This blog post is about two aspects of the prose style of Ballard’s three early novels:

1. widespread use of similes
2. long, lush descriptions

Common features

J.G. Ballard’s first three novels are ‘disaster’ stories – The Drowned World, The Drought, The Crystal World. All three share obvious common features:

• the plots – they are set in versions of our world, just a little in the future, which are beset by massive environmental disasters
• the people – they feature relatively small groups of disparate characters who start off by being odd and progress into stranger and stranger mental states of detachment and psychosis
• the doctors – the main protagonists of all three novels are doctors – Dr Kerans, Dr Ransom and Dr Sanders, respectively
• the style – all three novels contain extended passages of outstanding and visionary intensity, sensual descriptions of the tropical foliage in The Drowned World, the terrifying vision of the bleak salt flats in The Drought, extraordinary descriptions of jungle plants and animals turning into multi-faceted jewels in The Crystal World

1. Ballard’s similes

There’s a lot to be said about all these and many other aspects of his style, but I was particularly struck by Ballard’s extensive use in all three books of similes. It strikes me that similes do (at least) three things:

1. they compare one thing with another
2. thus they take the reader’s imagination away from the reality of an object or situation
3. and, given that they can compare the real world to anything the author fancies, they expand a text’s imaginative realm in potentially any direction

This continual movement of the text away from reality very much reflects the physical and psychological journeys of Ballard’s characters.

Physical journeys

In The Drowned World Dr Kerans gives in to the irrational urge to head away from safety and sets off south towards the radioactive sun. In The Drought Dr Ransom’s trek to the coast is mirrored by his return to the abandoned city ten years later, but both are only preliminaries for the psychotic pilgrimage he sets off on at the end of the book. Similarly, in The Crystal World, Dr Sanders’ journey to the disaster zone to seek his mistress makes some sense, unlike his decision right at the end of the book to leave safety behind and journey back into the heart of the crystal forest presumably to die.

Psychological journeys

As the outlines above suggest, all three doctors start as reasonably rational beings but then slowly shed all rationality as they become steadily more detached from reality and obsessed by their respective quests.

During their journey to the south he had felt an increasing sense of vacuum, as if he was pointlessly following a vestigial instinct that no longer had any real meaning for him. The four people with him were becoming more and more shadowy, residues of themselves as notional as the empty river. (The Drought p. 92)

So the movement of similes away from reality, away from the actual thing being described in the text, and out into exotic or unexpected comparisons, is a kind of textual mirror of the physical and mental journeys undertaken by the chief protagonists.

Categorising Ballard’s similes

We can attempt an elementary categorisation of Ballard’s similes, from simple via increasing complexity, to ‘ornate’ and on to a ‘gateway’ category (I’ll explain).

Banal

Plenty of Ballard’s similes are obvious enough, functional, meat-and-potatoes work you might find in run-of-the-mill fiction. They provide simple comparisons but don’t really take you very far.

• The lions’ roars sounded like the slamming of a steel mill. (TD 54)
• The heat of the waterfront fires drove across the river like a burning sirocco. (TD 88)
• Stretching along the entire extent of the coastal shelf were tens of thousands of cars and trailers, jammed together like vehicles in an immense parking lot. (TD 94)
• The water ceased to move, and for a moment the great lagoon, and the long arms of brine seeping away northwards through the grey light, were like immense sheets of polished ice. (TD 111)
• Ransom looked round to see Jordan watching him in the half light, his dark face like an intelligent savage’s, filled with a strange child-like hope. (TD 140)
• Like a bleached white bone, the flat deck of the river stretched away to the north. (TD 145)
• He sat down by a gap in the balustrade, surrounded by the empty cans and litter, like an exhausted mendicant. (TD 161)
• During the journey from Libreville he had roamed about the steamer like an impatient tiger… (CW 15)
• The dark image of her face floated like a dim lantern before his eyes (CW 38)
• In the darkness the worn columns of the arcade receded towards the eastern fringes of the town like pale ghosts… (CW 40)
• The youth kicked at the knives and leapt sideways through the catwalk like a fish about to be gutted (CW 44)
• The Negro picked himself up and raced like a wounded animal through the entrance (CW 94)

They colour and distract a little but don’t add that much to the object, view or situation being described.

Contrived

Many betray that strand in Ballard which is always seeking out culturally obvious references – Ballard has a non-humanities student’s airy insouciance when it comes to invoking Great Cultural Landmarks, e.g. the Bible, Michelangelo, the ancient Greeks and so on. These sometimes feel a bit pretentious. Into this category come other similes which just feel over-elaborate and contrived.

• Over his shoulder he could see Catherine Austen resting on the tiller in the sunlight, her hair lifting like the fleece of some Homeric ram. (TD 86)
• His pomaded hair and cherubic face, and the two jewelled clasps pinning his tied inside his double-breasted waistcoat, made him look like some kind of hallucinatory clown, the master of ceremonies at a lunatic carnival. (TD 77)
• Grady stared at them, his little face for a moment like an insane sparrow’s (TD 105)
• Louise’s hands strayed to the sunglasses beside her plate, safely within reach lie some potent talisman (CW 36)
• The huge jewelled gauntlet like the coronation armour of a Spanish conquistador… (CW 51)
• Several plate glass windows appeared to have fractured and then fused together above the carpet, and the ornate Persian patterns swam below the surface like the floor of some perfumed pool in the Arabian Nights. (CW 86)
• Sanders stumbled ahead, like an onlooker driven towards some bloody Golgotha by its intended victim. (CW 118)

Mild incongruity

Then there are similes which definitely contain the surprise and imaginative lift of unexpectedness, the sense of your imagination momentarily expanding.

• The cheetah flicked an eye at him like a referee noticing an almost imperceptible infringement of the rules. (TD 76)
• The negro smiled, his great domed head veined like a teak globe of the earth. (TD 86)
• The windows of the Hotel Europe hung listlessly in the dark air, the narrow shutters like coffin lids (CW 21)

Inspired

Some strike a real chord, giving you the strong sense of new mental associations, a flash of insight into the world hidden behind this world.

• The steel spans of the bridge rose above the stalled cars and trucks, which were carried over the hump like scrap metal on a conveyor. (TD 91)
• His eyes hovered below his swollen forehead like shy dragonflies. (TD 180)
• The wrecked catwalks lay on the water like the skeletons of half-drowned lizards. (CW 48)
• They passed the aircraft lying like an emblazoned fossil in a small hollow to the left of their path… (CW 97)
• Sanders was about to protest but the young woman turned away from them and seemed to subside into sleep, the jewels lying like scarabs on the white skin of her breast. (CW 109)
• He stood up and looked down at the table, his stooped figure with its blond hair like a gallows in the dusk. (CW 111)
• Around him in the vitreous walls, the reflected stars glittered like fireflies. (CW 114)

Lots of animal comparisons – dragonflies, lizards, scarabs, fireflies… hmmm.

Exotic

Then there are similes which are deliberately incongruous, connecting the like with the unlike in a way designed to jolt you into a new fragment of perception.

• The shadows of the torn deck braces danced like ragged spears. (TD 130)
• In the face of the quarry were the half-excavated shells of a dozen cars and trailers, embedded in the gritty sand like the intact bodies of armoured saurians. (TD 134)
• In the sunlight the gilded edifice gleamed among the dust and sand like a Fabergé gem. (TD 173)
• Lomax postured among the low dunes, his small powdered face puckered like a shrivelled fig. (TD 18)
• The forest canopy rose high in the air like an immense wave ready to fall across the empty town. (CW 27)
• Louise’s body had lain beside him like a piece of the sun, a golden odalisque trapped for Pharaoh in his tomb. (CW 141)

Gateway

What I mean by ‘gateway similes’ is ones which open a doorway into the grand visionary otherworld of Ballard’s imagination at its most intense.

• He felt now that the white deck of the river was carrying them all in the opposite direction, forward into zones of time future where the unresolved residues of the past would appear smoothed and rounded, muffled by the detritus of time, like images in a clouded mirror. (TD 152)
• Philip Jordan and Ransom climbed onto the bank and looked out at the causeways of rubble that stretched away like the unused foundation stones of a city still waiting to be built. (TD 157)
• As he lay half-stunned in the sunlight he was aware of Mrs Quilter jabbering away on one of the dunes a few yards from him, the silent figure of her son, like an immense cuckoo, squatting beneath his furs in the sand. (TD 164)
• The imitation Louis XV pieces had been transformed into huge fragments of opalescent candy, whose multiple reflections glowed like giant chimeras in the cut-glass walls. (CW86)

Rereading these examples I realise that:

1. The most obvious and banal similes describe actions – running off like a hare, roaring like a lion etc – whereas the most powerful ones describe completely static scenery.
2. As these final examples indicate, what characterises the most visionary similes is that they are embedded in long flowing sentences, are merely building blocks in larger visionary descriptions.

So:

1. It’s a subjective judgement call which similes you allot to which category – I am just sketching out a possible taxonomy…
2. but in doing so am drawing attention to the prevalence of similes in Ballard’s style and the role they play in helping to transport the reader away from the real, concrete world of socially shared perceptions, and into a more intense and personal world of eccentric, powerful and sometimes hallucinatory visions – and so play their part in creating the weird, obsessive mindsets of the various protagonists

2. Lush descriptions

The situations in each of the three disaster novels are extreme and offer Ballard plenty of opportunity for extended passages describing the novel landscapes created by a) the super-hot flooded world b) a world stricken by drought and c) a world turning into crystal.

Probably the most vivid, extended and lush descriptions are in the first novel, The Drowned World, suggesting the original rich, over-ripe soil from which Ballard’s mature style would eventually evolve.

Soon it would be too hot. Looking out from the hotel balcony shortly after eight o’clock, Kerans watched the sun rise behind the 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. Even through the massive olive-green fronds the relentless power of the sun was plainly tangible. The blunt refracted rays drummed against his bare chest and shoulders, drawing out the first sweat, and he put on a pair of heavy sunglasses to protect his eyes. The solar disc was no longer a well-defined sphere, but a wide expanding ellipse that fanned out across the eastern horizon like a colossal fire-ball, its reflection turning the dead leaden surface of the lagoon into a brilliant copper shield. By noon, less than four hours away, the water would seem to burn. (First paragraph)

Passages of heat-stunned grandeur like this occur throughout The Drowned World making it a tremendous sensual pleasure to read.

Similarly, The Crystal World announces its heavy, symbolist, late-Victorian atmosphere long before we’ve got to the actual disaster zone. Right from the start the prose is heavy with long elaborate sentences and a sense of brooding menace.

At intervals, when the sky was overcast, the water was almost black, like putrescent dye. By contrast, the straggle of warehouses and small hotels that constituted Port Matarre gleamed across the dark swells with a spectral brightness, as if lit less by solar light than by some interior lantern, like the pavilions of an abandoned necropolis built out on a series of piers from the edges of the jungle. (Second paragraph)

The Drought, sitting between the two lush novels is, by definition, altogether a dryer reading experience, but it too has extended passages which convey a tremendous sensual immediacy, especially in the second section, about life on the wide, bleak, windswept salt flats which have been created along the sea shore after ten years of distilling seawater to create drinking water.

Shortly after dawn, as the tide extended across the margins of the coastal flats, the narrow creeks and channels began to fill with water. The long salt-dunes darkened with the moisture seeping through them, and sheets of open water spread outwards among the channels, carrying with them a few fish and nautiloids. Reaching towards the firmer shore, the cold water infiltrated among the saddles and culverts like the advance front of an invading army, its approach almost unnoticed. A cold wind blew overhead and dissolved in the dawn mists, lifting a few uneager gulls across the banks.

Less sensually pleasurable than the warm fantasies of the other two books, nonetheless these scenes from The Drought have just the same skilled immediacy, and use the same kind of long, multi-claused sentences to create very vivid pictures in the mind.

Conclusion

The long, super-lush descriptions which characterise his first three novels were burnt off in the mid-1960s by Ballard’s growing obsession with the science fiction of the present day, epitomised by The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash.

As the settings for his characters’ mental decline and obsessions changed from tropical forests and giant iguanas to motorway flyovers and concrete high rises, so Ballard’s style became more clipped, factual and a lot more sensually restrained.

Scientific jargon, the language of experiments, an argot of angles and geometry, obsessive imagery of nuclear test bunkers and perverse pornography, come to dominate Ballard’s fiction of the later 1960s, and a reader who came to Ballard through The Atrocity Exhibition would never suspect him capable of the long, rolling lush descriptions which are such an enjoyable and distinctive aspect of the first three disaster novels, and in which the inspired use of similes plays a small but significant role.

It should not be too difficult to arrange my escape and then I shall return to the solitary church in that enchanted world, where by day fantastic birds fly through the petrified forest and jewelled crocodiles glitter like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline rivers, and where by night the illuminated man races among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels and his head like a spectral crown… (p.169)

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Credit

‘The Drowned World’, ‘The Drought’ and ‘The Crystal World’ by J.G. Ballard were published published by Jonathan Cape in 1962, 1964 and 1966, respectively. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

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