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The problem with writing a racially-charged tale of madness and death, lost deep in an alien and antagonistic jungle is that you're going to draw comparisons to 'Heart of Darkness', and that's not a comparison from which many novelists are going to emerge unscathed. The white men lose themselves in the brutality of the primordial past, going 'native', or even beyond native, but Ballard cannot match the furious voice or psychological insights of Conrad.

Ballard distinguishes himself as a competent and bold author, his style easily outdistancing his sci fi contemporaries. His prose is strong, his use of science thoughtful and inspired, and his setting intriguing. Of course, the very notion of a 'drowned world' is a bit suspect, as any researches into Nasa's water level software show: even with the most generous estimates, there just isn't enough water to cover it all. In a more fantastical book, like Kavan's Ice, we can take for granted that the setting is symbolic, not literal, but Ballard takes a more realistic approach. His use of constant, running floods alleviates some of that problem, and there still is land, made remote not just by water, but by temperature.

Generally, as temperature rises grow more extreme, they tend to affect colder regions more than warm ones. In the Eocine, when the poles were warm year round and the ice caps entirely melted, the temperature variance from equator to pole was relatively slight--a continuous rainforest ran from pole to pole. The temperature increase had a more pronounced effect on the cold areas than the warm ones, meaning temperatures at the equator rose a small amount, while those at the poles rose a great amount.

In the Mesozoic, a great deal of the high temperatures were the result of a combination of carbon effects and the fact that there was only a single landmass surrounded by water. Coastal regions always have less temperature variance, especially with the sorts of constant storms described in Ballard's book. These storms would also act to deflect a great deal of the sun's heat, especially as they seem to be concentrated around the equatorial regions. But these are relatively minor concerns, and Ballard's setting was strong enough to suspend disbelief, and did not delve too deeply into explanation or theory.

His sweltering jungle world is reminiscent of Armina's Garden: the place which is too green, too full of life, so vibrant and pulsing that it grows dangerous. Everything is wet, overgrown rot, the sort of place that birthed malaria, an overabundance of frantic, competitive live for which soft man is hardly suited. His sci fi contribution to this trope is the metaphor of the primordial womb: the return to an earlier state. In this he evokes the early Twilight Zone notion of 'reversible evolution', though his depiction is less ridiculous.

But Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' also posits a return to an earlier psychological state, a reversion in which the 'civilized' white men grow even more brutal and depraved than they imagine the natives to be. And like Conrad, Ballard tries to trace this reversion through the psychology of his isolated, increasingly inhuman characters.

But Ballard's psychology is not as variable, not as complex. The characters all speak in the same tones, all make the same sorts of observations, and all seem instantly to comprehend one another's minds. He seems to be trying to build a continuous, shared psychology for these latter men, to paint his reversion in absolute terms, but it is all a bit convenient, and undermines the conflicts between the characters. Their inner thoughts are explained to us, their speech prefaced by redundant adverbs.

And this exposition is a part of his general style. His great central metaphor is also brought up often, then explained matter-of-factly. It is not an undercurrent but a tangible presence in the book, something overt which all the characters seem to understand implicitly. Yet each time we see it, we are not getting a new, contrasting view, as Conrad would give us, but the same images and observations, over and over.

His use of figurative language is mixed. Though it sometimes hits the right mark, the constant repetition means that much of it becomes stale. some authors use such repetition to lull us, to create a poetic style where certain words, through repetition, gain more meaning over time. The author can use the word to invoke a series of related ideas and then add another layer or provide a contrasting observation.

Through such a style, authors can create a dreamlike feel, pervaded with ideas. While Ballard can be dreamlike, he breaks up this mood by his over-explanation. The problem is, if a motif must be explained every time it is brought up, that indicates that the author has not properly established it. Instead of progressing through the idea as the story goes on, the author keeps dragging us backward.

It felt like Ballard wanted to talk about it, but every time he returned to it, he found he had nothing new to say. Part of this might be because the book was expanded from a smaller story, but I'm not convinced it needed expansion. If anything, it could use some editing down.

Ballard does have a literary sensibility that I respect, and I appreciated his mythological allusions, but I didn't feel like this book was a concise exploration of the concepts he brought up. We start off hard sci fi, then quickly drop into what seems like a mystical exploration of the mind, then Ballard leaves that on the back-burner for a bit of suspenseful adventure.

There isn't really a good balance between the slow, psychological introspection and the basic adventure plot, and due to repetition, the introspection rarely elevates the story above what it might otherwise be.