The Crystal World by J. G. Ballard

First published: 1966

Type of work: Science fiction

Time of work: c. 1966

Locale: An obscure corner of the Cameroon Republic in West Africa

Principal Characters:

• Dr. Edward Sanders, the protagonist, the assistant director of a leper hospital
• Max Clair, a microbiologist
• Suzanne Clair, his wife and a former mistress of Sanders
• Loulse Peret, a young French reporter who becomes Sanders’ lover
• Thorensen, a mine owner in Cameroon
• Ventress, an unbalanced, middle-aged architect
• Serena Ventress, his young wife, who is living with Thorensen
• Father Balthus, a Catholic priest facing a spiritual crisis

The Novel

A strangely worded letter from Suzanne Clair has brought Dr. Edward Sanders by steamer from Libreville, Gabon, to dingy Port Matarre in the Cameroon Republic. For two years, Suzanne was his mistress while she and her husband, Max, worked with Sanders at the Fort Isabelle leper hospital in a corner of West Africa. When Max and Suzanne abruptly left for Cameroon, Sanders began to suspect that Suzanne had contracted leprosy. Now, Sanders seeks transport fifty miles up the Matarre River to Mont Royal, where the Clairs have established a small clinic. Passage upriver is difficult to secure. When Sanders arrives, Port Matarre is almost deserted, and an African official explains that a new kind of plant disease has been discovered in the forest near Mont Royal and that military authorities are surrounding the affected area.

There are other mysteries as well. His cabinmate during the voyage to Cameroon, an architect, Ventress, is a furtive and manic personality with his own hidden reason for reaching Mont Royal. Another passenger, Father Balthus, is ostensibly returning to his small parish in the forest after a sabbatical rest, yet Sanders senses in Balthus some dark purpose.

A young French journalist, Louise Peret, befriends Sanders at Port Matarre, and the two are drawn together. At night, they notice an odd luminescence from the jungle upriver, and even the Echo satellite overhead is brighter than usual. At a local curio shop, Sanders has seen beautiful crystalline flowers that seem to glow, which the natives keep under wraps.

An altercation at the port between Ventress and those hired by Thorensen, a mine owner, draws Sanders into the middle of a personal vendetta as he attempts to aid his former cabinmate. Then, the body of a man is found in the water, one arm covered with some deliquescing crystal structure. The drowned man was an associate of Peret, and now she, too, must journey into the jungle.

Eventually, Sanders and Peret are able to hire passage upriver. At the military compound there, the jungle has become a kaleidoscope of crystal; as Sanders discovers, the same process is at work in the Florida everglades and in the Soviet Union as well. T he transformation of the jungle seems to Sanders to reflect a cosmic change first seen in the Andromeda galaxy. Already, the prismatic forest begins to exert a compelling influence on the hospital director, who is drawn not only to the beauty but also to the utter timelessness of the crystal foliage.

Ventress has also managed to find his way to the jungle and thence to Thorensen’s summer house, which is already becoming fossilized by the approaching crystals. Later, after a series of encounters with both Ventress and Thorensen, Sanders meets Ventress’ wife, Serena, near death from tuberculosis and kept in safety by Thorensen in the summer house. Ventress married her when she was seventeen but treated her as a caged spirit; Thorensen rescued her, and now the deranged architect is striving at all costs to get her back.

Soon, Sanders finds Max and Suzanne Clair. Max heartily greets his old friend, but his wife is shrouded in shadow. Their small clinic is mostly deserted, and Max spends his time caring for Suzanne. The jungle exerts its strong pull on Suzanne, and when she disappears into the crystalline forest, Sanders makes his way through the spectral growth, searching for her, his arm overgrown with the advancing crystals. Only real jewels held close to his arm lessen the hold of the mysterious crystals. At last, responding to organ music coming from a clearing, he finds the apostate priest Balthus, alone in his small church. In the crystal world, Balthus is confronting the absolute evidence of God’s presence and the promise of immortality offered by the embalming growth.

Balthus gives Sanders a great jeweled cross, which enables him to pass through the jungle; the crystals melt when the cross is brought near. On his journey, he passes a troupe of dancing lepers, joyously led by Suzanne Clair; Sanders sees the crystal growth already replacing the ravages of leprosy.

When Sanders arrives again at Port Matarre, Max and Peret have returned as well. Sanders, however, is not to remain; in two months, he heads back to the prismatic jungle, to join Suzanne, Ventress, Thorensen, Serena, and others who have become crystal glories. As Sanders writes to a friend,

I shall return to the solitary church in that enchanted world, where by day fantastic birds fly through the petrified forest and jeweled 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 Characters

The plot of The Crystal World is less significant than the spiritual movement of Sanders, from the purgatory represented by Port Matarre, a world of black-and-white choices but mixed motives, to the shimmering certainty of the jungle landscape. The landscape dominates the story, and J. G. Ballard takes great care in depicting its feel. The central characters serve as mere extensions of Sanders’ relationship with his environment. The characters are symbols, not well-rounded human beings. Those symbols picture a series of reconciliations of the human psyche in all of its variety with the kind of timelessness offered by the engulfing crystals. “I don’t take sides between Ventress and Thorensen,” Sanders tells Louise Peret. “Isolated now they’re both grotesques, but perhaps the forest will bring them together.”

Peret is in her twenties, with bright, observant eyes. She wears a white suit and is the counterpart of the dark Suzanne, whom she resembles. Peret’s sunglasses divide her face into the seen and unseen, representing for Sanders some kind of choice he must make. It is March 21, the equinox, when day and night are of equal length, and Sanders, precariously balanced, is about to choose.

Suzanne Clair was the reason for Sanders’ journey to Mont Royal. She is a somber beauty, a decade older than Peret. Sanders had been unable to resolve his affair with Suzanne, to give himself fully to her. Suzanne represents Sanders’ dark side, his mixed motives, his fear that “he might be more attracted by the idea of leprosy, and whatever it unconsciously represented, than he imagined.”

Max Clair, in the kind of ironic punning in which Ballard excels, is clear about very little. He cares for his wife but is shortsighted and unable to appreciate the meaning of the approaching crystallization. He took his wife to a remote area in Africa to spare her the ignominy of leprosy, but he neither apprehends the secret past she and Sanders share nor realizes the curative effect of the jungle upon those psyches inclined to the “dark side.”

Thorensen and Ventress also reflect the element of choice facing Sanders. Serena Ventress, rescued from her mad husband but now dying in the summer house, can only clutch real jewels to her body to ward off the approaching crystals. Though Thorensen is darkly dressed, there is a tenderness in him toward Serena. The deranged Ventress, the white-suited architect, seems to picture the madness of the “normal” world, and his attempt to keep for himself the beauty of his wife ends in failure. When the crystals finally overwhelm them, Thorensen is crystallized beside Serena, a kind of life in death, while Ventress, the illuminated specter, passes into the jungle madly shouting for his wife.

In Father Balthus, Sanders finds his dark twin. Balthus is a man dispossessed of his faith, determined to prove his doubt, to eliminate any reason for belief in the miraculous. Yet in the crystal world he is confronted with the reality he denied. On the third day Sanders is with him in the forest, Balthus celebrates the Eucharist. The priest sees the body of Christ in every jewel of the forest:

Here everything is transfigured and illuminated, joined together in the last marriage of space and time.... Once I was a true apostate—I knew God existed but could not believe in him.... Now events have overtaken me. For a priest there is no greater crisis, to deny God when he can be seen to exist in every leaf and flower.

Sanders leaves him in the forest, his arms stretched out in a kind of cruciform image, home at last.

Ballard reveals little information about his characters. Sanders has been in Africa for fifteen years, ten at the leper hospital. He has broad shoulders and a critical eye. There is the trace of a beard below his scarred, firm mouth. Sanders is substantial enough to carry the story along, but ultimately, the reader is interested in his response to the crystal world and in his representation as a man who chooses.

Critical Context

The Crystal World was first serialized as “Equinox” in New Worlds in 1964 and represents one of the finest examples of Ballard’s work in his first decade as a professional writer. During this time, he produced several novels dealing with worldwide catastrophe: The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), and The Drought (published in the United States in 1964 as The Burning World and revised in 1965). These stories, utilizing some of the conventions of science fiction, are metaphysical explorations of the landscapes of the psyche.

In the decade following 1966, Ballard turned to more avant-garde fiction, which included the novels Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), and High-Rise (1975); these are brutal pictures of the modern landscapes and of how people become “invisible” to one another, trapped in their individualism. He made another new departure with Empire of the Sun (1984), his most autobiographical work to date. Here Ballard recalls in convincing detail and with surrealistic force his early childhood in Shanghai, when war and its attendant dislocations seemed to blast everything in the city into the rough, component parts of reality. For this novel, the author received the Guardian Fiction Prize and a nomination for the Booker Prize.

Throughout his work, Ballard has probed the meaning of human alienation. The hope of reconciliation comes only through humble acceptance of overwhelming forces, whether death or dissolution or a merging into paradise.

Bibliography

Aldiss, Brian W. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, 1986.

Jung, Carl G., ed. Man and His Symbols, 1964.

Platt, Charles, ed. Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction, 1980.

Pringle, David. Earth Is the Alien Planet: J. G. Ballard’s Four-Dimensional Nightmare, 1979.