As I have read more and more fiction books, I have noticed that my process for finding new authors/books has radically changed over time. When I was working early in the morning at my retail job, I would quickly browse good reads for highly rated short stories (under 6 hours) that I could listen to on audible (bonus points if it was free). Shortly after that brief period of time, I graduated into lightly researching the authors of books I was interested in by watching short YouTube videos from various popular content creators, like Leaf by Leaf and TheBookchemist, whose book opinions I really came to respect (and still very much do). And while I still do this to some extent, I’d argue that I have taken it to a higher level. At this point, if I find an author that I am interested in reading, I’ll watch videos, listen to lectures from professors, and even consume hour-long podcasts about that author before I even crack the spine of one of their novels. This has most definitely been the case for J.G Ballard. Now I know what you’re thinking, “why not read his more popular books, namely, Empire of the Sun, Highrise, or Cocaine Nights?” And the reason is actually pretty telling; I love “deep cuts” and the idea of diving deep into works that many people have likely never heard of or have repeatedly overlooked. The Crystal World, in my view, is definitely this.
As with most book reviews, now for the brief summary before we get into critiques and some of my favorite passages.
Set in Cameroon, the story follows Dr. Sanders, a leper hospital assistant director, who takes a leave to visit his ex-mistress Suzanne Clair at her clinic. Upon arriving in Port Materre, Sanders encounters various characters, including Ventress, Father Balthus, and Louise Peret. Sanders faces difficulties arranging transportation to the remote clinic that is said to be under some kind of lockdown, but he eventually gets a ferryman named Aragon to help him. Before leaving, Sanders witnesses strange incidents, such as bodies encased in crystal-like jewels and public outbursts from Balthus. With military help, Sanders finally reaches Mont Royal, a deserted town amid a crystallized forest. As it so happens, Sanders becomes reacquainted with Ventress, and he becomes deeply embroiled in the violent conflict between Ventress and Thorensen (a wealthy mine owner in Mont Royal). At the mission hospital run by the Clairs, Sanders faces more conflicts and strange encounters, including the discovery that Suzanne has developed the early signs of leprosy. Suzanne runs away into the crystal forest and while on the search for her, Sanders’s arm becomes crystallized and is later healed by Balthus in a church by a jeweled cross. As the crystal forest encroaches upon the church, Father Balthus urges Sanders to escape. Sanders ultimately returns to the outside world but decides to go back to the forest, closing the novel with his journey back upriver.
What I really like about Ballard’s work here is that it successfully captures the complexity of the surreal. The surreal is NOT the negation of the real, rather it is the weaving of the real and the imagined. While Ballard’s entanglement of the real and the imagined in “The Crystal World” is best shown through his usage of symbolism, it also manifests in his usage of pacing and imaginative detail. Starting with symbolism, I will provide in-text citations for each of these and then I’ll highlight what I think makes them successful.
“The smuggling of the pistol unknown to himself seemed to symbolize, in sexual terms as well, all his hidden motives for coming to Port Matarre in quest of Suzanne Clair.”
This explicit identification of this symbol could, if read quickly, appear merely as a nice psychoanalytic flourish; but I believe this quotation points to something more than it initially lets on. Before you can fully see the depth of this passage, it is important to make clear some of the context surrounding it. Earlier in the chapter, the small boat that is occupied by Sanders, Ventress, and Balthus gets stopped by the military to be searched. Ventress, in an effort to avoid being caught with his gun on him, smuggles his pistol into Sanders’s baggage suspecting that he won’t be searched because of Sanders’s “doctor” status. Additionally, it is important to point out that Ventress is dressed in all white, and he is repeatedly characterized in relation to light and brightness; Ventress is even detailed to have “a gleam of a smile”, which, by the usage of the specific word gleam clearly associates Ventress with light.
With these important contextual points of reference in mind, Ventress fully embodies the nature of light. Ventress, like light, conceals, reveals, and can be reflected. Ventress concealed and revealed the weapon, and part of himself. My favorite though, is when Ventress’s action is explicitly reflected, or even refracted, through the narrator and onto Sanders’s situation. All of this is to say that while Ventress is the symbol of light, he is not a static or flat symbol. Further, and here is where I think Ballard does genius-level work, Ballard closes the gap between what his characters represent and the thing represented; much like a surrealist painter might represent the form of a human man, but also include features of light to his aspect. And while I do think that Ballard’s entanglement of Ventress and light does evince his deep connection to the surreal, I also think Ballard pushes readers to contemplate the boundary between fiction and reality.
Speaking of surrealism, I don’t think it is possible to discuss the topic without mentioning dreams. Isn’t it super interesting that dreams seem to move in their own time dimension? At least in my experience, it’s often that they bleed between fast-paced, blood-pumping moments, into slower more symbolic puzzles. This same effect is recurrent throughout the novel. Take for instance the progression from the conversation between Ventress and Sanders on page 100 to the discovery of Radek in the crystalized forest on page 111. In 11 pages we go from a vague and complex conversation in Thorensen’s house to a full-blown, up close and personal fight scene, and then back to these vivid scenes of them moving “through the forest, sometimes in complete circles, as if Ventress were familiarizing himself with the topography of his jeweled twilight world.” To reference a painting that I think captures this same kind of pacing effect, check out Nature at Dawn (Evening Song) by Max Ernst. But what is Ballard’s pacing without his imaginative, detailed descriptions?
Much of what makes this novel successful can be tied back to Ballard’s interesting, imaginative, and surreally detailed descriptions. Without them, the pacing loses its flavor, the complex symbols and meta insights lose their luster, and the prose becomes nearly bland. I know that sounds like a lot of heavy lifting, but for a novel about a crystal forest growing in different places around the world, I think that’s nearly necessary. For instance read this passage:
“The road marked the final boundary of the affected zone, and to Dr. Sanders the darkness around him seemed absolute, the black air inert and empty. After the endless glimmer of the vitrified forest the trees along the road, the ruined hotel and even the two men with him appeared to be shadowy originals in some distant land at the source of the petrified river. Despite his relief at escaping from the forest, this feeling of flatness and unreality, of being in the slack shallows of a spent world, filled Sanders with a sense of failure and disappointment.”
From these descriptions I can’t help but imagine the weaving of “reality” and the nearly diaphanous symbolic experience described. We know the ruined hotel is real, and we know the two guys with him are real, but the whole “appeared to be shadowy originals in some distant land at the source of the petrified river” seems to be something just beyond reality. And while I do think Ballard’s descriptions are nearly necessary to the success of this novel, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about some of the drawbacks they contribute to.
While reading the novel, there were some descriptions and explanations that were either esoteric or honestly pretty muddy. Case in point:
“We now know that it is time (“time with the Midas touch, as Ventress described it) which is responsible for the transformation. The recent discovery of anti-matter in the universe inevitably involves the conception of anti-time as the fourth side of this negatively charged continuum. Where anti-particle and particle collide they not only destroy their own physical identities, but their opposing time-values eliminate each other, subtracting form the universe another quantum from its total score of time. It is random discharges of this type that, set off by the creation of anti-galaxies in space, which have led to the depletion of the time-store available to the materials of our own solar system.”
In addition to this explanation being unnecessarily complex, I felt that the whole idea of it was kind of a reach. I say it’s a reach because, as a reader, it makes me think of more questions than it provides explanations. Questions like, “so have the anti-particles and the particles of earth made contact?”, “how does this impact the spread?” and “why does anti-matter inevitably involve anti-time?” take me out of the story and force me to contemplate what all of the terms and ideas even mean. Imagine listening to a song and halfway through, randomly, instruments that weren’t in the song to begin with start playing in a different key and in a totally different style. It would no doubt be a very jarring and distracting experience. Now, I know that this novel is categorized as science fiction, but the science in this novel is actually quite sparse. Outside of this quotation, I can’t immediately think of any other passages that deep dives into science or technology.
With all of this being said, I really enjoyed J.G. Ballard’s “The Crystal World”, and it inspired me to read more of his work, which, I think makes it meaningfully successful. As another plus, while I’ve been working on this review and revisiting certain sections of the novel, I can confidently say that it is re-readable. As of right now I think the next Ballard book I’m going to read will either be Cocaine Nights or The Atrocity Exhibition. Let me know in the comments what books are on your list right now, and we’ll meet again on another page! Rating: 3.75 out 5