Below the shoulder of the dam I can see the footprints of nomads who have camped on the river-bed beside the earth rampart. I am always careful to examine the prints, and on several occasions have seen Noon’s scarred instep and curious toes. I remember my final glimpse of her, and the crazed journey down the Mallory, as it flushed me away with its last waters.
Sharing Noon’s skiff with Sanger, it took us three weeks to reach Lake Kotto. As we lay in the metal shell we saw the whole process of creation winding down to its starting point like a reversed playback of Sanger’s imaginary documentary about my quest for the Mallory’s source. The green desert had faded again when we reached the cascade at Bonneville, and below the pool the groves of tamarinds resembled pineapples run to seed. The papyrus swamps where Mrs Warrender had hunted for men were now a grass wilderness of white basins and dried-out lagoons, covered with the skeletons of millions of frogs. I almost believed that the Diana had reassembled its timbers and sailed southwards, casting its white death on the land.
Later, during our convalescence in the provincial capital, I knew that Sanger suspected that the entire expedition to the source of the river had been an invention. Distancing himself from me, he regaled the governor’s press officer with a graphic account of the comeuppance of the renegade country policeman, the would-be secessionist Captain Kagwa. When I protested, he informed me that he was concerned with a more interesting project, and at the first opportunity flew to Nairobi. I had served my purpose for him, and he could never forgive me for having learned to take his dubious profession with complete seriousness. I last heard that he had arranged for the Mallory to be deleted from the National Geographic Society’s gazetteer.
However, Sanger’s insistence that I was no more than a bystander in the attempted coup saved me from suspicion. At times, as I rested in my hospital bed, I too felt that I had invented the entire adventure. The irony is that, in many ways, I remember our journey to the Mallory’s source in terms of Sanger’s imaginary travelogue. That alone seems to give meaning to all that took place.
Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the journey was real, as I have confirmed on two modest safaris twenty miles up the drained bed of the river. I have been shown aerial photographs of the Salammbo still embedded in its rubbish tip by the cascade at Bonneville. Yet I have never seen any corpses of Kagwa, Harare or their men, though their abandoned military equipment is strewn along the 200-mile course of the river, and the rusting hulk of the landing-craft still lies on its side half a mile south of the barrage.
Kagwa and Harare have vanished into the nothingness of their ambitions, just as Mrs Warrender and her women have disappeared into their mountain dream of a new nature reserve, somewhere in the rain valleys of the Massif. Each of us had abused the Mallory, trying to use it for our own ends, and only Noon remained true to our first dream.
I had not invented the river and our journey, but had I invented Noon? She has a distinct physical presence that is ever more real, the smell of her hands and breasts, the endless clicking of her teeth. But was she a figment born from a river itself sprung from my imagination? Had I invented her to draw myself to the river’s source, and in their references to Noon were the others merely humouring my obsession?
Fifty feet from the rampart there are fresh footprints in the river-bed, but I will explore them later. Above the dusty roofs of Port-la-Nouvelle I can hear the government helicopter. It moves over the town, its propeller sending up whirlwinds of dust that hunt the empty streets. The new district officer is keeping his eye on me. He is suspicious of my hanging about this drained river-bed, and guesses that I may be waiting for a secret plane to land here at this remote airstrip, carrying the emissaries of another secessionist movement.
I am waiting, but not for a plane. I am waiting for a strong-shouldered young woman, with a caustic eye, walking along the drained bed of the Mallory with a familiar jaunty stride. Sooner or later she will reappear, and I am certain that when she comes the Mallory will also return, and once again run the waters of its dream across the dust of a waiting heart.
An Investigative Spirit
Travis Elborough Talks to J. G. Ballard
In several of your novels you have used a small community, the residents of a luxury housing development or a high-rise block for example, as a microcosm with which to explore the fragility of civil society. Do you think that your preoccupation with social regression, de-evolution even, stems from your childhood experiences in the internment camp when you saw, first hand, how easily the veneer of civilization could slip away?
Yes, I think it does; although anyone who has experienced a war first hand knows that it completely overturns every conventional idea of what makes up day-to-day reality. You never feel quite the same again. It’s like walking away from a plane crash; the world changes for you for ever. The experience of spending nearly three years in a camp, especially as an early teenage boy, taking a keen interest in the behaviour of adults around him, including his own parents, and seeing them stripped of all the garments of authority that protect adults generally in their dealings with children, to see them stripped of any kind of defence, often losing heart a bit, being humiliated and frightened – and we all felt the war was going to go on for ever and heaven knows what might happen in the final stages – all of that was a remarkable education. It was unique, and it gave me a tremendous insight into what makes up human behaviour.
You’ve written that the landscape of even your first novel, The Drowned World, a futuristic portrait of a flooded twenty-first-century London, was clearly informed by your memories of Shanghai. I wondered if you could say a little about how, after having possibly explored it obliquely in your works of science fiction, you came to write so directly about your childhood experiences in Empire of the Sun?
I had always planned to write about my experiences of the Second World War, Shanghai under the Japanese and the camp. I knew that it was such an important event, and not just for me. But when I came to England in 1946 I had to face the huge problem of adjusting to life here. England in those days was a very, very strange place. There was an elaborate class system that I’d never come across in Shanghai. England … it was a terribly shabby place, you know, locked into the past and absolutely exhausted by the war. It was only on a technicality that we could be said to have won the war; in many ways we’d lost it. Financially we were desperate. I had to cope with all this. By 1949 the Communists had taken over China and I knew I would never go back. So there seemed no point in keeping those memories alive, I felt I had to come to terms with life in England. This is, after all, where I was educated. I got married and began my career as a writer.
England interested me. It seemed to be a sort of disaster area. It was a subject and a disaster in its own right. I was interested in change, which I could see was coming in a big way, everything from supermarkets to jet travel, television and the consumer society. I remember thinking, my God, these things will bring change to England and reveal the strange psychology of these tormented people.
So I began writing science fiction, although most readers of science fiction did not consider me to be a science-fiction writer. They saw me as an interloper, a sort of virus that had got into the cell of science fiction, entered its nucleus and destroyed it. But all this while I could see bits of my China past floating up and I knew I was going to write it up at some point.
You studied medicine and have stated that you believe that the contemporary novelist should be like a scientist. Do you ever regret not qualifying as a doctor?
I was very interested in medicine. The experience of dissecting cadavers for two years was a very important one for me, for all sorts of reasons. I do think that novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver … I would like to have become a doctor, but the urge to write was too great. I knew from friends of mine who were a year or two ahead of me that once you actually joined a London hospital or became a junior doctor the pressures of work were too great. I’d never have
any time to write, and the urge to write was just too strong.
Do you think there is a moral purpose to your fiction?
I am not sure about that. I see myself more as a kind of investigator, a scout who is sent on ahead to see if the water is drinkable or not.
As a scout or investigator you’ve been uncannily prescient, famously predicting Reagan’s presidency in The Atrocity Exhibition, and I noticed that one commentator made reference to The Drowned World in the aftermath of the New Orleans disaster. Have you ever worried that you might be too prescient?
An investigator and a sort of early warning system, let’s put it like that. I suppose one of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set. The reality that you took for granted – the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives, the familiar street and all the rest of it, the trips to the swimming pool and the cinema – was just a stage set. They could be dismantled overnight, which they literally were when the Japanese occupied Shanghai and turned our lives upside down. I think that experience left me with a very sceptical eye, which I’ve turned onto something even as settled as English suburbia where I now live. Nothing is as secure as we like to think it is. One doesn’t just have to think of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans – this applies to everything. A large part of my fiction tries to analyze what is going on around us, and whether we are much different people from the civilized human beings we imagine ourselves to be. I think it’s true of all my fiction. I think that investigative spirit forms all my novels really.
About the Author
J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China, where his father was a businessman. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Ballard and his family were placed in a civilian prison camp. They returned to England in 1946. After two years at Cambridge, where he read medicine, Ballard worked as a copywriter and Covent Garden porter before going to Canada with the RAF. He started writing short stories in the late 1950s, while working on a scientific journal. His first major novel, The Drowned World, was published in 1962. His acclaimed novels include The Crystal World, The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash (filmed by David Cronenberg), High-Rise, The Unlimited Dream Company, The Kindness of Women (the sequel to Empire of the Sun), Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come. His autobiography, Miracles of Life, was published to great acclaim in 2008. J. G. Ballard died in 2009.
By the same author
The Drowned World
The Voices of Time
The Terminal Beach
The Drought
The Crystal World
The Day of Forever
The Venus Hunters
The Disaster Area
The Atrocity Exhibition
Vermilion Sands
Crash
Concrete Island
High-Rise
Low-Flying Aircraft
The Unlimited Dream Company
Hello America
Myths of the Near Future
Empire of the Sun
Running Wild
War Fever
The Kindness of Women
Rushing to Paradise
A User’s Guide to the Millennium (non-fiction)
Cocaine Nights
Super-Cannes
The Complete Short Stories
Millennium People
Kingdom Come
Miracles of Life
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The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Page 27