Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
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2011 June 10 • Friday

The J. G. Ballard story "Mr. F Is Mr. F" (1961)is about a man who ages in reverse, ultimately becoming the fetus inside his pregnant wife. In a bizarre flourish at the end, typical of Ballard in its claustrophobic insanity, Charles Freeman's friend becomes his wife's husband and Freeman's father, "the moment of [Freeman's] conception coinciding with the moment of his exticntion, the end of his last birth with the beginning of his first death".

Before this, Freeman's transformation from infant to fetus is described: "he now felt clearly for the first time what he had for so long repressed. Before the end he cried out suddenly with joy and wonder, as he remembered the drowned world of his first childhood".

Which brings us to The Drowned World (1962) J. G. Ballard's second novel but first "major" novel or "work", the novel that Ballard wanted the world to remember as his first.

The succession of gigantic geophysical upheavals which had transformed the Earth's climate had made their first impact some sixty or seventy years earlier. A series of violent and prolonged solar storms lasting several years caused by a sudden instability in the Sun had enlarged the Van Allen belts and diminshed Earth's gravitational hold upon the outer layers of the ionosphere. As these vanished into space, depleting the Earth's barrier against the full impact of solar radiation, temperatures began to climb steadily, the heated atmosphere expanding outwards into the ionosphere where the cycle was completed.

All over the world, mean temperatures rose by a few degrees each year. The majority of tropical areas rapidly became uninhabitable, entire populations migrating north or south from temperatures of a hundred and thirty and a hundred and forty degrees. Once-temperate areas became tropical, Europe and North America sweltering under continuous heat waves, temperatures rarely falling below a hundred degrees. Under the direction of the United Nations, the colonisation began of the Antarctic plateau and of the northern borders of the Canadian and Russian continents.

Eventually "Europe became a system of giant lagoons, centred on the principal low-lying cities, inundated by the silt carried southwards by the expanding rivers".

The story of The Drowned World takes place in what used to be London. A scientific-military expedition is wasting time with studies nobody pays attention to and is eventually called back to its polar base. A handful of people decide to remain, having become fascinated by dreams of a primordial sun and jungle.

As the planet returns to the conditions of the Mesozoic Period, so do these few humans, being part of the planet, return also. When life left the ocean for land hundreds of millions of years ago, it was an event analagous to mammalian birth and one which is remembered, apparently biologically or genetically, by humans. The "drowned world of uterine childhood" is mentioned more than once.

As the few futuristic squatters travel back in time in their dreams, their dream life more real than their waking life, they discover that the time periods they travel back through can be mapped onto their vertebrae. The lagoons themselves are described as "neuronic".

Their situation is disturbed by the arrival of Strangman, a dangerous looter who, like the military man Riggs, is too much of a materialist to have the dreams experienced by the others. Strangman arrives in a ship with a crew of mercenaries and followed by thousands of alligators. His hold on the crew and the alligators is mysterious. Like much in this novel, it has the power and resonance of ancient mythology.

It's a great book and, naturally, wonderful summer reading, especially if you're somewhere hot and humid like New York City, where you can imagine the place overrun with giant iguanas and prehistoric vegetation. There are echoes not only of "Mr. F Is Mr. F" but also of such Ballard stories as "The Waiting Grounds" (1959), "The Voices of Time" (1960), "Deep End" (1961) and "The Cage of Sand" (1962).