The Drought: A Novel

So The Drought, from 1965. I loved The Crystal World and I love how different this is. Crystal World came after but is absolutely no retread. Ballard grows as an author in my appreciation for creating two masterpieces that are so different from each other. That'd be like if Mondrian had also made The Last Supper in between his haunting plastic visions.

Years ago I bought a box of a hundred postcards depicting paper back covers. The four that made the biggest impression on me were a collection of Heine poems with a mindblowing op art cover, Iris McCullough's A Severed Head with that just-manic-enough stare, and the contrasting dichotomy of J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World and The Drought. I always wanted to read them. Turned out that it's not just two books, it's an entire series. I managed to read The Crystal World a few years ago, in Swedish; this copy of The Drought was in English.

The fact that it's in English meant it was rough going at first since I had been spoiled of reading a whole bunch of novels in Swedish lately. I read way slower in English (not that I'm that good at Swedish either). It was also rough going because of how bleak it is and how close to home it hits in this era of climate desolation and stubborn denial. We're currently living in The Burning World and our World Leaders are still pouring gallons of gasoline on those flames.

J. G. Ballard crams his prose ful of comparisons. Everything is like something else. Sometimes it just falls flat and looks dumb like when mud looks like lava or whatever but often it adds to the experience more often than not. One of my faves is an early description of how car drivers are throwing their cigarettes out the window as they're crossing the bridge and that act of poisonous littering looks somehow beautiful.

That's a theme for the entire novel. Making ugly things beautiful and vice versa. There's a "drowned" aquarium (an aquarium where the water hasn't been changed) and the tropical fish are fraying like gossamer. It's a meditative and enriching read.

That's why it stings so much that the main character is such a racist, ableist, ageist, and cissexist (and initially fatphobic but he gets over that). Some of the secondary progragonists are African American, old, hydrocephalic, blind, or (shock horror) female, and the third-person narration never shies away from expressing that in slurs. Not only through slurs for those particular groups (but there's a lot of that) but also "collateral slurs" like one of the worst words for Artic First Nations women that someone else gets compared to.

I wonder if it had been more palatable if this book instead just had been a first person account by this Dr Ransom main character because the third person voice makes it seems like the author himself is down with the sickness. The choice of third person is effective when it comes to barfing forth apocalyptica (and yes the book makes me wanna run TRPGs) in all its ugly beauty, and the book has three parts and each part starts more "zoomed out" and the third-person-ness makes that seamless; it can describe the lay of the land and then jump right onto the shoulder of a PoV char. But I have no idea of knowing that. Maybe it would be even worse.

And maybe this is just J. G. Ballard's own language of blood purity and strong river men coming at us through the ages. It's been sixty years since the book was written but I would hope that even then this would've been beyond the pale.

The particular flavor of apocalypse is haunting and timeless. I was lightly teasing Count Zero the other day for its telefaxes and rooftop antennae (all in good fun because that one does seems like a marvelous books) but this has almost nothing like that. I never get jarred awake from "this could happen". Okay yeah one thing: mosquitos would decrease in number during a drought, not increase. But that's just one sentence.

I'm giving this book a strong reco if you can stomach the assorted slurs. I'm not excusing them or saying "it was a different time"—the book would 100% have been better without them. But there's enough "here" here in the location work and themes that carries the book into an unforgettable nightmare that our noble leaders are dragging us towards in real life.