Мартин Эмис – The Drowned World (страница 1)
The Drowned World
J. G. Ballard
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins
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London SE1 9GF
This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014
First published in 1962
Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1962
J. G. Ballard asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
‘The Drowned World’ © Martin Amis 2011
‘Reality Is a Stage Set’ © Travis Elborough 2006
‘Time, Memory and Inner Space’ © J. G. Ballard 1963
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780007221837
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007290123
Version: 2016-03-22
Contents
CHAPTER ONE: On the Beach at the Ritz
CHAPTER TWO: The Coming of the Iguanas
CHAPTER THREE: Towards a New Psychology
CHAPTER FOUR: The Causeways of the Sun
CHAPTER FIVE: Descent into Deep Time
CHAPTER SEVEN: Carnival of Alligators
CHAPTER EIGHT: The Man with the White Smile
CHAPTER NINE: The Pool of Thanatos
CHAPTER ELEVEN: “The Ballad of Mistah Bones”
CHAPTER TWELVE: The Feast of Skulls
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Too Soon, Too Late
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Paradises of the Sun
IS PRESCIENCE A LITERARY VIRTUE? And should the work of J. G. Ballard be particularly prized (as some critics maintain) for the ‘uncanny’ accuracy of its forecasts? The answer to both these questions, I suggest, is a cheerful no.
In
So here’s a prophecy: fictional divination will always be hopelessly haphazard. The unfolding of world-historical events is itself haphazard (and therefore unaesthetic), and ‘the future’ is in a sense defined by its messy inscrutability. Besides, the art of fiction owes allegiance to a muse, a goddess as pure as her eight sisters, and not to some bustling Madame Sosostris (Eliot’s ‘famous clairvoyant’, with her ‘wicked pack of cards’). Nevertheless there are certain writers whose visionary power is indifferent to the corroboration of mere upshots – writers who seem to be able to feel, and use, the ‘world hum’ of the ‘near-after’. That first quote is from Don DeLillo, who is one such; the second quote is from James Graham Ballard (1930–2009), who is another.
Ballard foresaw manmade climate change, not in
This is an irony we need not fear: indeed, it speeds us on our way to more central questions. As a man (and as a good Green), Ballard was naturally on the side of the angels; but as an artist he is unconditionally of the Devil’s party. He loves the glutinous jungles of
‘Soon it would be too hot’ is the laconic first sentence of
Even through the massive olive-green fronds the relentless power of the sun was plainly tangible. The blunt refracted rays drummed against his bare chest and shoulders … The solar disc was no longer a well-defined sphere, but a wide expanding ellipse that fanned out across the eastern horizon like a colossal fire-ball, its reflection turning the dead leaden surface of the lagoon into a brilliant copper shield.
The sun is alarmingly distended. It is also alarmingly
There are mosquitos the size of dragon flies, hammer-nosed bats, wolf spiders. There are iguanas and basilisks – at one point a large caiman sees Kerans ‘waist-deep among the horse-tails’ and veers towards him, ‘its eyes steadying’ (that ‘steadying’ is awfully good). The water gives off an unendurable reek, ‘the sweet compacted smells of dead vegetation and rotting animal carcases’. Kerans watches the ‘countless reflections of the sun move across the surface in huge sheets of fire, like the blazing faceted eyes of gigantic insects’. Beneath the lagoon is a city: ‘Free of vegetation, apart from a few drifting clumps of Sargasso weed, the streets and shops had been preserved almost intact, like a reflection in a lake that has somehow lost its original.’ The city is London.
Kerans is nominally engaged with a team of scientists on a waterborne testing station, but the work has become pointlessly routine. Fauna and flora are faithfully following ‘the emergent lines anticipated twenty years earlier’, namely an accelerated counter-evolution, a retrogression into a world of lizards and rainforests under a Triassic sun. The human actors have embarked on a parallel process – within the diameter of their own skulls. Early on we learn that something has gone wrong with
Guided by his dreams, he was moving backwards through the emergent past, through a succession of ever stranger landscapes, centred upon the lagoon … At times the circle of water was spectral and vibrant, at others slack and murky, the shore apparently formed of shale, like the dull metallic skin of a reptile. Yet again the soft beaches would glow invitingly with a glossy carmine sheen, the sky warm and limpid, the emptiness of the long stretches of sand total and absolute, filling him with an exquisite and tender anguish.