The Day of Creation by J. G. Ballard

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. 

Walking to Hollywood by Will Self

 

Made up of three sections, each ostensibly recounting a long journey on foot and illustrated with photographs as if to prove it, Walking to Hollywood takes the traditions of memoir and travel writing as its point of departure. If it is either of these things, however, then it certainly falls within the outer reaches of the most generous definition. I came away from this book with the belief that Will Self probably did a lot of the walking which serves as the text's foundation, and also that this was a memoir of an abstract kind, what Jonathan Coe would call "an emotional autobiography." That's about as far as the relationship to non-fiction goes.  

Will Self has often named his late friend JG Ballard as his biggest influence, but it is William S. Burroughs, the man Ballard called the 20th Century's greatest writer, whose ghost can most tangibly be felt haunting the pages of Walking to Hollywood. This is especially true in the titular middle section, in which the narrative of a journey around Los Angeles is continually disrupted by what Burroughs would have referred to as "routines" — bizarre and surrealistic flights of fantasy in which the rules of logic, reason and physics are very much suspended, replaced by free association, paranoia and all the violence of the Id. Take for example the passage where Will Self, the book's central character, visits Pinewood studios, gets into a fight with Daniel Craig's stunt double and witnesses several explosions before liberating Scooby Doo from the set of The Wolf Man. Despite being overwhelmed by love for the animated dog, he sets him free to roam. Or take, for another example, the incident in which our hero grows enormous and green in downtown LA and decides he wants to fuck a car. Or the occasion when he becomes an actor without agency in a pre-written, computer generated riot. All the while, every character is played by a Hollywood actor, except for the narrator, who is played by two. Self is aware that he is being played alternately by Pete Postlethwaite and David Thewlis, although he is not always sure which of them is playing him at any given time.

If this sounds confusing and bizarre to say the least, it is only the tip of an intricate and relentless weirdness which can be partly explained by the fact that Self's narrator is in the depths of a severe psychotic episode. In fact, each of the novel's three distinct sections sees the same narrator, Will Self, suffering from a completely different but equally debilitating mental illness.

In this respect the insanity of the routines is far more focussed and controlled than any comparable work by Burroughs, following as it does the internal logic of a particular psychopathology. Self also has a good deal more respect for the conventions of punctuation, for whatever that may be worth. And as the examples given might indicate, the themes and content of the weird tangents follow and reveal the central ideas of each of the book's sections. Thus, in the section on Hollywood, all Self's delusions and "fugues" grow out of one or another cinematic cliché and focus on movies, actors, simulacra and the death of "the real". Yet with only the narrator's mangled viewpoint to guide us, waves of this madness spill into areas where readers might otherwise hope to anchor themselves in some form of external reality. Characters in the story seem aware that Self is being played by an actor, and are sometimes disturbed by this. In one of the funniest passages in the book, the David Thewlis version of Self appears one morning to meet the camera crew he has hired to follow him on his journey. Unfortunately, when he secured their services he was being played by Pete Postlethwaite and they very much want to know what the hell he's done with Pete. They're worried, they say, that Postlethwaite might be having some form of breakdown. Ever since he hired them he's just wandered around LA, muttering "unbelievable bullshit!"

If this camera crew exist at all, how can they have noticed that the narrator has switched from one imaginary representation of himself to another? Their failure to recognise him and their consequent confusion only make sense in the framework of the narrator's delusional system. If we are to believe that any conversation has taken place outside of the narrator's mind, we are left with no idea what it might have been. Of course there is a nod here to the fact that it is all a fiction anyway, none of it is real, but this removal of any fixed point of narrative reference makes at times for queezy reading.

In the two sections, call them related novellas, that frame the section called Walking to Hollywood, Self's narrator suffers Alzheimer’s and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. These stories are restrained only by the standards of the monster sitting between them. As someone with family experience of all the neurological and psychological conditions Self uses as textual tools in this book, I could easily have felt his occasional willingness to play them for laughs glib and unpleasant, were it not for the fact that the whole text seems to float on an ocean of serious sadness, confusion and anxiety for which these problems become symbolic expressions. In this context the humour is more than welcome.

Walking to Hollywood is undoubtedly a unique book. It is sometimes very funny, often well written, but in honesty it is not always enjoyable. Self's use of repetition can be irritating, his jokes are sometimes painful and the concerns are certainly grim. Not to diminish the book's enjoyable elements — there's always a sense of gratifcation in recognising some appalling satirical truth, and any book featuring Scooby Doo is likely to win my heart — but this novel is not really something you are intended to enjoy. It is uncompromising, unsettling and memorable, which might arguably be greater praise.