why the reviewers quoted on the cover had given the book such praise. Scarcely deserved.

It is badly writted. Adjectives where clearly an adverb is intended (changing the meaning of the sentence) and other examples of poor re-reading and little attention to detail demonstrated the most glaring example of the thoughtlessness of this prose. Much worse is the implausible story. One reviewer lauded its interesting place between realism and fantasy. This is too great a kindness.

The characters are hateful, Ballard's point of view on the key themes of feminism and environmentalism are of no interest whatsoever. It's not that there aren't interesting things to say about the excesses of these ism's, but Ballard doesn't mention one.

As you will have noticed I've changed my mind and given it 1 star.

I bought this book after reading the totally amazing "Crash". It took my a week to just get halfway through it before I said to myself, "You know, reading for fun isn't supposed to be a CHORE." I then threw it in the garbage. I didn't even want to donate it to the local library for fear that someone might make the same mistake I did. Utter doo-doo.