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A ship arrives at Port Matarre in West
Africa. A weird light hangs over the little coastal town, and strange
rumours from inland reach the new arrivals: the priest, the bearded man with
the gun, the young woman journalist, the doctor who has an inkling of what is
going on from letters his mistress has sent him from the leper hospital in the
jungle. All are intent upon visiting the forbidden area, though each has a
different motive.
The Crystal World begins like a thriller; but
— as is to be expected of Ballard — the thrills are not of the
orthodox kind. He takes us into an exquisitely imagined world in which a simple
but fundamental change, a freak shift in the ordinary physical processes of the
universe, produces a bewildering and sometimes fatal phenomenon. The prosaic
majority of the human race flees the proliferating, fantastic disease of time
that is threatening the world; but there are certain men and women who turn,
dazzled, towards its magnificent sterile beauty.
No other writer today
has Ballard's ability to make a poetic and psychological drama out of a
scientific fantasy. The fascination of The Crystal World will remain
with the reader long after the book is closed. |
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