The Crystal World by JG Ballard

Many years ago, maybe a decade ago, maybe longer, I read a book by JG Ballard titled the atrocity exhibition, an intentionally Burroughsian (as in that writer who shot his wife and got away with it, legally) text that the younger me found complicated and uninteresting, an exercise rather than a book, words and language rather than meaning and thought… Image not humanity… Maybe I was right and that book is 1960s psychoactive vacuity, but maybe I was wrong and it is instead a masterpiece that I was too ignorant to appreciate…

Certainly, it didn’t make me want to return to Ballard’s oeuvre any time soon (or ever, tbh), hence why such a long time has passed since I’ve done so again.

Why, then, break the habit of a quarter-lifetime?

Because The Crystal World was one of the many texts I went out and scoured secondhand book stores searching for after I read Joe Darlington’s book on experimental British literature of the 1960s and ’70s, The Experimentalists.

That book – which I fucking loved and highly recommend – focused on several writers whose work I was already familiar with (e.g. BS Johnson, Ann Quin), introduced me to other writers (e.g. Alan Burns (I’ve read five of his books and two (Europe After The Rain and The Angry Brigade are amongst my favourite reads of the bleak empty life of my self-sabotaging / self-harming return to London) and Alexander Trocchi (bought two books and I’m yet to read either)), and also reminded me of some of the existence of more experimental yet mainstream-y writers whose works I have various opinions of, e.g. Doris Lessing (love), Anthony Burgess (like the idea of but have never read a book of his I truly thought was special) and JG Ballard (see above).

Joe Darlington’s book, though, is a near love letter to experimental literature (be that super experimental to the point where an intellectual lightweight like me would struggle to understand it (e.g. your fucking Samuel Beckett)), and everything he writes about in The Experimentalists genuinely sounds interesting: even the things that sound boring or cold or like (the noun I will come back to because it’s the way I often feel about “experimental for the sake of being experimental” type literature, e.g. Oulipo (bleurgh), e.g. that book without the letter “e” in it) an exercise, still feel worth reading.

It was, then, that Joe Darlington’s writing persuaded me to look up JG Ballard’s 1966 (check that if I can be bothered) novel, The Crystal World.

For me – and perhaps for other millennials who didn’t grow up in a house with literature – JG Ballard was a name first encountered on the covers of garish-looking books filling the remainder stands of The Works and HMV in the noughties, next to Chuck Palanuik, Bret Easton Ellis, The Dice Man, Helter Skelter, whatever the sequel to The Dice Man was called, the ugliest editions of The Road ever printed and various Gonzo journalism classics…

Nestled amongst these books aimed at teenagers who see weed use as aspirational, undergraduates who wank more than they shit and adults with poor interpersonal skills/personal hygiene were Ballard novels that very much seemed to fit right in … novels with titles like Cocaine Nights and Crash … novels about drug use and class, and also about erotically charged autovehicular violence.

For whatever reason, I didn’t get round to reading those Ballard books when I was of the right age to pass for any of those three target demographics (I mean you could argue that my interpersonal skills are “poor”, but I think that would a) technically be ableist and b) no, they’re not, I’m just too depressed to bother to use them (and my personal hygiene is – to the best of my knowledge – fine, but I don’t speak to enough people irl to be told that it’s not if it isn’t, so maybe it’s not… please let me know in the comments if you’re an acquaintance of mine and you think I’m stinky?)), and so it never occured to me to try again.

(I’ve also never seen the 201x (check later if I can be arsed) Ben Wheatley film adaptation of High Rise or the 199x (check later if I can be arsed) David Cronenburg Crash so maybe if I’d watched either of those I would have found myself reading Ballard again by now? We will literally never know.)

Darlington, though, evoked this early novel of Ballard’s as a seething and complex text, one with more in common with Anna Kavan than a book with a title like An American Sex Binge, so I dutifully added it to my shopping list then let it sit, unread, for a year on one of my many shelves piled high with unread books and unlived futures.

Until this week, when a sub-200 page experimental sci-fi (arguably early cli-fi?) novel by a dead white male felt like the right choice. Was it the right choice? Maybe, though probably not.

How to describe The Crystal World?

It’s basically what would have happened if Graham Greene had tried to write a Kurt Vonnegut novel. By that I mean that there’s a nihilistic worldview, non-naturalistic plot elements, weird Catholicy bits, colonial British attitudes and – crucially – balls to the wall authorial sleaze.

The novel is about a forty year old doctor who works in a leper colony who receives a weird letter from the woman he was recently shagging who has moved to another part of Africa with her husband (yes, she was married and, yes, her husband and the protagonist were best friends), and he sets off in horny pursuit. En route, he meets a sexy French woman who looks like his recent lover, but like fifteen years younger, who he shags, and then he tries to work out why everything in one specific bit of a jungle in the “dark heart of Africa” (dunno if Ballard uses that exact phrase but he certainly echoes its patronising tone) is literally turning into crystals.

He shags the young French woman some more, goes into the jungle looking for his ex and his ex best friend, finds them and shags his ex and realises she has leprosy and admits that he does too, then he tries to get out of the jungle because living things are turning into crystals now, but he gets injured and his arm starts turning into crystals, but then he does get out, shags the young French woman again (maybe giving her leprosy if it’s sexually transmitted???), writes a long letter to his boss at the leprosy hospital where he works saying he quits, then heads back into the jungle in order to deliberately be turned into crystal as, apparently, it’s nice to be crystallised.

Also, the area of crystallisation is expanding, there are other places like this in other countries and basically the whole world will eventually be turned into crystals, so it makes sense to get it over with, right?

The novel promises and hints at time slips and backwardsness and there are lots of half-recognised figures and broken conversations with people who may be meeting out of order with each other, but although this is never clarified it is felt, impactfully…

In the crystallised and crystallising forest, time and timelessness, much like light and dark and life and death, are all different from the rest of the world…

It’s evocative and sinister, and reminded me a lot of Jeff Vandermeer’s Area X trilogy, but set in a world where women aren’t really people and where the transformations wrought by the strange locations are… easier to understand… simpler… Turning into crystal, not… not… Who knows what happens in those books? (I don’t, but I would read them again, and that’s something I very very rarely think, say or feel.)

Will I read more Ballard?

Not this week, and probably not this month, but I definitely have an unread copy of Empire of the Sun somewhere that maybe I’ll place just a little higher in whichever way-too-tall pile of books it currently happens to be drowning in.

Worth a read? I honestly don’t know. But I definitely didn’t hate it, and that’s a start!