The Drought by JG Ballard

A Metaphor Equation Micro-blog

“One day you’ll drown in that much water, Doctor…”

“On the desk by the stern window was the limestone paperweight he had cut from a chalk cliff as a child, the fossil shell embedded in its surface bearing a quantum of Jurassic time like a jewel.”

If we have a prolonged drought this year, no one can say they weren't warned. A  drought that will surely affect the oceans as much as the land, with life in the seas already diminishing through pollution, over-fishing, and the destruction of whole swathes of the seabed. Indeed, daily life increasingly now increasingly resembles the plot from this very novel: how long before the rivers and the reservoirs dry-up and the population migrates to the coast in a desperate attempt to reach and refine seawater only to create a second desert of salt in the great basins between the continents.

If Arthur C. Clarke was “the prophet of the Space Age,” JG Ballard was – and is – the prophet of the “Dystopian Age,” predicting many scenarios that have since been mirrored in actual events (The Drowned World – global warming; The Atrocity Exhibition – our collective obsession with sexual violence and psychopathy; and Crash – the dominance of the motor car in every aspect of our lives, including our sexual fantasies. Every story a myth of the near future, another foray into a terminal disaster area. As one commentator observed, “is this fiction or history written ahead of its time?”   

In The Drought, tribes of landlocked fishermen compete to recruit press-ganged congregations and to secure their rights to an ever diminishing supply of tidal water; white lions prowl the abandoned suburban streets, their pelts pale with ash and dust, and two riverine figures – the Caliban-like Quilter and the Ariel-like Philip Jordan – contest humanity’s future. Some of the book’s most striking imagery comes from the juxtaposition of these two characters – the dead peacock tied to Quilter’s belt, and the oil soaked swan that Philip tries to save. And Dr Charles Ransom, surely Ballard himself, as he struggles to make sense of it all, abandoning his houseboat to embark on a typically Ballardian circular quest through a “dune limbo;” arriving back where he started just in time to watch Mount Royal burn (the author’s proxy Shepperton set ablaze in a Nero-like conflagration).    

All of which begs the question – should Ballard’s books be part of the (future) history curriculum rather than the modern literature syllabus? And of course, the novel has one of the most enigmatic last lines in any piece of fiction cum prophecy. Discover what that is in this real-life season of zero precipitation.  

Cultural touchstones:

Jour de Lenteur by Yves Tanguy

The “dead” swan from Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop

The English Patient – the desert as ocean, the desert as self  

The startling book cover images are by James Marsh, David Pelham, and Chris Foss.  

Getty Images