The Drowned World

The Drowned World was J G Ballard’s second novel, though the first to remain in print after he disowned The Wind From Nowhere. The novel is an early example of the now ubiquitous climate disaster genre, portraying a world in which increasing temperatures have led to widespread flooding, caused, in this case, not by the fossil fuel emissions but by “a series of violent and prolonged solar storms.” The effect, however, is the same, though the time-scale is condensed:

“The majority of tropical areas became uninhabitable, entire populations migrating north or south from temperatures of a hundred and thirty and a hundred and forty degrees.”

The opening description of a flooded London contains the decayed buildings that now feature in numerous post-apocalyptic films and television series. The novel’s protagonist, Kerans, lives in the abandoned Ritz hotel. The novel, however, is not a warning – Ballard’s interest is in the new world taking shape rather than the destruction of the old world. As Kerans observes the “growing isolation and self-containment” of the military unit under Colonel Riggs currently posted in the city, he is reminded:

“…of the slackening metabolism and biological withdrawal of all animal forms about to undergo a major metamorphosis.”

The tension in the novel occurs between those who accept the new world and those who resist it. When Riggs is ordered to withdraw, Kerans chooses to remain behind despite the fact that he knows supplies will only last a matter of weeks. He is joined by one of the military party, Dr Bodkin, and Beatrice Dahl, a loner like Kerans who lives in an abandoned building and is characterised by “lethargy and ennui”. “Alcohol kills slowly,” she tells Kerans, “but I’m in no hurry.” Bodkin is perhaps influenced by his patient, Hardman, a soldier who escapes into the jungle before the group departs. Kerans recognises something of himself in Hardman:

“…the same symptoms he had seen in himself, an accelerated entry into his own ‘zone of transit’…”

One symptom is a reoccurring dream which Beatrice and Kerans share:

“As the great sun drummed nearer, almost filling the sky itself, the dense vegetation along the limestone cliffs was flung back abruptly to reveal the black and stone-grey heads of Triassic lizards.”

Once Riggs has left, there is further conflict over the new world when a group of looters appear led by the piratical Strangman. They are able to drain the lagoon and reveal the previously submerged streets of central London:

“They stood in the entrance to one of the huge cinemas, sea urchin and cucumbers flickering faintly across the tiled floor, sand dollars flowering in the former ticket booth.”

Bodkin soon tries to flood it again. “Is it only the external landscape which is altering?” he asks Kerans earlier in the novel, revealing the question that will continue to preoccupy Ballard throughout his work. The compulsion of Bodkin, Hardman and Kerans to go south is explicitly irrational, rejecting survival as primary aim. When Kerans encounters Hardman towards the novel’s conclusion, he is barely recognisable as human:

“The man’s long legs, like two charred poles of wood, stuck out uselessly in front of him, sheathed in a collection of tattered black rags and bits of bark… The man was no more than a resurrected corpse.”

In a novel in which dreams foretell the changing earth, its dreamlike nature is perhaps unsurprising. Its language is often as dense as the landscape it is describing, creating the oppressive atmosphere of a nightmare which resists the rational rules of the waking world. Visually, too, it delivers nightmarish scenes, from Kerans trapped in an underwater planetarium to Strangman’s army of alligators. Even in 1962, Ballard was pioneering fiction in which the conscious and unconscious mind compete to interpret an uncertain world, with a uniqueness of vision that would see him go on to become one of England’s most important post-war writers.

Tags: 1962club, j g ballard, the drowned world