or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
 
More Buying Choices
33 used & new from £2.00
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
The Crystal World (Flamingo modern classic)
 
See larger image 
Share your own customer images
Publisher: learn how customers can search inside this book.

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
You Save: £2.77 (35%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In stock.
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon.co.uk. Gift-wrap available.

Want guaranteed delivery by Tuesday, November 24? Choose Express delivery at checkout. See Details
22 new from £2.32 11 used from £2.00
Other Editions: RRP: Our Price: Other Offers:
Paperback Order it used
Audio Cassette (Audiobook) Order it used
Unknown Binding Order it used
12 Days of Christmas Sale in Books
12 Days of Christmas Sale in Books
Get up to 65% off some of our top titles. Shop now

Special Offers and Product Promotions

Frequently Bought Together

The Crystal World (Flamingo modern classic) + The Drowned World + The Drought (Paladin Books)
Price For All Three: £15.17

Show availability and delivery details

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

The Drought (Paladin Books)

The Drought (Paladin Books)

by J.G. Ballard
3.6 out of 5 stars (8)  £4.98
The Drowned World

The Drowned World

by J.G. Ballard
4.2 out of 5 stars (21)  £4.97
The Unlimited Dream Company (Paladin Books)

The Unlimited Dream Company (Paladin Books)

by J.G. Ballard
4.5 out of 5 stars (6)  £5.47
Concrete Island

Concrete Island

by J.G. Ballard
4.2 out of 5 stars (9)  £4.97
Hello America

Hello America

by J.G. Ballard
3.0 out of 5 stars (1)  £4.98
› Explore similar items

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.

    •  Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

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!
See all Product Description

Suggested Tags from Similar Products

 (What's this?)
Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
 
(4)
(4)
(3)
(2)
(2)
(2)
(2)
(2)
(2)
(2)
(1)

Your tags: Add your first tag
 
See most popular tags

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

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)
£5.22
High-Rise
13% buy
High-Rise 4.8 out of 5 stars (8)
£4.96
The Drowned World
12% buy
The Drowned World 4.2 out of 5 stars (21)
£4.97
Concrete Island
12% buy
Concrete Island 4.2 out of 5 stars (9)
£4.97
Explore similar items
 

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)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
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.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
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.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
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.
Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Brutal, beautiful planet
Is there any artist who can lay claim to such a consistently dazzling and diverse range of writing? In this formative (and in my view most accomplished)period of his career,... Read more
Published on 22 Dec 2006 by randombullmerde

Only search this product's reviews


Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
   
Related forums

Listmania!

Create a Listmania! list

Look for similar items by category

Look for similar items by subject








i.e., each product must be in subject 1 AND subject 2 AND ...

Feedback

Ad

Your Recent History

 (What's this?)

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.