In an unnamed
Republic somewhere in central Africa, by the side of a drained lake, a
territorial dispute is gearing up between the local police chief, Captain Kagwa,
and a revolutionary Pan African communist called Harare. Harare's militia of
child soldiers are regularly treated for sickness and disease by the narrator
of this book, one Dr Mallory. Mallory, though officially working for the WHO,
has taken over an abandoned drilling project to try to find water trapped under
the desert. He has dreams of irrigating the Sahara. When the book begins, the
local political situation is escalating on all sides. Mallory is reluctantly
preparing to leave the area, but when he dislodges the base of a dead oak
tree, water begins to trickle out. Before long, this small stream has eroded
the ground both before and behind it and grown into a huge river.
Mallory claims the river as his own. A disgraced TV documentarian named Sanger, who has come to Africa to save his reputation, even registers the new river under Mallory's name. And so begins a hallucinatory journey up the river, on which Mallory sets out with a child soldier called Noon, a 12-year-old girl in an ill-fitting camo-jacket. His motivations are unclear even to him. He vacillates between wanting to save the river and wanting to destroy it, but the goal of the mission is in either case to reach the river's source.
J. G. Ballard started his career as a writer of science fiction short stories and weird, surreal and dystopian adventure novels, but he drifted towards a self-created genre that is now often called ballardian. Ballardian fiction tends to be set in a parallel reality, where the corrosive effects of technology and/or social decline are slightly exaggerated to horrific effect. The most famous exception to this trend is Ballard's most read book, the autobiographical Empire of the Sun, which dealt with the writer's own childhood experiences in WWII China. The Day of Creation is the book he wrote after the unexpected success of Empire of the Sun, and in many ways it is quintessentially ballardian. It looks back to his earlier weird adventure novels, like The Crystal World, in which surreal, transformed landscapes were central leitmotifs, but it also makes much of the unsettling presence of technology. The landscape in The Day of Creation is often strewn with refuse. The arrival, early in the story, of Sanger’s documentary crew allows Ballard to insert Mcluhanesque truisms about how sooner or later everything turns into television. Mallory's journey up the river is made on a car ferry, progressively more junked up with cameras, screens, VHS tapes, as well as a black Mercedes stolen from Captain Kagwa.
On one level, The Day of Creation is a hugely symbolic satirical novel. There are obvious references to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with Mallory standing in for both Marlow and Kurtz. Mallory's belief that he created the river, his naming it after himself, his pathetic attempts to reroute and destroy it, all seem to be insane parodies of European colonialism. Noon, the child guerrilla, becomes obsessed with Sanger's collection of phoney African documentaries, watching their constructed images of African warrior queens and modelling herself after them. She hardly speaks, but instead clicks VHS tapes against her teeth. When she does say the doctor's name she calls him "Doc Mal," as if referring to the illness he represents. As the journey up the river progresses, and Mallory becomes increasingly Humbert Humbert about his relationship to the girl, even their relationship seems to echo the delusional colonialist's distorted view of Africa.
It is often the case that a writer's distinctive features are both their major strength and their key weakness, and that is very much the situation here. I don't know if it is simply because of the myriad contemporary writers and visual artists who continually rip off Ballard (Tom McCarthy, for all he bangs on about Kafka and Joyce, basically grafted Ballard's worldview onto John Berger's G in order to create the formula for his execrable novel, C), but reading Ballard today can feel like reading a parody. If I had to write a treatment for a balladian novel set in Africa, it would be exactly like this book, although I might have missed out the sexual obsession with a child. However, it is also true that Ballard is much a stronger writer of horror and psychopathology than he is a builder of characters or stories. As much as the obsolete technology, descent into amoral madness, murder and social collapse are what make this book recognisably ballardian, and thus a little predictable, they are also where the writing is strongest. In the first part of the novel, Mallory's obsession with the river feels laboured and contrived, and though the story strives to be thrilling it ends up flat and unengaging. As the journey goes on though, as the characters become sicker and and the whole world goes insane, the vision begins to fall in place and the book becomes convincing.
This is probably not a novel for someone wanting an introduction to the author. An easier entry would be High Rise, for example, or any one of the earlier novels. Those particularly curious about Ballard's weird vision of humanity's relationship to technology could do worse than to start with Crash. On the other hand, people interested in reading an alternative take on the European novel set in Africa will probably find The Day of Creation interesting, and I imagine a person could write a Masters thesis on this book's satirical use of colonial imagery. Diehard lovers of the author will find plenty of his trademark idiosyncrasies to enjoy here. Personally, reading The Day of Creation, I mostly wondered whether Ballard's appropriation by other writers and artists hasn't permanently rendered his work a little toothless and boring.
Mallory claims the river as his own. A disgraced TV documentarian named Sanger, who has come to Africa to save his reputation, even registers the new river under Mallory's name. And so begins a hallucinatory journey up the river, on which Mallory sets out with a child soldier called Noon, a 12-year-old girl in an ill-fitting camo-jacket. His motivations are unclear even to him. He vacillates between wanting to save the river and wanting to destroy it, but the goal of the mission is in either case to reach the river's source.
J. G. Ballard started his career as a writer of science fiction short stories and weird, surreal and dystopian adventure novels, but he drifted towards a self-created genre that is now often called ballardian. Ballardian fiction tends to be set in a parallel reality, where the corrosive effects of technology and/or social decline are slightly exaggerated to horrific effect. The most famous exception to this trend is Ballard's most read book, the autobiographical Empire of the Sun, which dealt with the writer's own childhood experiences in WWII China. The Day of Creation is the book he wrote after the unexpected success of Empire of the Sun, and in many ways it is quintessentially ballardian. It looks back to his earlier weird adventure novels, like The Crystal World, in which surreal, transformed landscapes were central leitmotifs, but it also makes much of the unsettling presence of technology. The landscape in The Day of Creation is often strewn with refuse. The arrival, early in the story, of Sanger’s documentary crew allows Ballard to insert Mcluhanesque truisms about how sooner or later everything turns into television. Mallory's journey up the river is made on a car ferry, progressively more junked up with cameras, screens, VHS tapes, as well as a black Mercedes stolen from Captain Kagwa.
On one level, The Day of Creation is a hugely symbolic satirical novel. There are obvious references to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with Mallory standing in for both Marlow and Kurtz. Mallory's belief that he created the river, his naming it after himself, his pathetic attempts to reroute and destroy it, all seem to be insane parodies of European colonialism. Noon, the child guerrilla, becomes obsessed with Sanger's collection of phoney African documentaries, watching their constructed images of African warrior queens and modelling herself after them. She hardly speaks, but instead clicks VHS tapes against her teeth. When she does say the doctor's name she calls him "Doc Mal," as if referring to the illness he represents. As the journey up the river progresses, and Mallory becomes increasingly Humbert Humbert about his relationship to the girl, even their relationship seems to echo the delusional colonialist's distorted view of Africa.
It is often the case that a writer's distinctive features are both their major strength and their key weakness, and that is very much the situation here. I don't know if it is simply because of the myriad contemporary writers and visual artists who continually rip off Ballard (Tom McCarthy, for all he bangs on about Kafka and Joyce, basically grafted Ballard's worldview onto John Berger's G in order to create the formula for his execrable novel, C), but reading Ballard today can feel like reading a parody. If I had to write a treatment for a balladian novel set in Africa, it would be exactly like this book, although I might have missed out the sexual obsession with a child. However, it is also true that Ballard is much a stronger writer of horror and psychopathology than he is a builder of characters or stories. As much as the obsolete technology, descent into amoral madness, murder and social collapse are what make this book recognisably ballardian, and thus a little predictable, they are also where the writing is strongest. In the first part of the novel, Mallory's obsession with the river feels laboured and contrived, and though the story strives to be thrilling it ends up flat and unengaging. As the journey goes on though, as the characters become sicker and and the whole world goes insane, the vision begins to fall in place and the book becomes convincing.
This is probably not a novel for someone wanting an introduction to the author. An easier entry would be High Rise, for example, or any one of the earlier novels. Those particularly curious about Ballard's weird vision of humanity's relationship to technology could do worse than to start with Crash. On the other hand, people interested in reading an alternative take on the European novel set in Africa will probably find The Day of Creation interesting, and I imagine a person could write a Masters thesis on this book's satirical use of colonial imagery. Diehard lovers of the author will find plenty of his trademark idiosyncrasies to enjoy here. Personally, reading The Day of Creation, I mostly wondered whether Ballard's appropriation by other writers and artists hasn't permanently rendered his work a little toothless and boring.
