The Day of Creation

by J.G. Ballard

At Port-la-Nouvelle, on the parched terrain of central Africa, Dr. Mallory watches as his clinic fails and dreams of discovering a third Nile that will make the Sahara bloom. When there is a trickle on the local airstrip, and soon a river, the obsessed Mallory claims it as his own creation and sets out for the river’s source.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Novels, British Literature, Africa, Fantasy, Literature

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

James Graham "J. G." Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Ballard came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard focused on an eclectic variety of short stories (or "condensed novels") such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which drew closer comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Burroughs. In 1973 the highly controversial novel Crash was published, a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism; the protagonist becomes sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car crashes. The story was later adapted into a film of the same name by Canadian director David Cronenberg.

While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army. Described as "The best British novel about the Second World War" by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg.

The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like the antihero of Werner Herzog’s masterwork Fitzcarraldo, the narrator of Ballard’s novel is a semi-cracked basket case with an insane dream and an insane level of stamina and persistence. In Fitzcarraldo, the mission is to build an opera house for the Peruvian people through hauling a ship over a mountain to scout for rubber. In Ballard, rogue doctor Mallory seeks to forge a river to rival the buried waters of the Sahara and bring fresh water to the parched basin of the Central African Republic. Using a corrupt Captain’s ship (replete with limosuine), and with the help of a teenage native, Mallory’s obstacles include frequent helicopter fire, a rabid guerilla group, a purblind documentary filmmaker, an Indian naturist, a strange brothel-ship madamed by a former lover, and his own diseased lust for the underage girl. The astonishing descriptive powers that Ballard summons up to create this sweltering hell are the star of this riveting misadventure. Herzog missed a trick in not filming this.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Sooner or later, everything turns into television.”
- J.G. Ballard, The Day of Creation



A hypnotic and dreamy parable or perhaps a freakish and hallucenegenic and moody allegory, 'The Day of Creation' drifts along with Ballard's beautiful (sometimes absurdly quirky) prose. I've read roughly eight of his novels or more and I've yet to be disappointed really in any of them.

The book is slippery. It isn't really plot driven (I guess all river novels have some direction and plot to them). Think of some strange combination of Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness', Twain's 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', the 'African Queen', Burton's 'The Source of the Nile', etc., all mixed with a flavor of Greek myth. Dr. Mallory floats upstream with his girl Friday, his nubile Jim (Noon) to discover the source of the river Mallory "created". The further up the river he floats, the crazier and sicker everybody becomes. The novel bloats and floats on a lot of the fluvial space Ballard loves: environmental extremism, political absurdity, war, madness, nightmares, violence, sex, and technology.

If you are new to Ballard, I might not recommend you start with this one. Ballard is like raw oysters, pickled beets or artichoke hearts: he's slippery, earthy, and an aquired taste. So, start with something a bit more mainstream. But if you are into funky contemporary literature and are willing to drift, float, and eddy around a bit while drunk or high -- this novel might just be exactly what you weren't looking for but might want anyway.

[Damian Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure if I'm being entirely fair in my 3-star rating of this book. I think I've hit my Ballard saturation point. I've read about 80% of his work and every time I read something new I feel like it's simply more Ballard, not particularly different from the Ballard I've read before. I do feel that Ballard's narratives aren't tremendously strong and that his strength lies in his ideas, which may have been more or less played out by the time he wrote this one.

[Lee Foust · Rating 4 out of 5]

While it hasn't the wholly transgressive and mind-bending appeal of the classic Atrocity Exhibition or Crash, this Ballard offering is unique (of the novels of his that I have read, eight or so of them now) in its balance of realism and imagination. In fact, it seemed to me to be an extended metaphor for a trip inside the protagonist's mind in the form of a journey up a river. Unmistakable, then, is the sly reference/updating of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Thus the novel works on a few levels: as an adventure story, a psychological exploration of the self-destructive urge, a literary quotation of sorts, as a kind of political commentary updating European imperialism in Africa for the 1980s, and even--given the title--as a kind of postmodern creation myth.

I liked all of these levels, particularly the more thoughtfully symbolic ones, for the actual adventure journey wasn't really interesting enough for the 200+ pages. Still, Ballard's forte is how well he diagnoses the sicknesses of modern culture, particularly pop culture and visual media, and shows how such things lie deep in our minds now, as if spliced into our DNA. Which makes me think--and I thought it several times while reading this one--that David Cronenberg (who later made a film version of Crash) was probably reading a lot of Ballard when he wrote Videodrome. Although this particular novel might seem much more primitive, and Conradian, with the African setting and all, than that urban film about visual media and reality colliding...still, The Day of Creation has a lot to say about how nowadays, and for some time now, we can only really experience the world as a TV show--that's the way we've been trained since childhood to understand reality. Thus Africa, to a modern Anglo-European, can only be 1/2 adventure film/Conradian novel and 1/2 safari documentary. Food for thought.

A brief for instance: Last night on Bill Maher's Real Time the panel was discussing the recently published excerpt from the new book on the Trump presidency and the shocking scene of his first meeting withe the Pentagon/military bigwigs and his tirade and calling them dopes and babies. It was mentioned that he was doing it as good reality tv. Maher, often a little thick in my mind, didn't get it. "But there was no audience," he said. Bill doesn't understand that audience doesn't matter, that Trump lives every minute as if he were on his reality tv show, that he's living the drama that will get him ratings whether there's a camera or audience or not. This certainly explains much of his behavior, his inability to distinguish reality from fiction, self-interest from madness, a good decision from a bad one--he's just living the drama as if that (the ratings that good drama garner) are all that matter, are all that's at stake.

[Baal Of · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ballard writes ugly novels filled with ugly characters, and stories that reflect his disgust for humanity. Part of me agrees with him, when I see the ugliness of the current state of American politics with the rise of the racist, fascist right, and the regressive stupidity of Trump and those who continue to support and defend him. Another part of me wants to just throw this book away since it feels like wallowing in despair, with its ecological undertones revolving around the nastiness that fills the magical river. Adding to all the unpleasantness is the main character who is loathsome in just about every way, and particularly with his sexual obsession with Noon, the 12 year guerrilla girl he ends up travelling with. As the novel progresses, the imagery around the river and the attempts by the people to control its waters become increasingly sexual as well, and even though Ballard's adeptness with language kept me from giving up entirely, by the end of the book I was just glad it was over, and I was left with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

[F.R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I read ‘Rushing to Paradise’ the other month, I think I said that Ballard had managed to create a good sense of place away from his normal Shepperton stamping patch. But even though ‘The Day of Creation’ has an African setting, that sense of place is sadly lacking. Indeed it is so vague as to be almost dream-like, and that the whole thing is a dream is an interpretation Ballard positively invites. (Although bearing in mind that Ballard also wrote the likes of ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, this is a far more lucid dream). However that dream quality means that it isn’t a particularly compulsive read, almost drifting by the reader.

A young doctor discovers, then tries to destroy a river in Central Africa. No reading of Ballard is ever wasted, but he wrote better novels.

[Gabriel Congdon · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first Ballard! I’d just moved to a place of the same name, so I thought it was apt.


Ballard is a writer of garbage. The landfill is his home. It’s mostly aerosol cans and tires (sorry, tyres) but what garbage!

Let me tell ya, this was one of them lucky books for me. I was lucky to read it, (that it was at the bookstore where I trade for books as well). If you’re always rolling the literature dice, sometimes the book you need is the one you’re reading. The main character in this book (spoiler) is going mad and I’ve been going crazy. If I hadn’t had this book to exorcise myself, I’m not sure how I would have shaped. But luckily luck is out there. Waiting for our time of need.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ballard deploys his characteristic extreme metaphors in the tale of a medic obsessed with the birth and death of a river he believes he created (of course,this is Ballard)

[Alan · Rating 2 out of 5]

J.G. Ballard was a giant of speculative fiction. His feral visions of futures in decay were a tremendously influential perspective on what had all too often been an unreflectively triumphalist literature. After encountering works like High Rise, The Terminal Beach, The Drowned World, The Crystal World, The Atrocity Exhibition and of course Crash, it becomes much more difficult to accept wide-eyed technological utopias without at least a degree of skepticism. His books take hold of the mind and won't let go, like the dried black-green algal bloom adhering to the sides of an empty swimming pool in the courtyard of the last Martian hotel.

I think it may be telling that my most memorable Ballard moment is Kara murmuring "Maybe the next one," as she watches traffic from a hotel room balcony, a line which as far as I can tell is actually from the David Cronenberg film rather than from the book Crash... but in any case, when I ran across this recent reissue of Ballard's 1987 novel The Day of Creation on the new books shelf at my local public library, I knew I had to pick it up.

The packaging of this edition is simple and eye-catching without being gaudy. I especially liked the edgy display font chosen for the chapter titles—lines which, thus set off, become one-line short stories in their own right, like "The Impresario of Rubbish"; "Out of the Night and Into the Dream" and "Journey towards the Rain Planet." Unfortunately, I cannot put a name to that face... there was no "Note on the Fonts" in the volume at hand, nor did it turn up using the web services Identifont and WhatTheFont.

The Day of Creation's locale is suitably exotic, or will be to most of Ballard's readers—an imaginary Central African region abandoned by its own people when the encroaching Sahara Desert all too realistically dried out all their farmland. It's set in a time that is also rapidly becoming exotic, an era of "clocks without hands" (p.106), devoid even of the concepts of cellphones, laptop computers and ubiquitous wireless connectivity: the 1980s.

It is not primarily a work of scientific fiction, though. The events described are realistic, or at least start out that way, set in motion by an unprecedented but nontheless plausible shaking of the earth. A great river appears out of, essentially, nowhere. Dr. Mallory, the narrator of this story, a medical doctor and quondam water prospector, witnesses what he takes to be its day of creation, springing from beneath the exposed roots of a great old oak tree near the empty village on the former shore of dry Lake Kotto where Mallory has his clinic. This "third Nile" promises to revivify the Sahara seemingly overnight... and of course Mallory's first impulse is to own, to control, even to destroy what he, in his more feverish moments, believes he has created. He embarks upon an upstream journey to find the source of this natural prodigy—after all, "Men must play their dangerous games." (p.86)

Dr. Mallory, whose first name is never mentioned, is not a very likeable character, and The Day of Creation is a story of unpleasant emotions, of hubris, lust, anger and fear, played out against a surreal background that seems to be as much internal landscape as it is navigable river. The Africa he sees is a very European one, mysterious and powerful but even so a mere possession, subject to his whims, full of benighted natives obsessed with Western gadgetry but incapable of maintaining it for themselves. It's an outsider's imperialist view that was hardly tenable even at the time Ballard was writing, and seems even less so now. And Mallory's obsession with the just-pubescent guerrilla girl Noon is, if not technically criminal in this jurisdiction, certainly unwholesome. I began thinking of The Day of Creation as something like Heart of Darkness crossed with Lolita—though not, I suspect, likely to be remembered as long as either.

"God rested on the seventh day in order to look at the rushes."
—(p.64)

I did like the ambiguity of this line, though—the "rushes" denoting both the film from the Japanese documentary crew encamped near Mallory's clinic, and the reeds now growing along the newborn river. However, this was not my favorite of the Ballard I've read.

Maybe the next one.

[Jacob Nicholas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not his best - the more straightforward 'adventure' aspects of are compelling but weirdly trad. Every character's motivation is inscrutable, particularly the protagonist's, which gives it a nice hazy dreamlike quality, but one that gets a bit frustrating given most of the novel's more traditional realism. It's only really the final act when it descends into usual Ballardian psychosis that it really takes off, and even then it doesn't hit the peaks of his other work. In some ways a worse retread of something like The Drowned World, with a deeply uncomfortable amount of nonceing. Still a solid, albeit pretty uncomfortable, read, and I'm excited to get into some of his more celebrated later works to see how they compare.

[Dimitrije Vojnov · Rating 3 out of 5]

THE DAY OF CREATION J.G. Ballard je njegova parafraza Conradovog "Srca tame", i to ne samo knjige HEART OF DARKNESS, već generalno cele supkulture koja je proistekla iz tog dela.

Potpuno je jasno da Ballard ide jasnom linijom parafraziranja te strukture kroz priču o britanskom lekaru koji u podsaharskoj sušnoj Africi prisustvuje čudu, nastanku ogromne reke koja je dovoljno jaka da ozeleni pustinju. Pod uslovom fa zaista postoji.

Lekar kreće na put brodom ka izvoru reke koju je nazvao po sebi Mallory i naravno jasna je simbolika da on na tom putu ide zapravo kao svom izvoru, ka svom jezgru.

Roman je zanimljiv i bogat događajima. Nažalost, iako je to atipično za Ballarda, sam tekst je malo haotičan, nabacan, unutar njega fali dramaturgija, fali poredak, šta je važno, šta nije, šta su događaji, šta ne. Deluge kao da je želeo da napravi jednu melasu u kojoj se izgubio junak, ali onda se u njoj gubi i čitalac.

Stoga, kad Mallory pođe na put, i ja sam se poprilično izgubio u raznim senzacijama kojima me je tekst zasuo. Dugo sam čitao ovaj roman jer sam želeo da ga pažljivo savladam, ali na kraju ta pažnja suštinski i nije baš nagrađena.

Pa ipak, ovo je roman vredan pažnje, neki koncepti koje ovde Ballard razrađuje na bazi Conrada su zanimljivi. Ako ne pokušavate baš da proniknete, sam rukopis nikada nije dosadan, čak naprotiv, nudi previše toga. I u stvari ovo je roman kome prija malo "površnije" čitanje.

[Logan · Rating 3 out of 5]

[SPOILERS AHEAD] Once I realized what THE DAY OF CREATION was “about,” I was a little surprised it took me so long to get there. I mean, it's right in the damn title. But, I got about halfway through the book before it occurred to me the whole thing is an allegory for the creative process. There’s Mallory at a dry lake bed in an town nearly devoid of people. He wants to fill the lake bed, but what, exactly, he's doing about it is a little unclear. He's inert, not doing much of anything really. There is, however, two guerrilla armies fighting each other and threatening to kill him from time to time. These warring factions seem to be far too interested in him, as well. Like, what are they fighting about and why do they keep coming back to him? He then “creates” the river, which was a complete accident not even caused by himself, but by a tractor uprooting an old tree. Though it wasn't even his own action, he proceeds to take full credit for having created this river in the middle of the Sahara. In fact, he goes on to "own" it by purchasing it. And of course he names the river after himself, the Mallory. He then goes back and forth between wanting to kill the river at its source and wanting it to thrive (i.e., the "struggle" of the artist). And of course the river, along with guerrilla soldiers, a filmmaker, and a floating brothel of women, attempt to kill him. But Mallory, himself, becomes determined to “kill” the river, i.e., finish the process. Meaning, the book, as far as I can tell, which, I suppose, is also like killing off a little bit of yourself. As soon as he does "kill" the river, the book ends, pretty much back where it started. But, if the whole thing is an allegory, that begs the question: Did Ballard think Mallory’s inappropriate relationship with the twelve- or thirteen-year-old Noon could be explained away because she was merely a symbol of his id or the driving force behind the creative process? Perhaps. I think it was a poor choice and needlessly distracted from the book, though. Why throw that monkey wrench into the works? I'm sure if he were here he would have an explanation, but still. Of course, Mallory was never a likable character and maybe he chose to have the id represented in such a way to ensure we never fully embrace this conflicted, narcissistic character. Anyway, there probably is a lot more to be dissected here, but I won’t because the book never fully grasped me. I'm not really interested in putting too much more time into this book than I already have. For me, I had a hard time envisioning a lot of this book. Ballard has a particular way with imagery in some books that simply doesn’t work for me. I can’t get the picture in my head. I’m trying to figure out what exactly it is, as others don’t seem to have the same problem. But, for me, I’ve had a hard time running the “movie in my head” for at least a small handful of his books that I’ve read. I think in some books he gets over-specific. For instance, in a single paragraph he’ll say that something is 30 yards that way while in the east, another 200 yards is something else. In my brain, I'm trying to get the picture of distance between subject and object while juggling everything else the sentence/paragraph demands of me, and I get lost. And meanwhile there’s all this vegetation I’ve never heard of and all these topographical terms that mean nothing to me because they’re too specific. Like, if it's a hill, man, just call it a damn hill. Etc etc. I'd bet if Ballard could have used the scientific terms for things, he would have! And, yes, I could stop every other sentence and look the word up, but at some point it’s just like, um, no. I love Ballard but some of his books seem to get stuck in second gear. This is one of them. Still, it has the requisite weirdness, the typical Ballardian obsessions of psyche and society, etc etc, and the poetic language (in this book, perhaps a little more forced than usual). As well, this book may work best if read in a few sittings. I took way too long with it. In any case, I'll keep plodding away through Ballard's bibliography.

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fever dream high within Joseph Conrad and post-colonial distress. It is full of the incredibly surreal, reminding me more of "The Electric Dream Company" than "Crash", in that it meanders through a half-hearted quest to find the source of the new river, getting lost, stuck in dream like scenarios reflecting the true heart of the callous creator and his lascivious vision of a new Nile. One of my favorite scenes is the protagonist, who has been naked for some time on the river dodging rebels, and pursuing an underage girl, gets covered in talc making him more white than his whiteness. There is also this longing sense that perhaps the new river doesn't exist that infects the whole story. Worth your time.

[A Cask of Troutwine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first Ballard novel, and apparently its considered middle grade for him from what I've seen, which is astonishing given that I think it might be the best book I've read in a while.

The novel is basically a modern-day take on Conrad's Heart of Darkness in the age of documentaries and humanitarian aid. The main character, Mallory, is a WHO Doctor obsessed with the idea of drilling for water for a dried lake near the rapidly encroaching Sahara desert. When he accidentally causes a river to form nearby, he grows to both hate it and become possessive of it. He see's himself reflected onto it and tries to reach its headwaters to possibly destroy it in an almost suicide-by-proxy.

The novel is really more about how people attempt to impose themselves and their desires onto the environment, for the local guerilla leader and his enemy that means what the river means strategically, for a widow and her entourage that means what it means for the victims of the ever-present local conflicts, for a documentary maker it means what makes the best story. For our protagonist Mallory? The River is an extension of himself, and the environments he finds as he travels upriver as being born straight from his mind, literally created by him as he perceives it, and if the river becomes a third Nile and irrigates the growing Sahara, it will be because of him.

(A side note, but the figure of Sanger, a documentary film-maker/"humanitarian", is probably one of the more interesting of the novel. Mallory despises him for how he imposes a simplified, white-washed fiction on the environment which almost seems to subsume it and the people in it at different points. What really irritates Mallory though is that Sanger openly acknowledges that Mallory is doing the same thing).

The novel is a solipsistic fever dream, and as the characters move up river the madness infects them all. The prose is stunning but easy to read, and perfectly reflects the events with an eye for strange details and poetic turns of phrase.

I would recommend to anyone who wants read a slow-burn nightmare, fans of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, or Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.

[Bill Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Awash in symbols and extended metaphors, Ballard's fascination with Conrad gets a revisit here, though in a less visionary manner than in The Drowned World. Skewering the unspeakable history of Europe in Africa, Ballard's Mallory carries his own heart of darkness down a river of murder and disease with a deluded promise of godlike power over a continent. As noted in other reviews here, the protagonist's obsession with a 12-year-old girl is the most unsettling thread in a tapestry of horrors and an effective check on any feeling of identification a reader might have with Mallory.

On the whole though, I think the journey goes on too long, the thread of referential metaphor stretched beyond its capacity to illuminate or entertain, and I was relieved to see it come to an end.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. Another very well written, engaging Ballard novel. It’s an adventure type story about Doctor Mallory and his quest to find the source of a newly created river in central Africa. He meets a mysteriously silent young native girl who he becomes attached to. He is in conflict with Captain Kagwa and General Harare, leaders of rival bandit armies, each seeking conquest and wealth. Doctor Mallory steals a river barge with Captain Kagwa’s Mercedes car on board and motors upriver with Captain Kagwa pursuing Doctor Mallory.

Ballard fans will find this book a satisfying reading experience, however readers new to J.G. Ballard should begin with ‘Crash’ or ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’.

[Brendan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not my favorite of Ballard's novels- the narrator's obsession with an underage girl is just a little bit too unsettling for me, in the long run- but overall, this is yet another excellent story of Ballardian obsession in a strange, beautiful world that seems to be just a slight misstep away from our own.

[Stephen Ellis · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing is incredible but I knocked a couple of stars off due to the very problematic relationship between Mallory and Noon.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good but depressing.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 2 out of 5]

'Ballard in Africa' about as good an idea as it sounds like.

[Perry Whitford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ballard treads water in an imaginary African river.

Dr Mallory works for the World Health Organisation on a failed project where he instead conceives a mad obsession to bring water to the Sahara by tapping a source under a drained lake in Central Africa.

A river duly appears, local interests come into conflict over the potential wealth, outside media interests descend, while Mallory gives his own name to this 'third Nile' and heads out for the source with a talismanic pre-pubescent guerilla girl.

If that all sounds a little bit like Heart of Darkness meets Lolita then that's fair enough; Dr Mallory comes across as something of Marlow and Humbert Humbert combined, the River Mallory as Kurtz and Quilty:

'I had become so obsessed by myself that I had seen the Mallory as a rival, and measured it's current against my own ambition.'

The river quickly becomes home to the imported detritus of Western colonization, ''beer bottles, cigarette packs and French pornographic magazines,'' alongside broken items of technology both large and small, such as aerosol cans, hairdryers and aircraft hangers.

Native influences infest the waters too, such as snakes, fevers and disease. The young girl who accompanies and intoxicates Mallory, called Noon, has a natural affinity with the river, though her obsession is for Western gadgetry, especially film.

The local players are Captain Kagwa, the police chief, and General Harare, leader of the guerillas. Both have essentially the same ambitions. In two excellent examples of Ballard's way with a pithy phrase, the former becomes 'a black conquistador sailing up his private Amazon', the latter 'a Messiah come to claim his kingdom of dust.'

Also on the river are Professor Sanger, a dubious maker of TV documentaries, and a small gang of female natives out for revenge on the men that killed their husbands and raped them, led by Nora Warrender, who runs an animal breeding centre.

Ballard's previous novel, The Empire of the Sun, was immediately adapted into a popular film by Stephen Spielberg. I think its fair to say that the director wouldn't have been so keen to make a movie about a story where a middle-aged white man longs to rob Africa of a new source of water while lusting after a twelve year old tribal girl.

I opened this review with a lame pun about Ballard treading water in this novel, which is partly true. Much is familiar here, if generally less so. But it's still Ballard, a superior writer of speculative fiction if ever there was one. Few swam as fast as he doggie-paddled.

He was also very brave. He would have started this novel in about 1985 at the height of the African drought and the charitable response from the West which culminated in Live Aid.

So this was his uncharitable response.

[Akiva · Rating 5 out of 5]

What the hell just happened? I guess this isn't the first book I've read about traveling down a river with a narrator whose reliability is questionable at best. Well I suppose he is traveling up a river. Who is he? Dr. Mallory, an Englishman running a clinic for the WHO in Africa. He's obsessed with irrigating the local town and with the idea of another Nile to green the Sahara. The river of his dreams comes pouring through, and he's convinced he caused it. And so as everything goes mad around him due to a combination of the newly struck river and the general environment, he endeavors to travel to the source of the river. There are guerrillas and a documentary crew and a creepy obsession with a young girl associated with the guerrillas who he decides is somehow the spirit of the river. The whole thing is feverish literally and figuratively.

There are a lot of tricks I associate with Gene Wolfe where it's hinted that something is happening, but he doesn't spell it out, and then refers to it later as if it is clear what he means. In fact the whole thing reminded me of Gene Wolfe and particularly the parts sailing with Seawrack from On Blue's Waters.

[Judah T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

A more hallucinatory Heart of Darkness. Ballard uses post colonial Africa as a place to stage the decay of our western structures. The "other" is Ballards truth. His future is one where western structure has decayed, and we are unveiled as the animals we truly are. Delightfully twisted.

[Daniel Polansky]

My first Ballard! Late to the game, I know. Anyway, it's fabulous. Dreamlike, erotic, exciting, working as an adventure novel and as a philosophical discersion. Strange and sad and melancholic, as soon as I read it I ran out and bought a bunch more. Ballard deserves the accolades he gets.

[Rick · Rating 2 out of 5]

A fetid fever dream, running
like an infected river through
Ballard's dark imagination.

[Brett Warnke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most authors would describe a helicopter, descending on a protagonist as a "terrible wasp" or a "monster." Check Ballard out: "through the clouds of illuminated smoke the helicopter appeared, the grand finale of this fireworks spectacular. An ugly genie, it descended to within 50 feet of us.The restraining nets of the west wall were now alight, and revealed the huge rounded breasts of the dam in a fiery striptease." The rich, conjuring of images--a helicopter as an ‘ugly genie’!--this is the writing that makes Ballard the last of the Surrealists. He died in 2009. Ballard wrote dozens of novels and a massive collection of short stories. Also, his amazing book of reviews and essays, "A Users Guide to the Millennium," is a key to his very idiosyncratic but fascinating style, as is his somewhat autobiographical novel, "Empire of the Sun." Being a great author is writing clearly but also developing a style. Cormac McCarthy, J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov, Martin Amis, Antonio Lobo Antunes, William Faulkner--all of these authors have a unique style of enriching a paragraph, sharpening the page so that the sentences could only be theirs. Ballard's "The Day of Creation" is a wild Conradian journey through East Africa. But is Ballardian, too. The narrator, Dr. Mallory, is possessed with a troubled subconscious--his obsessions take him on a journey up a self-named river he wants to create but also destroy. He believes he has created the source of this new river and travels through the mud and mosquitoes, beside a young girl, Noon. The novel, published in 1987, is an adventure and a subtle critique of the TV culture that preys upon Africa in a kind of war-porn, exploitative neocolonialism. I think Ballard's goal as a writer was to disprove Henry James's dictum, "Tell a dream, lose a reader." Many of Ballard's characters are purposely thin, with minimal characterization and backstory--as if they are walking through a dream. While not exactly devices, many of his main characters serve as a kind of "everyman." Types. Many are doctors and thinkers. But their desires, obsessions, fears, and hopes are very much realized through their actions (and misdeeds). Many revert to primal and often vicious behavior when given the chance. If the novel’s dialogue is often useful as opposed to rich, it is because Ballard plays to his strengths as a writer--offering us rich images, twisted desires and carries us through a flood of sensations. Ballard's fiction is a walk through a Francis Bacon painting, a crooked journey through the late 20th century madness. Ballard predicted the catastrophes that will be our reality, receiving little readership in the United States. Often dismissed as a mere SF author, he was on no college syllabus of mine. "The Day of Creation" is very much a story of discovery and loss, as well as the tale of a mad dream--mysterious characters with questionable motives on oddly selfish missions to achieve strange ends in an uncertain, dreamy setting. Both hyper-specific (we know the types of birds in the trees and vines on the ground) we don't know which country we are in. Of course, the criticisms of a Surrealist writer can produce themselves, but Ballalrd didn't care. Or, more likely, he dared his critics. Look at the clear and complex realistic characters in "Empire of the Sun." He could certainly develop it when the story required it. Obviously, Ballard's modernist work—Freudian misadventures—explored the inner space of what we are and what we are capable of doing in extremes. And it is a book that upon finishing, you know you will pick up and sail through at least once more.

[Alan Sharp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ballard has always been an author who defies categorization. Most often he gets classed as a science fiction writer, mainly based on some of his best known works such as the post apocalyptic nightmare of The Drowned World or the dystopian futurism of High Rise. But alongside that you have to acknowledge the psychosexual philosophising of Crash or his semi-autobiographical war novel Empire of the Sun.

This novel seems to fall into the genre of magical realism, sharing much in common with the likes of Murakami or Garcia Marquez. But it owes its greatest debt of inspiration to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Like that novel, the central plotline deals with a surreal boat journey up a dark and forbidding river in central Africa.

Ballard does not hide this influence. His main character Mallory and the antagonist Kagwa have names that echo those of Marlow and Kurtz from Conrad’s work. Mallory is a WHO doctor, assigned to a clinic in Port-le-Nouvelle, a mining community in an unnamed African country on the southern edge of the Sahara. When a local warlord, General Harare, begins systematic attacks on the mining operation, most of the workers leave, and Mallory finds himself without patients.

However, he has become obsessed with a project of his own, to drill down to the water table and irrigate the Sahara, bringing life back to the region. He does this under the disapproving eye of Kagwa, the local police chief who has political ambitions.

A mishap during a raid by Harare’s men causes Mallory to inadvertently reroute an underground river to the surface, causing a great torrent to begin flowing through the territory, changing the ecology and threatening to overwhelm Mallory’s own irrigation project. He decides he needs to find the source of the river and force it back underground, and to do so he steals a car ferry belonging to Kagwa, with the latter man’s prize Mercades on board.

However, Kagwa sees in the river an opportunity, in this newly fertile land, to secede the territory and set himself up as a ruler of his own kingdom. He sets off in pursuit of Mallory, intent on killing him and ending his project. With the aid of a 12 year old female former child soldier called Noon, who he has inappropriate sexual feelings for, as well as a mostly blind and delusional documentary maker, we follow his journey as he tries to stay one step ahead of Kagwa, while also avoiding the murderous intentions of Harare and his army, and a floating brothel run by an ex lover.

A lot of this makes for quite uncomfortable reading, but it is supposed to. Immersing yourself in the mind of a fanatical obsessive is never going to be an easy ride. Mallory frequently makes unwise and downright ridiculous decisions based on his warped worldview, and his trust in Noon as a guiding spirit belies the fact that she is a prepubescent girl who has seen too much in her short life to be in any way stable.

One of his later novels, this is not vintage Ballard, but he remains a challenging and vital writer, and it is a story that carries you along, if sometimes a little reluctantly, on an often uncompromising wave of fascination. It’s not a novel I would recommend to someone new to Ballard’s work, but it is a worthy addition to his canon.

[Gary Reger · Rating 4 out of 5]

A doctor stationed in the Central African Republic named Mallory becomes obsessed with uncovering an underground river that he believes lies buried beneath the savanna. By shear accident a spring is indeed discovered, and begins pouring forth water that, in Mallory's dream, will irrigate the desert as a Third Nile (after the Nile and the Niger). But revolutionaries hoping to create an independent country in the region interrupt his plans. For reasons never quite clear, Mallory then decides to plug his river, and begins a journey on a stolen ferry upstream to the Massif de Toulou (an actual mountain range), where the source is hidden. He's accompanied by a child soldier who previously looked to kill him; she's only 12, but Mallory becomes obsessed with her, too.

The plot is a bit bizarre. It is never explained why there is a source in the mountains when the river first bubbles up near Mallory's dispensary. Nor is it quite clear in which direction the river flows; in any case, not into the Sahara. Mallory and his companion Noon escape multiple attempts by the revolutionary leader Harere to hunt them down; these escapes are pretty improbable, given that Harere commands a helicopter and hundreds of troops.

The Day of Creation was published originally in 1987. It seems to me to stand in a genre of European writing about Africa in which whites become more or less deranged and abandon their moral strictures, as in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness or Graham Greene's Burnt-Out Case. Harere is a stock character, a Marxist revolutionary bent on fashioning himself a dictatorship; Noon serves as a sexual beacon for Mallory, who slowly sheds any inhibitions about his pedophiliac attraction to a pubescent girl. (He eventually, probably--maybe?--sleeps with her in a floating brothel.)

Ballard, of course, developed a reputation for the shocking as his career matured; the best-known instance is Crash. The Day of Creation isn't as extreme, but its themes are disturbing and its stereotypical picture of Africa and Africans not especially appealing. The writing is splendid, naturally, as Ballard was a gifted stylist, and it repays a read. But for readers new to him, there are better books with which to begin, like the early stories in Vermilion Sands.

[Bjorn Roose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Een tweetal boekbesprekingen terug had ik het ook al over een werk van de in 2009, op 69-jarige leeftijd, overleden J.G. Ballard, dus op de auteur en zijn andere werken terugkomen lijkt me weinig zinnig.

En toch moet ik dat laatste misschien doen: De dag van de schepping heeft namelijk – uiteraard een aantal gelijkenissen met andere van zijn werken, maar ook verschillen en één specifieke eigenschap. Die specifieke eigenschap is dat het héél erg Afrikaans is, of toch Afrikaans zoals in “Afrika zoals het door een Europeaan die er gewoond heeft aangevoeld wordt”. Het is een rommeltje van opkomende en weer verlaten steden, rivaliserende bendes (“krijgsheer” is nog een eretitel voor de leiders van die groepen van een paar tientallen “soldaten” groot), achteloosheid en diepzinnigheid, ecologische rampen en schitterende natuur, en vooral véél ... koorts.

Want dat is wat deze De dag van de schepping is, een geleidelijk escalerende koortsdroom. Niet eentje van het soort waarmee je te maken krijgt in Apocalypse Now, maar een waarin de werkelijkheid gewoon steeds gekker begint te worden.

Dat belet echter niet dat in die droom/werkelijkheid of droomwerkelijkheid een aantal van de typische Ballard-thema’s opduiken: rampen (zelfs als ze in eerste instantie een zegen lijken en soms alleen maar omdat ze de personages in de weg zitten/helpen), idealen die bij contact met de werkelijkheid in hun tegendeel omslaan, de invloed van de cameralens, en hoofdpersonages die op een of andere manier niet écht in de wereld lijken te staan.

Het boek dateert intussen al van 1987, maar het verdient nog steeds ten zeerste gelezen te worden, ook al heeft de auteur van de achterflap er met zijn pet naar gegooid toen hij een korte inhoud neerschreef. Deze keer niet omdat het over een donkere toekomst vertelt, maar over een donkere realiteit.

[Meg Powers · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not his best !!!
I really didn’t enjoy this book . The ego/megalomania of the narrator was wildly unpleasant , and not in a way that benefits the story or enlightens the reader . I don’t believe Ballard wanted us to like or agree with this incarnation of his adventurer-doctor motif , and i think that’s a little interesting , but I found myself too frequently disgusted by and embarrassed for Dr. Mallory .
SPOILER / PERSONAL ANECDOTES , but most of the book focuses on his unrepentant pedophilic exoticism of a twelve year old African girl , and it’s no Nabokov experience , let me tell you . The delusions of reciprocity obsessing a middle aged , mostly nude , emaciated white man riddled with sores gave me the same embarrassed and frightened feelings I had during childhood for certain film and television characters i had abstract sex nightmares about . Perhaps my experiences being sexualized at a young age by creepy older men also colored this for me . I’m able to read about these themes , but they weren’t presented in any enlightening / cathartic / particularly interesting way .

There was a theme of television harnessing and repackaging nature to be relatable and digestible for the urban and suburban masses , and that was far more interesting to me , but we get so little of it . It’s presented as something violent and immoral , yet Dr.Mallory is doing the same thing with his own narrative by projecting himself and his own experiences of Judeo-Christian mythology onto the African wilderness and it’s people . I’m not saying this isn’t intentional , as Mallory is clearly a hypocrite. I just wish there was more exploration of the meeting of technology and nature . Ballard is so good at that ! What the hell .

I will say that it is interesting to see another motif of his (flooding) , a product of his childhood memories in China , reused during a different time in his life . I just wish it was a better book .