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…
(The Crystal World, page 169)

This is a novel of staggering, visionary brilliance, whose otherworldly vividness is matched only by the eerily detached and psychological flatness of all the human characters.

Ballard’s third canonical novel (he suppressed his first effort, The Wind From Nowhere) is another disaster scenario which slowly unfolds, creating an ’emergency zone’ where ordinary or rational notions of time and order and comprehensible behaviour slowly collapse.

The protagonist is another fictional doctor (Dr Kerans in The Drowned World, Dr Ransom in The Drought, Dr Edward Sanders in this one) who finds himself drawn towards the danger zone, becoming briefly entangled with an eligible young woman, but far more attracted to the area of collapse because he subconsciously knows it will release him from reason, from social relations, from his past.

And so he becomes another Ballard protagonist on a journey towards the area of decay, to an abandoned city strewn with derelict cars, empty hotels, eerie shopwindow mannequins and always, everywhere, the drained swimming pools and dried-up fountains.

And it’s another Ballard novel which references a haunting painting which in many ways seems to have been its inspiration – Isle of the Dead by the Swiss Symbolist artist Arnold Böcklin for this novel, as Yves Tanguy’s painting Jours de Lenteur (1937) was a visual spur for The Drought.

Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin (1880)

Part one: The Equinox

Dr Edward Sanders is 40. For fifteen years he has been working in Africa, for the past ten at the Fort Isabelle leper hospital in the Cameroon. He has been having an affair with the wife of one of his colleagues, a microbiologist named Max Clair, the wife’s name being Suzanne Clair.

Three months ago the Clairs had, without explanation, abruptly quit the leper hospital, and gone to the town of Mont Royal, close to some jewel-mining operations. Mont Royal is upriver of the coastal town of Port Matarre. Then Sanders receives a letter from Suzanne telling him the forest is ‘full of jewels’. For obscure reasons, uncertain (like most Ballard protagonists) of his own motivation, Sanders takes a month’s leave from the hospital to go and see the Clairs.

The novel opens as the steamer Sanders is travelling on from Libreville (the modern-day capital city of Gabon) arrives at Port Matarre. On board he has struck up relations with two typically queer, aloof and puzzling characters, the Catholic priest Father Balthus, and a short intense man he is forced to share a cabin with, Ventress. He steps ashore on the day of the spring equinox – darkness and light are perfectly balanced.

Sanders quickly discovers something strange is going on. There are no river steamers up to Mont Royal. The railway is closed. The roads are closed. The telegraph is down. He visits the military chief of the area who tells him that news is being… rationed.

He notices the sky is eerily dark and the jungle across the river and surrounding the town has a sombre, colourless feel about it.

Then Sanders gets caught up in a James Bond-style shootout down at the native harbour. At the centre of it is Ventress carrying a suitcase he’s at great pains to protect from a gang of machete- and gun-toting thugs seemingly under the command of a tall blonde-haired man who directs operations from a cruiser which steers up into the docks. Ventress escapes, a dazed Sanders staggers back to his hotel.

After just a few days in town Sanders has picked up a characteristically featureless Ballardian woman, the journalist Louise Peret, who has got wind of something happening up-country and knows there’s a story in it. Down at the docks, before the fight kicked off, she had identified a body the locals were just pulling from the river. It was the assistant to an American journalist who’d gone up country before her.

The thing is – the dead man’s arm was encased in a crystalline sheath which glittered and emitted a strange light. Earlier in the day, in the local market, Sanders had come across a trader who opened a secret cache of flowers, each of which was encased in a brilliant, multi-faceted crystal, freezing cold to the touch.

The night before Sanders had looked up into the sky and seen an extraordinarily bright white object moving over the night sky. He realised it is the telecoms satellite Echo but…shining with an eerie efflorescence as if… encased in jewels...

And so, the secret of the novel leaks out. Somewhere close to Mont Royal the jungle is turning to crystal. As the story progresses, other characters tell him the same process is being reported in the Florida Everglades and the Pripet Marshes of Russia. I.e. across the world.

Sanders strikes a deal with a local, one Captain Aragon, who takes him in his river cruiser up the African river into the heart of… crystals. The comparisons with Conrad’s most famous novel are too obvious to make. After a few days’ vividly described chuntering up the jungley river they come to a pontoon blocking their way and a busy army base. Aragon docks the ship and Sanders makes himself known to the officer in charge, one Captain Radek, himself a doctor (p.63).

Sanders is surprised to see none other than Ventress coming ashore from another boat which has docked at the military base. What’s he doing here? Radek allows Sanders to join an ‘inspection party’ which is proceeding up the river towards Mont Royal. As you might expect, they soon come to stretches where the forest has been turned into crystals whose facets flash light.

Then they arrive at the abandoned city of Mont Royal (like the abandoned London of The Drowned World, the abandoned Mount Royal in The Drought). They dock and the inspection party splits up into groups of soldiers, each led by an NCO. Sanders wanders through the characteristic Ballardian landscape of the abandoned city, cars strewn around the roads, shops eerily deserted and drained swimming pools and empty fountains.

They arrive right at the edge of the crystal zone, and watch an army helicopter trying to fly over it, whose rotors suddenly start crystallising, causing it to crash.

Sanders watches fascinated as an eddy of light passes out of the forest and towards him, crystallising the vegetation all around him, including a nearby car, while his own clothes begin to grow frostings and rimes of crystal, and suddenly a man is yelling at him from the window of a nearby mansion.

The ‘scientific’ explanation

Part two opens with a pretty crude bit of explication. Ballard includes an excerpt from a letter supposedly written by Sanders to the head of the leper hospital, Dr Paul Derain, which gives a comprehensive explanation for the crystallising phenomenon (rather as the ‘scientific’ explanation for both the drought and the drowned world are delayed until we’re well into the story).

It doesn’t make complete sense but the crucial fact is the explanation is based on TIME.

The discovery of anti-matter posits the existence of anti-time. We suspect that anti-matter and matter destroy each other continuously throughout the universe. Well, in the same way, time must be meeting anti-time and annihilating itself. And as time is destroyed, the universe’s total quotient of time decreases so that – like a super-saturated solution – the remaining atoms and molecules are crystallising out ‘in an attempt to secure their foot-hold upon existence’ (p.85).

In the letter Sanders explains that the weird effects he sees around him are connected to events in distant star systems, which astronomers have been observing, of entire systems like the island galaxy M31 becoming crystal, appearing to double in size and brilliancy. Events here in the forests of Africa are intimately linked with disturbances around the universe. (In fact the letter includes a reference to the Everglades in Florida which have, by the time he writes the letter, become almost entirely crystallised with the result that some three million Americans have had to flee their homes.)

Part two: The Illuminated Man

Then the narrative reverts the ‘present’ – in fact right back to the cliffhanger moment which part one ended on – Sanders on the verge of the crystallising zone when he hears someone shout his name from a nearby mansion. He runs across the crystallising grass to find Ventress with a shotgun, hiding behind a window. The reason becomes clear when someone takes a shot at them through the window and then Sanders, venturing downstairs is attacked by the same mulatto and crew of thugs who he’d saved Ventress from back in the fight at the native docks in part one.

Ventress appears to be locked in a feud with the mine-owner Thorensen. Why? He doesn’t explain, continuing to speak in what Sanders describes as ‘his ambiguous and disjointed way’ – so Sanders can’t guess why they appear to be ready to kill each other. (All this reminds me of the inexplicable feud between Whitman and Jonas in The Drought – as if there are people who just want to kill each other, sometimes for reasons they can’t even remember.)

After the shootout in the mansion, Ventress and Sanders venture out into the open and make their way along the half-crystallised river. Then they come across the wreckage of the crashed helicopter, ‘the four twisted blades veined and frosted like the wings of a giant dragonfly’ (p.96). Under the wreckage is an almost entirely crystallised body, it is Radek, the army doctor who greeted Sanders. The latter tears him free from his crystal sheaths and then ties his body to a handy broken tree trunk with his belt and gently pushes it into the river to send downstream and hopefully out of harm’s way.

Then Sanders and Ventress come to an isolated summer house, covered in crystals like a frosted wedding cake. As they approach there are shots, confusion, Ventress is trapped in a net by Thorensen’s men, and a huge Negro approaches with a panga to finish him off, but the surface of the frozen river cracks and gives way under his weight and while he’s extricating himself, Ventress wriggles free and escapes.

Now Sanders is with Thorensen who slowly realises who he is and reluctantly takes him through into the summer house where he is introduced to Serena. Now we learn that Serena is the hapless young who Ventress bullied her poor colonialist parents into letting him marry, then took off to a remote cabin in the forest. Ventress treated her appallingly and Thorensen stole her away whereupon Ventress went mad and has spent six months in an asylum. Now he has returned to take his revenge and steal back his child bride.

So that’s the basis of Ventress and Thorensen’s endless feud. Sanders looks down at Serena lying pale and frail in bed. She’s obviously very ill. Thorensen gives her some of the gems he picked up after the fight at the white mansion. Now Sanders witnesses something amazing which is that the jewels retard the crystallising effects. It is as if concealed in their hears they have the concentrated time which can reverse the time sickness which is causing the crystallisation.

Sanders says he must get back to Port Matarre. Thorensen says he’ll send him there with two of his African trackers. So off they set but after a while, Sanders realises they’re going round in circles. In fact Thorensen is using him as bait to lure Ventress out of hiding just as Ventress used him as bait at the mansion.

The guides disappear leaving Sanders on his own but moments later he hears a firefight in the jungle and goes back to find one of the blacks dying of gunshot wounds. Terrified by all this, Sanders takes off back in the direction of the river. it is heavily crystallised but he hopes to walk along the hard surface back towards the town.

Suddenly he sees a man carrying a wooden burden and hopes it is a soldier foraging for wood but on getting closer is horrified to see that it is Radek who he tried to save. Now most of the crystals have melted in the fast-flowing river Sanders realises that when he tore Radek from from the crystallised ground he ripped half his chest and face off! The man is a bleeding wreck of a man who can’t see and can barely talk but he has just enough energy to bed Sanders – Take me… back. Take me back!’ Sanders dodges the weaving figure and runs for the river, diving into its now free-flowing shallows.

A few hours later he emerges from the river where the road leads to a white building, the Bourbon Hotel. He is back in civilisation. Soldiers greet him and radio base. Captain Aragon turns up and tells him Louise Peret is waiting for him. Not only that but Mr and Mrs Clair – his friend and the friend’s wife who he was having an affair with – are at the hotel, too.

Sanders is greeted by Max, has a shower, changes into new clothes (admittedly the washed clothes of a man who died in the crystal forest) and has civilised drinks with Max and Suzanne. When they discuss Sanders’s adventures in the forest it becomes clear that Suzanne is entranced by the forest and its world of brilliantly-coloured jewelled facets.

Max tactfully beats a retreat (by implication, knowing his wife and best friend have had an affair) and it is only when he’s let alone with her that Sanders realises that Suzanne is showing the first symptoms of leprosy! So that’s why she and Max made such a sudden exit from the Fort Isabelle leper hospital. And there was he thinking it was him and their affair. Wrong again.

Next morning Sanders is bewildered to see that, although Max and Suzanne are overseeing a fairly modern hospital with plenty of resources, the trees and undergrowth are populated by shadowy groups of native lepers. They are refugees from a Catholic leprosie where the priest did little more than pray for them, and are too frightened to come into the modern hospital.

Then Sanders ‘girlfriend’, the beautiful slender journalist Mlle Louise Peret turns up, a breath of fresh air compared to a) the complicated psychodrama playing out around Suzanne and b) the macabre figures of the black lepers hiding in the undergrowth. He takes her to the bungalow the Clairs have lent him, and they make love.

Afterwards, Sanders expands on the ideas of darkness and light, speculating that these polar opposites are coming into sharper relief as time drains away from the world and Louise and he play spot the archetype: she (Louise) is light to Suzanne the dark lady. Thorense and Ventress’s endless feud is somehow binary. Father Balthus, is he darkness and who is his opposite? Sanders? Louise reveals that an army launch is going back up the river and she wants to be on it.

That evening he goes for dinner with Max and Suzanne but instead of discreetly absenting himself afterwards, Max insists on getting out a chessboard and playing a game, while Suzanne retires. An hour or so later the game ends and Sanders walks round the grounds. He sees the outline of the white hotel in the moonlight. He catches a glimpse of Suzanne and makes his way there. He catches up with her and she takes him into the ruined corridors of the abandoned building and up to a second floor room which she has made a kind if refuge.

Here on the bed Sanders makes love to his leprous mistress. The binary black and white imagery is laid on with a trowel. In the afternoon the chalet room was filled with blazing sunlight so he and Louise had to pull down a blind to make love. Now here in the ruined white hotel in the black night he makes love to his dark lady by wan moonlight. They talk. She is suddenly super-sensitive about her disease. She pulls her nightgown around her and before he can stop her runs out the room and down the abandoned corridors

Later that night, back in his chalet, Sanders is awoken by cars being loaded up and searchlights. Max bangs on his door asking if Suzanne is with him. Sanders disclaims all knowledge. Max is almost crying: Suzanne has run off, presumably into the forest. He goes off in search. Sanders takes a group of black servants with him to the Bourbon Hotel but they quickly settle down for a smoke.

Leaving them, Sanders walks back along the road into the abandoned Mont Royal. The crystallising process is much further advanced, the crystals hang from streetlights an overhead wires. Sanders comes across a smashed-in jewellers shop and realises that where the jewels lie on the pavement, the crystals don’t work. It is as if deep within them the jewels contain concentrated time, as well as light, which fights off the time disease of the crystals. Tired, Sanders sits down in the little patch of crystal-free pavement with his back to the wall and fills his pocket with gems.

When he awakes much of the jewels’ power has worn off and he is horrified to find his entire arm up to the shoulder encased in crystals. It is very heavy and very cold. He has been woken by Ventress tugging him. At that moment there is a shot and the window above them shatters. Thorensen and his crew of blacks are upon them. Again. Round and round this feud goes with the pointless circularity of a mad obsession.

Ventress stuffs some of the remaining jewels into Sanders’s pockets and tells him to run, run for his life, keeping in motion is the only thing that will prevent the crystals progressing from his shoulder to neck and thence to his head. And so for hours and hours Sanders runs through the crystallising jungle, The Illuminated Man, windmilling his crystallised arm round and round, gaining a slight relief from the process.

Finally he comes to the crystallised summer house and hears a voice hissing his name. It is Ventress. Again. Hiding in the underside of the summer house, peeking out over the surface of the ground and between pillars at Thorensen’s riverboat which is moored in the river a hundred yards or so away. The black crew load the ship’s cannon and fire repeated volleys at the summer house, the idea being not to destroy it but to shatter the crystals enough for the boar to approach really close. But in the event, after an hour or more of firing, the boat rams hard into the crystals but rears up on its hull and becomes landlocked, the crystals slowly starting to form over it.

This leads to one of the most contrived but strangest moments which is when a vast fifteen-foot crocodile, festooned with crystals lumbers heavily towards the house. Only when it is almost upon them does Sanders realise he can see a gun barrel sticking out of its mouth and realise it is an elaborate costume. He fires point blank into the crocodile which rears up on its hind legs revealing the mulatto who has been a repeated assailant of Ventress’s and Sanders, rearing up, keeling over and dying.

Ventress tells Sanders to go, go now: now all the blacks are dead and it is just him against Thorensen. Go!

And so Sanders staggers through the all-the-time more heavily crystallising jungle until he stumbles across a clearing and discovers the Catholic church of Father Balthus. He stumbles up the aisle and holds his arm up to the enormous jewel-encrusted crucifix and, of course, his arm is freed from its crystals. All the while Father Balthus watches from the organ where he is playing baroque organ music.

For three days Sanders stays with him in their church refuge, eating frugal meals, pumping the bellows for the organ, as his arm slowly heals and Father Balthus gives him his Christina interpretation of the crystallising, namely that the risen Christ is all around them in the new light of the forest. Eventually, the jewel’s power fades and the crystals invade the church and start advancing up the aisle. Balthus pushes the enormous crucifix into Sanders’s hands and tells him to escape. Sanders’s last sight of the priest is of him standing on the verandah of the church, arms outspread in the posture of crucifixion and the crystals move in to embalm him.

through the crystal forest Sanders staggers, using the jewels’ power to melt a path through the by-now almost solid walls in each direction.

1. He comes upon the lepers he’d seen hiding in the undergrowth near the hospital. Now they are dancing in the forest, weaving a strange saraband, old and young, men and woman, children. They dance up to him then away, eerily. And Sanders realises they are led by a tall figure in a black hood and only as it turns away does he realise it is Suzanne, now thoroughly incorporated into her leprous avatar.

2. He stumbles upon the damn summer house, again, now entirely immured in crystals and goes into the bedroom where he sees the corpse of Thorensen, the feud finally over, the bloody hole in his chest from a shotgun wound turned to ornate crystal, lying beside the embalmed Serena, her chest barely moving in its carapace of light. And then sees a figure running past the building, shedding fragments of crystal as it runs, crying out over and over Serena Serena. It is mad Ventress.

Finally, Sanders blunders out of the jungle and into the arms of the troops waiting at the perimeter. Ironically, he is charged with looting the enormous crucifix, until Max and Louise intervene with the authorities.

Now, it is two months later in Port Matarre and he winds up his letter to the director of his leprosie, Dr Paul Derain. He casually mentions that he thinks he has seen an efflorescence of the sun and its surface crossed by a distinctive lattice-work, a vast portcullis which may one day reach out and crystallise the planets themselves, stopping them in their tracks.

Louise has looked after him but he has not really been there, his heart is in the crystal forest and so she has grown away from him. Max asks him to come and work at the new hospital, but Sanders isn’t interested. He finishes writing the letter and leaves it to be posted, settles his bill and walks down to the quayside. Captain Aragon and his launch putters by, the two men nodding to each other. They reach an understanding. Half an hour later the launch turns and heads upriver, taking Sanders back into the heart of the crystal forest and his destiny.

He is coolly watched by Max and Louise from the quayside, but what do they understand of what he and Suzanne discovered, that

the only resolution of the imbalance within their minds, their inclination towards the dark side of the equinox, could be found within that crystal world. (p.173)

Credit

‘The Crystal World’ by J.G. Ballard was published by Jonathan Cape in 1966. Page references are to the 1985 Triad/Panther Books paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

Related links

• The Crystal World Wikipedia article

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