Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #209832 in Books
• Published on: 1985-07-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 175 pages

Synopsis
From the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Cocaine Nights comes an acclaimed backlist title -- the extraordinary vision of an African forest that turns into crystal -- now reissued in new cover style. Through a 'leaking' of time, the West African jungle starts to crystallize. Trees are metamorphosed into enormous jewels. Crocodiles encased in second glittering skins lurch down the river. Pythons with huge blind gemstone eyes rear in heraldic poses. Most men flee the area in terror, afraid to face what they cannot understand. But some, dazzled and strangely entranced, remain to drift through this dreamworld forest. There is a doctor in pursuit of his ex-mistress, an enigmatic Jesuit wields a crystal cross, and a tribe of lepers search for Paradise!

Customer Reviews

The Crystal World
Following a mysterious message a doctor heads into the Cameroon jungle on the trail of his ex-lover, only to find that pockets of time are being leached out of the area leading to strange crystal transfomations of the flora and fauna. In many ways 'The Crystal World' is a familiar reworking of Ballard's earlier novels, with the onset of a geological disaster (previously an excess and lack of water in 'The Drowned World' and 'The Drought')being used to mirror the psychological states of the cast, while the lead character gradually comes to actively embrace the new state of the world. However despite it's familiarity the bizarre SF concept at the heart of this novel makes for some startling and haunting imagery, and 'The Crystal World' stands as the most lyrical and strange of Ballards early novels. Excellent stuff.

Brutal, beautiful planet
Is there any artist who can lay claim to such a consistently dazzling and diverse range of writing? In this formative (and in my view most accomplished)period of his career, Ballard deconstructs our modern superficialities and demonstrates the primitive instincts and impulses that reside within us all. The imagery is at times breathtakingly beautiful, an arabesque landscape saturated with "Kori Nors".
However, it is the position of the individual amidst unrelenting adversity that dominates the book, with Ballard's evocative prose hypnotising the reader like a jewel-studded basilisk. His imagination is apparently boundless, his prose exquisitely rendered, and impossible scenarios are made to seem all too plausible. And best of all he's still writing well into his 70s, with the indefatigable need to confront our, and his demons still as intense as ever. Psychological extremity in a tangential world. All kneel and worship!!!

Surrealist realism
The science-fictional premise of The Crystal World (that the ‘supersaturation of time’ is causing the world, its plants, animals and people, to crystalise) is far less important than the imagery it produces. Ballard’s prose style is like the jewelled forests he describes so well: precise, scintillating, beautiful, but slightly cold. It’s his imagery that lingers in the mind, not his story or characters — the protagonist running through the weirdly transformed forest, whirling his arm to stop it crystallising, sending off sparks of prismatic colour; a snake whose eyes ‘had been transferred into enormous jewels that rose from its forehead like crowns’; a helicopter sliding backwards through the air as the weight of crystals forming on its rotor blades causes it to crash.

Ballard has often paid homage to the Surrealists, and many of his novels resemble Surrealist paintings (with the added dimension of time!), none more so than this, one of his finest. In a sense, the idea of the ‘supersaturation of time’ is his attempt to remove that dimension from his work, turning this book into an attempt at a still image in prose: an image of the world as a single, multifaceted crystal, at one with eternity.