The novel “The Crystal World” by J.G. Ballard was published for the first time in 1964 fixing up previously published short fiction.
Dr. Edward Sanders begins a journey up the Matarre River in Cameroon to reach the place where his colleague and ex-lover Suzanne Clair and her husband Max work in the Mont Royal leprosy treatment facility. The journey is made more complicated by unrest that adds to rumors of strange events that some of Sanders’ fellow travelers want to investigate.
The travelers find a passage but one of them, the photographer Matthieu, is found dead in the river covered with mysterious crystals. During the journey, the others discover that an unexplained phenomenon is leading to the progressive transformation of the forest into crystals.
In 1964 J.G. Ballard published the novella “Equinox” serialized in the magazine “New Worlds” and the novelette “The Illuminated Man” in the magazine “Fantasy & Science Fiction”. Fixing them up and reworking them, he obtained the novel “The Crystal World”.
During the 1960s, J.G. Ballard had become famous for his catastrophic novels in which various types of devastation affected the world but also human minds. For the author, the risk was that of becoming formulaic and once again having a doctor as the protagonist didn’t contribute to the originality of a new work of this genre. However, “The Crystal World” is a little different from Ballard’s previous catastrophic novels.
At the beginning of “The Crystal World”, the protagonist Edward Sanders doesn’t even know that a process is underway that transforms everything into crystal while some characters traveling with him intend to investigate rumors regarding strange events. The problems the characters have to face seem only to be those related to unrest among the population and the spread of leprosy. The opening part of the novel seems to be the story of a journey made difficult by very real problems. Usually, the inspiration by “Heart of Darkness” is associated with another Ballard novel, “The Drowned World“, but the journey on the river is reminiscent of that novel as well.
When the characters discover the mysterious phenomenon that causes the crystallization of anything, living or not, that is touched, a sense of threat starts growing. The problem seems local but it’s expanding and it’s impossible to stop an inexplicable force. Over the course of the novel, J.G. Ballard offers a pseudo-scientific explanation and it’s discovered that jewels dissolve the crystals, but all this remains insufficient to stop the progress of the phenomenon.
“The Crystal World” represents the culmination of some elements of J.G. Ballard’s catastrophic works. The author also drew inspiration from painting with a particular influence of surrealism, and this novel is perfect for creating a kaleidoscope of images. The crystallization phenomenon scares the characters but also fascinates them because it’s as if it froze in time whatever it captures potentially for eternity. This contrasts with the lepers often mentioned in the novel, who suffer a slow physical degeneration due to the disease.
The psychological digging into the characters’ reactions to the crystallized forest but also interpersonal relationships that were complex already at the beginning of the story contributed to making “The Crystal World” one of the most celebrated novels by J.G. Ballard. It’s now a classic far beyond genre labels.
