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‘Beautifully rendered…Ballard the poet in full ecstatic blast’
Anthony Burgess
‘Of all the unknown regions Ballard’s imagination has opened up, this crystalline forest is the most haunting, with its golden orioles frozen in a lattice of jewels and men like conquistadores embalmed in diamond armour. The creation of the crystal world is something magical and not to be missed’
Guardian
‘Brilliantly imagined, dark, brooding, convincing and powerful’
New Statesman
‘By far his strongest and most individual novel’ Brian Aldiss
Review
'Beautifully rendered!Ballard the poet in full ecstatic blast' Anthony Burgess 'Of all the unknown regions Ballard's imagination has opened up, this crystalline forest is the most haunting, with its golden orioles frozen in a lattice of jewels and men like conquistadores embalmed in diamond armour. The creation of the crystal world is something magical and not to be missed' Guardian 'Brilliantly imagined, dark, brooding, convincing and powerful' New Statesman 'By far his strongest and most individual novel' Brian Aldiss
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"The Crystal World" is the final part of Ballard's loose quartet of sixties 'disaster' novels although here the floods, droughts and raging hurriances of the earlier "Drowned World", "The Drought" and "The Wind from Nowhere" are replaced by a strangely esoteric harbinger of doom described as the "suprannuration of time itself". Ballard has denied claims that the novel was written under the influence of mind-altering drugs but the hypertrophied florescence and luridly colourful scenes of a West African jungle that form the novel's setting remind one of Aldous Huxley's encounter with Peyotl (a drug derived from cactus plants in Mexico) in "The Doors of Perception". Dr. Sanders, the laconic Ballardian hero takes a river journey that reminds the reader of Marlowe's passage into Conrad's "Heart of Darkness". The doctor intends to deploy his medical skills in the service of altruism at a leper colony - but these 'motives' are soon made questionable by the ambiguous criteria that so often govern the psychology of an alienated Ballardian hero. In the jungles the withdrawing military are helpless in the face of an encroaching forest canopy that literally doubles in space, mass and "time". Will the hero escape or more interestingly, will he stay to embrace destruction in the fabege mirror box of perpetual replication? A must read for all fans of a sophisticated and 'mythological' science fiction.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Who can resist the lure of the jewelery shop window? Peer inside - ogle over chunks of purple crystals, diamonds, semi-precious stones. Ballard exploits our cosmic magpie tendency and with cinematic effect draws us into his Crystal World. Perhaps he wrote it after his one and only LSD trip (see The Kindness of Women).
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