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The Day Of Creation
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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.
Hardcover, 254 pages
Published
by Gollancz
(first published 1988)
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Jun 21, 2012
Alan
rated it
2 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
Mad dogs and Englishmen
Recommended to Alan by:
An astronaut half-buried in dry sand, far from any ocean
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 w...more
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 h...more
Mallory, a English doctor in Africa, tries to figure a way to restore a dried lake by drilling wells on its shore, in a country that is in the midst of a civil war. By accident he moves a bit earth with his foot and unleases a spring that in a few days becomes a river. Of course, the river fills the lake, becomes a wide river, he names Mallory. I kept wondering, is such a thing geologically possible? Anyway, he wants to find the source of the river many miles upstream, and with a prepubescent Af...more
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...more
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A reverie of great rivers had overwhelmed me, moments marked by the measures of dream and myth. I sat under the canvas awning in the bows of the ferry, as the hours and days slid us through the copper haze that lay over the distant channel of the Mallory.
Mallory is a WHO doctor in the arid African town of Port-la-Nouvelle, which is threatened by the encroachment of the Sahara and an anti-government guerrilla army of General Harare. As well as running a clinic, he has taken charge of a drilling p...more
Mallory is a WHO doctor in the arid African town of Port-la-Nouvelle, which is threatened by the encroachment of the Sahara and an anti-government guerrilla army of General Harare. As well as running a clinic, he has taken charge of a drilling p...more
I just started on my J.G. Ballard kick after reading Empire of the Sun, which I highly recommend. This one is good, but not as good as Empire. Semi-autobiographical novels seem to find their own impetus and become the writer's best novel. Such as Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five being his best book, in my opinion, compared to his other books, which I did like quite a bit. Or Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire. Same thing. Beautiful imagery of going up the new Nile in the desert of Africa, causing war...more
I had some trouble getting into this book because it was hard to understand what was going on. A man uproots a huge tree trunk and water starts to flow. The flow increases until a river is formed, which continues to grow and grow. The man who uprooted the tree believes he created the river and sets off to discover the source. His journey is hampered by two warring factions & a fading journalist. I was not at all prepared for what he found when he finally got to the source. This book is full...more
Well, yeah. I finished it. I didn't get into it but I finished it.
I love this guy and all but unless you're a die-hard fan, you can probably skip this one. There certainly are moments and some clever critique and satire on the West's preoccupation with media and its attitude to Africa, but there's also a lot of waffle, repetition and strange analogies and allusions that don't really fit. And not in a manner that makes you feel uneasy and unnerved, they just don't work. It's not as creepy and ph...more
I love this guy and all but unless you're a die-hard fan, you can probably skip this one. There certainly are moments and some clever critique and satire on the West's preoccupation with media and its attitude to Africa, but there's also a lot of waffle, repetition and strange analogies and allusions that don't really fit. And not in a manner that makes you feel uneasy and unnerved, they just don't work. It's not as creepy and ph...more
Jun 05, 2012
Maria Grazia
rated it
4 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
narrativa-inglese,
j-g-ballard
Uno dei più onirici libri di Ballard, un ibrido tra la genesi e Cuore di tenebra.
C'è la creazione di un fiume, che sgorga in mezzo al deserto dalla voragine lasciata dalla rimozione di una mostruosa radice, c'è il viaggio lungo il fiume e la prograssiva perdita dell'innocenza dell'uomo che, nella suo cieca arroganza di bianco è convinto di aver fatto nascere il fiume, e del fiume stesso.
E c'è una piccola Eva primitiva, che non si coungiungerà con l'Adamo bianco, decretando la fine di tutto.
C'è la creazione di un fiume, che sgorga in mezzo al deserto dalla voragine lasciata dalla rimozione di una mostruosa radice, c'è il viaggio lungo il fiume e la prograssiva perdita dell'innocenza dell'uomo che, nella suo cieca arroganza di bianco è convinto di aver fatto nascere il fiume, e del fiume stesso.
E c'è una piccola Eva primitiva, che non si coungiungerà con l'Adamo bianco, decretando la fine di tutto.
Read The Day of Creation waiting in airports & flying over east Africa—classic Ballard, set in the desert of central Africa. The protagonist, Dr. Mal, abandons his failing WHO clinic & «invents» a river, the third Nile, then in Heart of Darkness fashion he follows it upstream, with a 12-year old haughty native nymph & a blind filmmaker, to the river's source so he can destroy what he created.
A little bit Heart of Darkness, a little bit Robinson Crusoe, a little bit Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—even some Lolita. References to myth and the “dream-time” resonate with the work of Mircea Eliade. In addition to the narrative of the African adventure, there is a recurrent critique of television.
It's always good to find stories that have (even vaguely) to do with the water crisis/resource wars. The last one I found was the War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts...which wasn't what I was expecting. Neither was this. There are traces of Conrad in this journey up the river story, and maybe even a bit of Lolita, but that's just me stretching to find references. The Day of Creation is not like any other novel that I have read. It's the narrative that is the liquid. Here Ballard writes story of s...more
Mar 18, 2009
Steve Luttrell
rated it
4 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
speculative-fiction
This is the greatest Werner Herzog movie that Werner Herzog never made. Not prime Ballard, but plenty good.
Ballard's language is great but this story is ultimately unsatisfying and generally boring.
An oneric quest suspended between colonial obsession and post-colonial critique.
The Day of Creation by J. G. Ballard (1999)
Excelent writing, mediocre plot
Sep 10, 2010
Velvetink
marked it as to-read
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
fiction,
sf-fantasy
*note to self. Copy from A.
Finiti
strange strange..
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.
Feb 26, 2008
Leif Erik
rated it
5 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
magic-realism,
english-lit
This is what Conrad's Heart Of Darkness should have been. The hubris of the Western missionary doctor combined with the deceptive apathy of the natives combine to show why new opportunies to do better are generally squandered to do what's easy.
Very English.
J.G. Ballard rewrites Heart of Darkness. Not bad, not good, which I guess kind of boils down to not worth it.
One of JG's lesser novels. Readable but could have been a lot better.
some annoying stock characters dragged it down
isbn,original
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J.G. Ballard (James Graham Ballard) was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China where his father was a businessman. After the attack on Pearl Harbour, Ballard and his family were placed in a civilian prison camp. They returned to England in 1946. After two years at Cambridge, where he read medicine, Ballard worked as a copywriter and a Covent Garden porter before going to Canada with the RAF.
In 1956 his f...more
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“Sooner or later, everything turns into television.”
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