I won a free advance reading copy of the 50th anniversary edition of The Drowned World, with a new introduction by Martin Amis, from W.W. Norton via a Goodreads giveaway. I’ve been meaning to read something by Ballard for a while, and this book, an early vision of a world in which global warming has melted the polar ice caps and the permafrost, with rising heat and rising waters turning most of the world into jungle or swamp, seemed as good a place to start as any. In his introduction, Amis says that “what really matters in Ballard,” what really makes his books interesting, is the “fusion of mood and setting, the mapping of a landscape of a troubled mind” (11). Certainly, The Drowned World is concerned with the inner world—more on that below—but the descriptions of the outer world were the part of this book I liked the best.
But let me back up a little. As mentioned above, The Drowned World is set in a future in which the world has gotten hot. It’s so hot, in fact, that Northern Greenland is a balmy 80-something degrees; civilization, or what’s left of it, has basically packed up and moved to the Arctic and the Antarctic. The drowned cities of Europe aren’t entirely empty, though: there are a few holdouts, determined to stay despite the ever-rising waters, and there are travelling scientists and military teams mapping the changing coasts and taking measurements of the rising temperatures and waterlines, and taking the holdouts away to safety. There are also looters, diving for whatever technology or treasure they can salvage—but we’ll get to them later. Robert Kerans, the protagonist of this book, is one of the scientists, though he’s more at home in the ruined city than most of the rest of the members of his expedition. He’s settled in to the still-climate-controlled-but-abandoned penthouse suite at the Ritz, and is having an affair with a solitary holdout named Beatrice Dahl, who has a penthouse apartment of her own in a nearby building. (Alan Bodkin, Kerans’s co-worker in the biological testing station, is also drawn to the ruined city, though for different reasons: he’s old enough to have actually lived in London as a child, before it was submerged.) Early in the book, Kerans learns that his team will be leaving the city in three days: he’s not sure he wants to go with them. Beatrice is determined to stay behind, and Bodkin, too, has no interest in going. So they stay, the three of them.
In addition to the obvious hardships of survival in a post-apocalyptic landscape, they have to contend with the strange dreams that nearly everyone has started having: “jungle dreams,” as Beatrice puts it (64). The dreams, which feature the drumming of the dreamer’s pulse and the relentless light and heat of the sun, are an echo and exaggeration of the real swamp and jungle outside. In drowned London, tropical flora and fauna are taking over: there are marmosets and iguanas, bats and giant insects and giant foliage. In the dream-world, there aren’t just lizards: there are dinosaurs. Bodkin theorizes that the dreams aren’t really dreams, but rather ancient memories encoded in the dreamers’ genes that are surfacing because of the changed climate: the dreamers are somehow travelling back through time in their minds, learning how to live in the Triassic-era world that’s taking shape around them. There is lots of Freudian psychoanalysing that goes along with this: “Perhaps these sunken lagoons simply remind me of the drowned world of my uterine childhood,” Kerans ponders at one point, and it’s hard not to groan a bit at that (40). Speaking of groaning, I also wasn’t crazy about the character of Beatrice, who doesn’t do much beyond drinking, painting her nails, and doing her make-up, and whose motivations are hardly explored. And then there are the looters: after Kerans and Bodkin and Beatrice have been alone in the ruined city for a bit, they’re joined by a band of looters, led by an albino named Strangman who has a mysterious power over his black crew. The crew are superstitious and violent, and the scenes in which they feature often have an uncomfortable air of minstrelsy (like: when they find a cache of still-dry evening-wear and run around in tuxedos and bow-ties, this is portrayed as funny/absurd, even though earlier in the book Kerans wears tailored suits left behind by the penthouse suite’s last occupant, and Bodkin wears a paisley cummerbund, which are surely equally absurd, given the circumstances). (That said: the back cover notes that this book is a retelling of Heart of Darkness, which I haven’t actually read, so possibly any issues of race in Ballard’s book are related to issues of race in Conrad’s.)
After the arrival of Strangman and his crew, the book increasingly takes on an action-movie feel, with chases and shoot-outs, but there’s also still the lure of the watery world and the jungle, the weird pull towards the south that Kerans continues to feel. And that, for me, is what works most about this book: the changed world and the descriptions of it, from the start of the book, when Kerans is on a hotel balcony looking at “dense groves of giant gymnosperms crowding over the roofs of the abandoned department stores four hundred yards away on the east side of the lagoon” (17). I love passages like this:
In the early morning light a strange mournful beauty hung over the lagoon; the somber green-back fronds of the gymnosperms, intruders from the Triassic past, and the half-submerged white-faced buildings of the 20th century still reflected together in the dark mirror of the water, the two interlocking worlds apparently suspended at some junction in time, the illusion momentarily broken when a giant water-spider cleft the oily surface a hundred yards away. (21)
Or this, from a dive that Kerans takes under Strangman’s supervision:
A few small angel fish swam past, their bodies gleaming like silver stars in the blue blur that extended from the surface to a depth of five feet, a ‘sky’ of light reflected from the millions of dust and pollen particles. Forty feet away from him looked the pale curved hull of the planetarium, far larger and more mysterious than it had seemed from the surface, like the stern of an ancient sunken liner. The once polished aluminium roof had become dull and blunted, molluscs and bivalves clinging to the narrow ledges formed by the transverse vaulting. Lower down, where the dome rested on the square roof of the auditorium, a forest of giant fucus floated delicately from their pedestals, some of the fronds over ten feet tall, exquisite marine wraiths that fluttered together like the spirits of a sacred neptunian grove. (122)
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