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The Crystal World (Flamingo modern classic)
 
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The Crystal World (Flamingo modern classic) (Paperback)

by J.G. Ballard (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
RRP: £7.99
Price: £5.22 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
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Price For All Three: £15.17

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Product details

  • Paperback: 175 pages
  • Publisher: Flamingo; New impression edition (17 Jul 1985)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0586024190
  • ISBN-13: 978-0586024195
  • Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 13 x 1.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 55,858 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #21 in  Books > Fiction > Cult Authors > Ballard, J.G.

Product Description

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


Product Description

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!

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The Crystal World (Flamingo modern classic)
56% buy the item featured on this page:
The Crystal World (Flamingo modern classic) 4.5 out of 5 stars (4)
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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
5 star:
 (2)
4 star:
 (2)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars In the Mirrors of Beautiful Apocalypse, 15 Mar 2001
By A Customer
"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.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Surrealist realism, 25 April 2003
By Murray "Murray Ewing" (West Sussex, UK) - See all my reviews
  
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.

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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars The Crystal World, 31 Mar 2007
By dogbarkssome (England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)      
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.
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