The Drowned World in On Paths Unknown

Feb 18, 2017 Paul rated it liked it

Shelves: science-fiction

Ballard wrote this dystopian novel in the early 1960s, but it is still resonant today and it deals with a drastic increase in temperature on the earth; it is set in 2145. The premise is fairly simple; temperatures have greatly increased and the polar icecaps melted; temperatures around the equator can reach well over 150 degrees. Most life is centred on the polar areas. Jungle proliferates and evolution has goes into overdrive with some insects, reptiles and plants developing and changing very q Ballard wrote this dystopian novel in the early 1960s, but it is still resonant today and it deals with a drastic increase in temperature on the earth; it is set in 2145. The premise is fairly simple; temperatures have greatly increased and the polar icecaps melted; temperatures around the equator can reach well over 150 degrees. Most life is centred on the polar areas. Jungle proliferates and evolution has goes into overdrive with some insects, reptiles and plants developing and changing very quickly. Great banks of silt have also developed with great lagoons surrounded by jungle. At the start of the book a team of scientists and military personnel are studying a series of lagoons set in jungle over what was the city of London; which is many feet below the lagoons.
The main character is Robert Kerans, a biologist. He has moved up from the makeshift camp to the top floor of the Ritz, the top floors being above water. He spends time with two others in particular; Dr Bodkin (a scientist) and Beatrice Dahl who is rather reclusive and has taken the top floor of another hotel. There are plenty of descriptions of heat and exotic wildlife. A number of members of the staff start to get dreams which seem to draw them to the sun and the south and which seem to point to a collective unconscious and impulses which go back to prehistoric times. Obviously Ballard is playing with Jungian ideas about the unconscious.
Kerans, Bodkin and Dahl remain when the main party leaves and they continue to lead a fairly solitary existence. This is disrupted when a large boat arrives captained by Strangman; a white man, dressed all in white, with an all black crew. Strangman is dangerous and unpredictable. Some high jinks ensue, but the primeval instincts are strong. I thought I had laid Heart of Darkness to rest last year; but here we are again!! Ballard has denied being influenced by it, but it鈥檚 clearly there for all to see. It is also possible that the influence is early H G Wells, as Conrad was also influenced by Wells; novels such as The Time Machine. The main characters are also like time travellers transported back to primeval times. Although the contrast here is different to Heart of Darkness where the jungle is threatening and other. Here the impulse is to return to the jungle, the primeval home.
There are links to Lord of the Flies and Robinson Crusoe and Strangman can be seen as a parody of Crusoe. Strangman is looting the treasures of the submerged city. Water and the sea are potent symbols here and Ballard puts words from Eliot鈥檚 The Waste Land (Death by Water) into Strangman鈥檚 mouth;
There's nothing much left now鈥擨 can tell you,
I sometimes feel like Phlebas the Phoenician.
Though that's really your role, isn't it?
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers.
As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool."
Strangman also quotes Donne (Eliot was a great promoter of Donne) and alludes to the following;
鈥淲ho bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? But who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee鈥�
Ballard makes reference to a number of other works; Camus, Kierkegaard, Ulysses and Homer to name a few. There are elements of the Grail Quest as well. There sometimes seems to be an element of, to adapt a rather British saying, throwing in everything including the kitchen sink.
It鈥檚 clever stuff and Ballard鈥檚 vision is very prescient. It is also well written and the impulse is to move back into the Darkness as if going back to the womb or back to primeval impulses. However we still have a white man in charge of a ship with a crew of black men dancing to his tune. Perhaps we have not moved on so far after all. That really irritated me. ...more

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Nov 17, 2012 Jennifer rated it liked it · review of another edition

Reverse evolution....genetic memory....and a drowned world. I couldn't put it down, it was a captivating world. ...more

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Feb 16, 2012 Brian rated it it was ok · review of another edition

This book is an interesting premise trapped in poor execution. I have enjoyed Ballard's other work (especially "Crash" and "Empire of the Sun") but his writing in this one was so clunky and ham-fisted that I could never get into the characters and completely immerse myself in the world he was attempting to create. There were some dialogue exchanges in the book that were as unbelievable and mechanical as Philip K. Dick's characters. ...more

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Oct 14, 2011 Kate Sherrod rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. The Drowned World could easily look like a climate change cautionary tale nowadays, depicting as it does a planet on which all the major cities are under hundreds of feet of water, the average daytime temperature is a good 120-140 degrees, and the biosphere is reverting to something much like its Triassic state, teeming with giant ferns and reptiles that some people are starting to suspect are evolving back into dinosaurs. But the book (first published in 1962) predates modern theories; here the The Drowned World could easily look like a climate change cautionary tale nowadays, depicting as it does a planet on which all the major cities are under hundreds of feet of water, the average daytime temperature is a good 120-140 degrees, and the biosphere is reverting to something much like its Triassic state, teeming with giant ferns and reptiles that some people are starting to suspect are evolving back into dinosaurs. But the book (first published in 1962) predates modern theories; here the sun is the culprit; a series of really bad solar flares having stripped away a lot of the protections Earth's atmosphere provides, the planet has gotten hot and steamy; The Drowned World could well be a sequel to Stephen Vincent Benet's poem, "Metropolitan Nightmare," which is even older.

So the characters here are neither hand-wringers nor moralizers. Robert Kerans, Colonel Riggs and Beatrice Dahl are studying the vast series of lagoons that used to be London as the book opens. But it's time to go back to the relative safety and comfort of the Arctic Circle; the iguanas and gators are getting uppity and the heat is going to get unbearable. Everything looks good to go -- but nobody asked Beatrice. And Beatrice, like many other members of the expedition, has started to have "deep" dreams that seem to be seducing her into staying, into giving up her humanity as it is commonly understood and becoming a quiescent consciousness submerged in jungle and lagoon. And because she and Kerans have become a couple during their time in the Lagoons-That-Were-London, he's going to stay, too. Besides, Kerans kind of likes his living arrangements, in the penthouse of the ruins of the Ritz Hotel -- a penthouse that's now more or less at water level, and still crammed full of a long-dead resident's silk shirts and other treasures.

What follows is a short -- shockingly short by modern standards; I had almost forgotten that novels once took up just 133 pages! -- account of a myriad of ways in which people can go mad outside of civilization. We have looters, a savage king (who arrives on a paddle steamer escorted by hundreds of alligators who seem to respond a bit to his will), and more than one person who has decided to do as the dreams suggest and just sort of zone out and become human lizards. When the savage king finds a way to drain the lagoon where Kerans and Beatrice are basking, the better to get at the treasures he imagines are still to be had in the abandoned stores and museums at the bottom, things get even stranger, which I would not have thought possible.

I had my own "deep" dream after reading The Drowned World in which I basically invented my own sequel to it and shared the sense of being subsumed in its waters; Ballard's sequences are so vivid and compelling that I wasn't at all surprised by this. I too, want to see London's big planetarium filled with water and teeming with sponges and coral and angelfish, the little specks of light from the water's surface far above forming a new set of constellations that Kerans imagines mirror those that appeared in the night sky when the Earth's climate was last like this.

Ballard is a wonder! ...more

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Jun 10, 2010 Kamakana rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: aa-englandlit, all-five-star, read-twice-or-more, aa-europelit, speculative-fiction, sff-new-wave, xshort-less-200, ballard-j-g, postapocalyptic, zz1962

.??? 90s: this is ballard. drowning world is set in the swamps of london, in the ongoing catastrophe of melting ice caps, rising sea levels, return to triassic-age climate that reveals all mankind still at the mercy of an indifferent universe. like the worst predictions of climate change, though completely beyond human cause and human freedom. i love that cover...

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