Day of Creation

From Publishers Weekly
Part spellbinding story, part fable for our time, Ballard's new novel is a vividly cinematic but nightmarish vision of a corrupted world. Dr. Mallory has come to a backward, drought-plagued and poverty ridden African country to run a WHO clinic, but constant warfare between a ragged band of guerrillas and the local chief of police has caused the tribal residents to flee. By accident, Mallory uncovers a mysterious stream that soon becomes a swiftly flowing river, and he dreams of creating a green Sahara and "saving" the Third World. Naming the river after himself and obsessively identifying with it, he immediately finds himself in conflict with Dr. Sanger, a charlatan maker of TV documentaries, who believes that his "flattering revision of nature was an act of creation as significant as the original invention of the river." Mallory undergoes a sinister change of heart, acknowledging a self-destructive impulse whose origins in his past are only dimly described. Suddenly deciding he must destroy the river, he travels toward its source on a derelict ferry with a former guerrilla, a 12-year-old girl he names Noon, and who progresses in a matter of weeks from Stone Age primitivism to a fascination with technology. Mallory encounters terrifying dangers at every stage of his quest. The area surrounding the river, which at first seemed Edenic, becomes poisoned by the water's now miasmic influence, the people along its banks falling deathly ill with fever and starvation. Mallory himself slides into full-fledged dementia and delirium as he battles the guerrillas, the militia and the forces of nature. In a narrative filled with ironies, Ballard's prose is honed and supple, often flowering into vivid lyricism. His characters are larger than life, each carrying the destructive impulses that decimate civilization. Some readers may resist the unrelievedly dark, ominous atmosphere, a profoundly depressing nightmare that goes on a little too long, and find that Mallory is too much an opaque, unsympathetic character, almost a device. Ballard's scorn for technological "marvels" (the makers of TV documentaries are "the conmen and the carpetbaggers of the late 20th century") sometimes overpowers his storytelling skills, and the roots of Mallory's suicidal obsession are never made clear. Yet this is a mesmerizing tale by a master of the craft, one that resonates with dark implications for the future of humanity on this planet. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Ballard's demented narrator, Dr. Mallory, believes he can fertilize the Sahara with a river he has "created" in a desolate, warring region of Africa. "The river and I were one," he announces as he embarks on a search for the source of the Mallory, reminding us repeatedly that a duel is taking place between them. His companion and the object of his puerile fantasies is a native girl named Noon, whom he treats like an exotic pet. When they finally reach the source, the river dries up as Mallory kneels in it. Mallory's delusions are all we know of him and of the misfits he encounters. Consequently, we cannot care for them; we can only wish for a swift end to their implausible ordeal. Ballard's other novels, notably Empire of the Sun , may spark interest in this otherwise forgettable book. Leonard Kniffel, Detroit P.L.Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Paul Gray, Time
Ballard has successfully created a new myth, a late-20th-century saga of distracted humans making a lonely voyage through time and the river to the well-spring of their parched imaginations.


Review
“The Day of Creation is a metaphysical adventure story dealing with complex themes—the life-giving qualities of water, the cold eye of television, obsession, love—all set in a dream Africa, as if hallucinated by Joseph Conrad.”—Angela Carter

“Ballard has successfully created a new myth, a late-20th-century saga of distracted humans making a lonely voyage through time and the river to the well-spring of their parched imaginations.” —Time

“A near-classic adventure.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Lyrical, hallucinatory...virtuosic...Few authors today can approach Ballard’s gift for placing his reader in a perfectly realized hypnotic world.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“The Day of Creation puts Ballard up with Golding, Forester, and Conrad.” —The Miami Herald



Book Description
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. Joined by Noon, a silent adolescent girl who as a child ran with the local guerrillas; Professor Sanger, a documentary filmmaker with a fading reputation; and Nora Warrender, the widow of a Rhodesian veterinary surgeon, the remains of whose menagerie flourish exotically amid the land's new fertility, Mallory sets out for the river's source. The Day of Creation is a metaphysical adventure story dealing with complex themes--the life-giving qualities of water, the cold eye of television, obsession, love--all set in a dream Africa, as if hallucinated by Joseph Conrad. -Angela Carter


About the Author
J. G. Ballard is the author of more than twenty novels and short-story collections. He lives in Shepperton, England.


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There's an overwhelming urge to discuss The Day of Creation in terms of plot, probably because so much of that plot is so murky....The novel's faults lie mostly in the middle distance, where a work of fiction is more than a collection of well or badly wrought sentences but is still less than the overview of its structural organization, formal parallels and esthetic arrangements....When we move in to look at the people, the relations between them, or the simple succession of events, things get very cloudy.... Over the years, a writer as individual as this must teach us how to read his or her works....I wish Mr. Ballard could give us more vivid characters and incidents within his intensely symbolic parables. -- The New York Times


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