All posts tagged Heart of Darkness

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch (1998)

‘Hutus must stop having mercy on the Tutsis.’
Eighth of the Hutu Ten Commandments published by Hutu Power propagandist Hassan Ngeze in 1990 (page 88)

Disappointment

Simon’s law of book-buying states that the more you spend on a book, the more likely you are to be disappointed. Nothing has brought me as much pleasure as picking up a copy of my childhood favourite, The Town That Went South by Clive King, for 30p in a National Trust second-hand bookshop a few years ago. By contrast, I paid full whack to buy We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families and almost immediately took against it.

The shiny cover of the Picador paperback somehow belies the fact that it was published in 1998 and so is nearly a quarter of a century old.

Next, the introduction by Old Etonian and Conservative Party leadership contender Rory Stewart is reasonable enough but offers no insights or ideas. In fact it opens with disappointing stupidity. His very first sentence is: ‘Is genocide a suitable subject for literature?’ to which the obvious answer is, ‘Yes, everything is a suitable subject for literature’. More specifically, ‘Yes – have you not heard of Holocaust literature?’ Literature about the killing fields of Cambodia, about the Armenian genocide, and so on? So it’s a non-question asked for purely rhetorical effect.

And finally, Gourevitch’s book itself is also disappointing because, although it contains a lot of good quality history of the background and buildup to the genocide, of the events of the genocide itself, and then a detailed account of the aftermath up until late 1998 when he completed his text, and although it contains interviews with a phenomenally large number of representative figures – it is continually interrupted by Gourevitch’s own meditations on the nature of genocide, what we should feel about genocide, whether we can write about genocide, the difficulty of imagining genocide and so on, which are uniformly poor quality, entry-level, GCSE-level. Trite ideas padded out with lame and obvious quotes. It is a big disappointment. Gourevitch may be a terrific reporter but he’s no intellectual.

The tone is set in the puzzling first chapter where Gourevitch retails a conversation he had with a pygmy (one of the aboriginal inhabitants of the region now known as Rwanda, who were swamped by later Bantu incomers and now make up about 1% of the population). This conversation delivers the  thumpingly banal message that humanity is one and needs to be united in its struggle against nature. This is the ‘insight’ message Gourevitch chooses to open his long book about the Rwandan genocide with, i.e. not very insightful at all, certainly not worth paying £10 for.

With a sinking feeling, I realised within a few pages that this book was not going to offer much insight into politics or human nature. In fact, in the passages where he tries to ‘think’ about the genocide, Gourevitch’s banal meanderings tend to blanket and dull the impact of the horrifying facts he sets down so powerfully in the factual passages.

The second disappointment is that a major part of the book’s USP is that it contains interviews and conversations Gourevitch had with scores of Rwandans from all parts of the country, from all classes and professions, Hutus and Tutsis, which go to create an impressive mosaic, like the walls of photos I’ve seen in some art installations, hundreds of photos of ordinary people caught up in a nightmare. Hence the book’s sub-title, Stories from Rwanda.

But I’m sad to report that these stories, also, partake of the general disappointment because they, also, are often surprisingly dull and banal. Obviously, many of the interviewees describe horrifying scenes: they describe entire lives lived in the shadow of the ethnic conflict between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi populations, they describe the repeated crises in the 1960s and 70s, when small-scale pogroms, massacres and localised ethnic cleansing broke out for one reason or another; then they describe the atmosphere of fear created by the RPF invasion of 1990 and the emergence of really vitriolic Hutu supremacism, the advent of magazines and radio stations calling for the complete extermination of the Tutsis; and then describe gathering round their radios to listen to the dreadful news that the moderate Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane had been shot down as it came into land at Kigali airport and the terrible sense of doom most of them felt.

And then, of course, Gourevitch includes eye-witness account of going into hiding, being arrested, trying desperately to contact family members, watching people being shot, hacked to death with machetes, driving through smoking villages, coming across streets full of bodies, terror and despair.

The content of these stories is, of course, gripping and horrifying. But the style is uniformly flat. They all sound the same, they all speak very simply. Either that’s because all Rwandans sound the same, very simple and flat. Or because all Rwandans are dull and boring. Or maybe because every interview had to be carried out through an interpreter, since most Rwandans speak French, and French has less lexical variety than English and that’s why everyone comes out sounding the same. Or maybe it’s because all the testimony has been first translated, and then put through Gourevitch’s own style machine. All the interviews are made up of suspiciously complete sentences. There are no hesitations or repetitions or stumblings. All Gourevitch’s interviewees speak in perfect and grammatically correct sentences. They all sound the same and they all sound boring.

He even manages to make Paul Kagame sound boring, which is quite a feat. Paul Kagame was born and raised a Rwandan exile in Uganda. He volunteered to join the Ugandan army, rose quickly through the ranks, studied military theory, was a senior officer in the rebel force which helped Yoweri Museveni overthrow the Ugandan dictator Milton Obote. Kagame then went on to become a co-founder and eventually leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) which invaded north Rwanda in 1990 and fought the Rwandan army to a ceasefire in 1993. Kagame was still working through implementation the peace accords he signed with the Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana in August 1993, when the latter’s plane was blown out of the sky in April 1994. This was the trigger for Hutu Power extremists in the government to launch their genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsi population, so Kagame immediately resumed the RPF incursion into Rwanda, quickly seizing large parts of the country, taking the capital Kigali on 4 July 1994, then pushing west to conquer almost the entire country and putting an end to the genocide by 17 July 1994.

Kagame then took up the twin roles of vice-president and defence minister in the post-genocide government, but everyone knew he was the real power in Rwanda, which he has gone on to lead down to the present day, 2021, when he is still serving as president.

Kagame is described by analysts as a military leader of ‘genius’ for turning the RPF from a ragtag of half-armed volunteers into a highly disciplined and effective military force (p.218). And then, after all this, he went on to be the military and strategic brains behind the alliance of armies, the AFDL, which invaded east Zaire in 1997 to close the Hutu refugee camps where Hutu Power génocidaires had been regrouping and preparing for genocide part two. This was the incursion which led to the AFDL marching all the way to Kinshasa and overthrowing Zairean dictator Joseph Mobutu.

In other words, Kagame is one of the most fascinating characters of the late 20th/early 21st centuries and Gourevitch has had the privilege of interviewing him not once but on numerous occasions. And yet, in Gourevitch’s hands, this is what Kagame sounds like:

“I have wanted to be original about my own thinking, especially in regard to my own situation here. Not that I don’t realise that there are other people out there to admire, but it is just not my habit to admire anybody. Even if something has worked, I think there are many other things that could work also. If there’s anything else that has worked, I would certainly pick a bit from that. But if there could be another way of having things work, I would like to discover that. If I could have some original way of thinking, that would be OK for me.” (quoted on page 213)

Pretty dull, eh. It’s far too harsh to say that Gourevitch is a lightweight and he makes everyone he interviews sound like a lightweight, but that thought did cross my mind during more than one of the duller interviews in the book.

He’s spoken to literally hundreds of people, including many key players and all kinds of experts and aid and UN officials and yet…hardly any of them say anything interesting. Only towards the end did some of the Rwandan officials complaining about the utter ineffectualness of the international community make an impression.

A literary account, alas

Gourevitch is a longtime staff writer for New Yorker magazine and a former editor of The Paris Review. He knew nothing about Rwanda or African politics before he watched the shocking images on the TV news as the Rwanda genocide broke in spring 1994. Fascinated and appalled he realised he had to find out more (or realised this was a terrific opportunity for an ambitious journalist looking for a subject for a book).

So Gourevitch began visiting Rwanda in 1995 (p.7) and over the next two years made nine trips to the country and to its neighbours (Zaire, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania) to report on the genocide and its aftermath. He made 6 trips lasting a total of 9 months (p.185). During that time he interviewed hundreds of people from Rwanda and the neighbouring countries and the book contains an impressive number of first-hand, eye-witness testimony from many, many Tutsi survivors, as well as more confrontational interviews with men accused of complicity or of organising particular local massacres.

Possibly his lack of background in African affairs partly explains the air of hopeless bewilderment he exudes right from the start. In the opening sections of the book Gourevitch goes heavy on his inability to imagine the events, on the importance of imagination in our lives, his interest in how people imagine their identities, on the importance of the narratives which shape their lives. In other words, he brings a heavily literary slant to his huge and complicated subject.

On the first page of his text he mentions Charles Dickens, on page 3 he is citing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, there are epigraphs from George Eliot and John Milton. Directly after that limp quote from Kagame which I cite above, Gourevitch says it reminds him of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke writing on love and art (p.213).

Oh dear. It is going to be literary journalism, the worst sort, the type of journalism which spends a lot of its energy emphasising the author’s own sensitivity, which foregrounds his own emotional responses, to the subject matter, rather than doing a journalist’s job which is to get on and tell you what happened and let interviewees tell their own stories, preferably without a load of editorialising about how you everything you find out about the horrors makes you feel. In the showbiz world of American journalism, ruined by the egotistical displays of Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe in the 1960s, it is acceptable to put the author and his responses at the centre of the story, but I wanted a history, I wanted to know the facts, not reiterations of how a pampered New York journalist was appalled to discover how brutal life  is in much of Africa and how thoughtlessly cruel human beings can be.

His factual sections are sensational but when he stops to reflect on it all, Gourevitch writes quite a lot of stupid things. When he writes that ‘Power is terribly complex’ on page 78 I suddenly realised I was dealing with an idiot. My daughter learned more about political, social and cultural power in her GCSE Sociology course than Gourevitch displays in this entire book. All the ‘reflection’ in the book displays a disappointingly low knowledge of political theory, knowledge of international relations, or philosophy about human nature.

And I was irritated by his casual assumption that the ‘we’ he continually refers to are all white, liberal, college-educated, East Coast readers of New Yorker magazine, that ‘we’ all share his over-developed moral scruples and his severely under-developed sense of world affairs, geopolitics, African history and politics. Right at the beginning he tries to implicate the reader in his sensitive moral scruples:

I presume that you are reading this because you want a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. (p.19)

Well, er, no. I am not disturbed by my interest in reading about the Rwandan genocide in the same way that I am not disturbed by my interest in reading about the Holocaust, or the Second World War, or the First World War, the Somme, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American Civil War, the Tapei Rebellion, the rape of Nanking, the Gulag Archipelago, the Russian Civil War, the Ukraine famine, the Partition of India, Islamic State, the Crusades, the decimation of the Incas and Aztecs, the violent rise of Islam, the blood-soaked fall of Byzantium, the life and massacres of Genghiz Khan. I could go on…

I am reading this book because I want to be better informed about human history which, as anyone who has even a superficial knowledge of the subject knows, amounts to an unrelenting series of wars, massacres, genocides and bloodbaths. I’m kind of used to it.

So, no, I am not in the slightest disturbed by my curiosity to want to understand a recent historical event better. Seems perfectly normal to me, and most of the history books I read include passages where historians say the public in general ought to be more aware of history. In addition, many progressive historians and commentators tell us we need to get out of our Eurocentric frame of reference and understand more about the wider world and places beyond London or Paris. So that’s why I’m reading a book about Africa, and about one of the most striking events in post-war African history.

Gourevitch’s comment betrays a basic…what…dimness, obtuseness, ignorance…about the entire subject of History and why people would want to study it, which is to find out what happened, to try and understand why it happened, in order to better understand the forces at work in the world around us, now, in the present.

The facts

The book consists of three elements:

  1. Gourevitch’s self-consciously literary fretting over the power of imagination and the importance of narrative and the centrality of stories and the difficulties of human identity and a familiar checklist of progressive, liberal arts issues
  2. interviews with scores of Rwandans, UN officials, foreign doctors and aid workers, politicians and so on, giving often harrowing descriptions of their experiences or clarifying the political situation in Kigali, in the UN, in the aid camps in Zaire
  3. actual historical facts

When he sticks to the facts, Gourevitch is very good indeed. Suddenly, about a third of the way into the book, after the kind of maundering speculation I’ve been slagging off, it changes tone dramatically and becomes a riveting account of the early history of the country, a description of the colonial era when the Belgians divided the two ethnic groups of Hutu and Tutsi the better to control them, and how this ethnic division, once created, went on to dog the Rwanda, which won independence in 1962 but continued to suffer repeated outbreaks of ethnic violence, pogroms and massacres (the massacres of 59, of 61, of 63, and so on).

In what follows I extract the facts Gourevitch gives and supplement them from other sources to try and create a comprehensive and useful timeline.

Rwandan history

In 1994 Rwanda had a population of about 7 million. Relatively small, it was the most densely populated country in Africa. About 85% of the population were Hutus, 14% Tutsis and 1% pygmies known at the Twa.

Rwanda is divided into five provinces: Kigali, Northern, Eastern, Southern and Western.

Because they were illiterate, no Rwandans before the arrival of Europeans had ever written anything down. Therefore, their prehistory relies entirely on unreliable oral traditions and speculation. Modern archaeology tentatively suggests that the hilly region was inhabited by pygmies as long ago as 8,000 BC, before it was slowly infiltrated from 700 AD by Bantu tribes from West Africa who went on to form the Hutus, and by ‘Nilotic’ ethnic groups from the north who were ancestors of the Tutsi (p.49). Maybe.

Hutus and Tutsis

For centuries before Europeans arrived, the Tutsis were nomadic cattle rearers, which made them wealthier than the Hutu majority who were mostly static farmers; the ruler of Rwanda was a Tutsi and the aristocratic Tutsis looked down on the peasant Hutus.

The regime was essentially feudal: Tutsis were aristocrats; Hutus were vassals. (p.49)

Although there’s a racial stereotype that the Hutus are full-on ‘negroid’ African in appearance while the Tutsis have narrow faces, with narrow noses and thin lips, in reality scores of generations of interbreeding meant the majority of the population didn’t conform to these stereotypes and very often Rwandans couldn’t tell which groups each other belonged to (p.50). Plenty of the Rwandans Gourevitch talks to tell him they pass for one ethnic group when they in fact belong to another. In other words, it wasn’t such a starkly obvious divide as between blacks and whites. Many Hutus and Tutsis are indistinguishable.

Tutsi ruler Kigeli Rwabugiri reigned from 1853 to 1895 and expanded the kingdom to its greatest extent. He oversaw a society which was regimented and hierarchical, with layers of military, political and civil chiefs and governors, priests, tax collectors, sub-chiefs, deputy governors and so on (p.49). Divisions between Hutu and Tutsi were hardened, with the former obliged to perform forced labour for the latter.

When the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 carved up Africa between the European imperial nations, Rwanda was handed to the Germans because they had explored the region, had missionaries on the ground, and nobody else wanted it (p.55). After Germany lost the Great War, Rwanda was combined with the neighbouring nation of Burundi and handed by the victorious allies over to Belgium, because they abut the huge Belgian Congo to the west. Belgium ran Rwanda from 1918 to 1962.

The Belgians hardened the ethnic division in the country by compelling every citizen to state on their identity papers which group they belonged to. This had the effect of crystallising a racial divide which had been far more fluid and flexible before.

The Hutu revolution

Throughout the century Hutu resentment at their inferior status simmered. With the advent of an educated class it found expression. In 1957 nine Hutu intellectuals published a Hutu Manifesto. Its full title was ‘Note on the social aspect of the native racial problem in Rwanda’ and it was ten pages long. The manifesto called for a ‘double liberation’ of the Hutu people, from the colonial oppression of the Belgians, and then from the racial oppression of the Tutsis. The manifesto called for the political disenfranchisement of the Tutsi, banning intermarriage between the two groups, and banning the Tutsi from military service.

1959 Hutu political leaders backed by elements in the Belgian administration overthrew the Tutsi monarchy (which had continued to exist throughout the colonial period) and replaced it with a republic. Violence against Tutsis spread across the country and tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to neighbouring countries, including Uganda. (When many of these exiles returned with the triumph of the RPF government in 1994, they were referred to as ’59ers’.)

Independence 1962

Rwanda was separated from Burundi and the two countries gained independence on 1 July 1962. Tutsi militias raised among exiles, especially in neighbouring Uganda, staged occasional raids into Rwanda, which always led to reprisals by the Hutu government. In December 1963 a Tutsi raid led to Hutu reprisals in which tens of thousands of Tutsis were massacred, in what one journalist called a genocide and Bertrand Russell declared was the worst massacre since the Holocaust. (This Russell quote crops up in Fergal Keane’s book on the genocide; it’s obviously one of those quotable quotes you get extra marks for in your GCSE essay.)

More than 336,000 Tutsi left Rwanda in 1964 to escape the Hutu purges. In 1972 Tutsi school students across the country were attacked, beaten, their houses torched. So large-scale massacres and pogroms came in waves.

Meanwhile, in neighbouring Burundi, it was the Tutsis who were in charge and in 1973 embarked on a pogrom of Hutus. As many as 100,000 were killed and a further 200,000 Hutus fled as exiles into Rwanda, where every one of their stories fed the fuel of anti-Tutsi anger.

The 1973 influx of Hutu refugees inspired the Rwandan president Grégoire Kayibanda to order his army chief of staff, Juvénal Habyarimana, to set up ‘committees of public safety’, which promptly set about massacring Tutsis. On this occasion the victims were ‘only’ in the hundreds, but as many 100,000 Tutsis fled abroad.

To summarise, Rwanda and Burundi have a long record of attack and counter-attack, profound ethnic antagonism and ethnic cleansing of the two groups which dated back before independence and flared up on an almost annual basis, with the Tutsi almost always being victimised, massacred, and fleeing the country in tens of thousands. The 1994 genocide was generations in the making.

Habyarimana’s coup 1973

In 1973 Rwanda’s army chief of staff, Hutu nationalist Juvénal Habyarimana, carried out a coup, overthrowing president Kayibanda and declaring himself president of independent Rwanda. Under his rule Rwanda became a totalitarian, one-party state in which every citizen was compelled to be a member of his MRND party and was required to chant and dance in adulation of the president at mass pageants (p.75). Habyarimana was to remain dictator of Rwanda for 21 years, kept in place by lavish aid from Western nations and in particular from his most loyal Western supporter, France. Naturellement.

Gourevitch makes the point that during the 1980s and 90s France channeled huge amounts of armaments to the Hutu government, up to and through the actual genocide; that French advisers helped the government at all levels; that French president Francois Mitterand’s son Jean-Christophe was an arms dealer who made a packet from the trade (p.89).

In 1986 the global price of Rwanda’s main exports, coffee and tea, collapsed, and real hardship for the majority of the population added to simmering Hutu disaffection. The racist, supremacist policies of Hutu Power spread like a virus, popularising the insulting term inyenzi or cockroaches for Tutsis.

The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) The Tutsis in Uganda

But so did the Tutsi fightback. It is important to understand the role played by Ugandan politics. In 1979 Tutsi exiles in Uganda formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). (It was initially known as the Rwandan Refugees Welfare Association and then, from 1980, as the Rwandan Alliance for National Unity (RANU)). It was formed in response to the persecution of Tutsi refugees by the regime of Ugandan president Milton Obote. Obote accused the Rwandans of collaboration with his predecessor, Idi Amin.

Tutsi refugees Fred Rwigyema and Paul Kagame had joined Yoweri Museveni’s rebel Front for National Salvation (FRONASA). Museveni had fought alongside Obote to defeat Amin in 1979 but withdrew from the government following Obote’s disputed victory in the 1980 general election.

With Rwigyema and Kagame, Museveni formed a new rebel army, the National Resistance Army (NRA). Their campaign to overthrow Obote’s government became known as the Ugandan Bush War.

Obote remained hostile to Rwandan refugees throughout his presidency and in 1981 forced RANU into exile in Kenya. In 1982 he encouraged local councils to force Rwandan refugees out of ordinary civil life and into refugee camps. When Rwandans attempted to cross the border back into Rwanda, the Habyarimana regime confined them to isolated refugee camps and closed the border to prevent further migration.

You can see why many Tutsi exiles found themselves in an impossible position and it explains why so many joined up with Museveni’s NRA with the aim of overthrowing Obote and restoring their rights within Uganda.

In 1986 the NRA captured Kampala with a force of 14,000 soldiers which included 500 Rwandans, some of them senior officers, among them Kagame and Rwigyema. Museveni was grateful for their support and relaxed all Obote’s laws discriminating against Rwandans.

But you can also see why their success in the Bush War led soldiers like Rwigyema and Kagame to  think they might launch a similar military attack against the consider an attack against Rwanda, with the aim of overthrowing the dictatorial Habyarimana regime, installing a moderate government and so allowing the Rwandan refugees inside Uganda to return home. And you can see why the new man they’d helped to power in Uganda, Museveni, would support such a move.

The Rwandan civil war 1990 to 1994

At its 1987 convention RANU renamed itself the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). After a small-scale incursion was repelled in 1989, a cohort of Tutsi soldiers within the Ugandan army deserted, along with uniforms, arms and ammunition and invaded north Rwanda in 1990. It was the right year, as the Cold War came to an end and Western powers abruptly ceased their support for African dictators like Mobutu of Zaire and Habyarimana of Rwanda and force them to instal multi-party democracies.

The RPF incursion developed into the Rwandan Civil War. (To give a sense of the relatively small scale of all this, the original Tutsi incursion numbered some 2,500 soldiers who effectively went AWOL from the Ugandan army, accompanied by some 800 civilians such as doctors and nurses.) The RPF were defeated and repelled by the Rwandan Army (bolstered by French troops flown in to prop up another notorious African dictator) and withdrew to the Virunga mountains where Paul Kagame, establishing himself as its paramount leader, led a very effective regrouping and reorganisation. He attracted funds and exiles, he imposed strict military discipline and turned the RPF into an impressive fighting machine. In 1991 they emerged from the mountains to conduct an effective guerrilla campaign, hitting military targets across the north.

Throughout this period Hutu Power stepped up their propaganda that the Tutsis were parasites on decent hard-working Hutus, exacerbated by the war which Hutus blamed on Tutsi invaders. The circle around Habyarimana’s wife, Agathe, set up a propaganda magazine, Akura, edited by Hassan Ngeze, who developed into the Dr Goebbels of the regime and in December 1990 published a Hutu Ten Commandments mandating Hutu supremacy in all aspects of Rwandan life (p.87).

Propaganda claimed the Tutsis were an alien people, were not Christians, were fighting to gain dictatorial control of Rwanda, restore the old monarchy and reduce the Hutu majority to slaves. In 1992 Hutu Power ideologue Leon Mugesera made a much-reported and chilling speech calling on Hutus to send the Tutsis back to Ethiopia by river i.e. as corpses down the river Nyabarongo (pages 53 and 96). And throughout the war Radio Rwanda broadcast anti-Tutsi hate and there were sporadic anti-Tutsi pogroms around the country, in which thousands were murdered.

The RPF invasion ratcheted up the very anti-Tutsi hate they were set up to counter.

Fragile peace 1993

By 1992 Habyarimana had been forced to accept a measure of multi-party politics and had included politicians not members of his party in the cabinet. It was these opposition politicians who met with the RPF leadership and negotiated a ceasefire in July 1992, leading to face-to-face peace negotiations.

It’s vital to realise that the hardline Hutus, often referred to as the akazu (p.81) and linked with the extended family of the president’s wife, disapproved of Habyarimana’s willingness to compromise and negotiate. They began setting up parallel hard-line Hutu structures within the organs of state, the civil service, the media and the army. Historian Gérard Prunier names late 1992 as the time when the idea of a genocidal ‘final solution’ to kill every Tutsi in Rwanda was first floated among this group. It was led, ironically enough, by one of the new parties encouraged to form by Western pressure to set up a proper democracy, the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic (CDR).

When Habyarimana signed a treaty with the RPF in early 1993 promising a transition to a genuine pluralist democracy in which Tutsi rights would be respected the CDR refused to sign, organised nationwide protests and encourage anti-Tutsi violence in which hundreds were murdered. In response the RPF resumed hostilities, this time defeating the Rwandan army which hadn’t been paid due to the country’s deteriorating economy.

Ever-faithful France sent troops to bolster the Rwandan army. The numbers are tiny. Just the arrival of 400 well disciplined and trained French troops was enough to halt the RPF advance. Nonetheless the RPF came within striking distance of Kigali but Kagali overruled his senior officers and refused to take the capital, shrewdly pointing out that it would alienate his foreign backers and the Hutu population. Instead he declared a ceasefire and called for more negotiations.

On the Hutu side, factions arose in all the parties which allied themselves with what became known as Hutu Power. Each party split into a moderate faction which believed in some amount of political negotiation, and a ‘Power’ faction, which rejected compromise and stood for total Hutu supremacy (p.97). Youth militia wings of each of the parties emerged, including the Interahamwe meaning ‘those who attack together’, who had their origin in football supporters clubs (p.93).

Habyarimana began to realise that the Hutu Power militants were more his enemy than the RPF. After prolonged haggling over the make-up of the post-war Rwandan army, a formal peace treaty was signed on 4 August 1993 (p.99). A transitional government was to be set up with members from all the main parties. UN troops were flown in to supervise the treaty, while Hutu Power authorities began to plan a genocide. Four days after the signing a new radio station set up by the akazu, Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines, began broadcasting genocidal propaganda (p.99).

The general situation was not helped at all when president of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, who had been elected in June as the country’s first ever Hutu president, was assassinated by extremist Tutsi army officers in October 1993, leading to a Hutu uprising and a violent crackdown by the Tutsi army which left around 50,000 dead (p.101). The assassination reinforced the notion among Rwandan Hutus that the Tutsi  presented a permanent threat and that there could be no peace, not real long-lasting peace, until they were completely eliminated. This very fragile ‘peace’ lasted from August 1993 till April 1994.

Trigger for the genocide 1994

On the night of 6 April 1994 a plane carrying president Habyarimana and his counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi – both Hutus – was shot down as it approached Kigali airport, killing everyone on board. Hutu extremists blamed the RPF. The Hutu Power wing of the army, led by Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, assassinated the next in line to civilian authority, the (Hutu) Prime Minister,  Agathe Uwilingiyimana, along with ten Belgian UN soldiers charged with her protection (who were tortured first, p.114), and immediately started to implement the campaign of slaughter which they had been developing for years. It was to be a ‘final solution’ to the Tutsi problem.

The RPF claims that Hutu extremists themselves murdered their own president because he was engaged in negotiations with the Tutsis i.e. was a moderate Hutu and seen by a ‘sellout’ by the extremists on his own side.

The very next day, 7 April, as systematic killings across the country began, Kagame warned he was abandoning the treaty and the RPF broke out of its base in the north, attacking into Rwanda in three directions. So the genocide took place against the backdrop of renewed invasion and war. The RPF slowly seized territory in the east, heading south. UN troops were stationed in the demilitarised zone in the north but were ordered to withdraw to their camps to avoid getting involved in the fighting.

You can see why the renewal of war incited the Hutu Power advocates to carry out the genocide with feverish haste, ordering their followers at local level to kill as many as possible as quickly as possible before either the RPF won or the international community stepped in. For Hutu Power, it was a race against the clock.

The genocide – 100 days in 1994

Between April and July 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days. Three key facts to grasp are that:

1. The Hutu Power extremists had been preparing for this day for years, had drawn up lists of every Tutsis in the country with names and addresses, had assigned local Hutu leaders to direct and manage the slaughter, and had plans to take over state radio The Hutu extremists set up a radio station, RTLM, and newspapers which circulated hate propaganda, urging people to ‘weed out the inyenzi‘, to broadcast messages of hate. In other words, it was all extremely well planned. The identity cards which every Rwandan had been obliged by law to carry ever since the Belgians introduced them in 1931 (p.56) now became death warrants for any Tutsi stopped by police, militias, at road blocks, in the street, stopped search identified and hacked to death with a machete.

2. Second thing is that Rwanda was unique in tropical African countries in having been, from before Europeans arrived, a highly hierarchical country, organised like a pyramid from each district up to the top of government. Habyarimana’s governing party, the MRND, had a youth wing called the Interahamwe, which was turned into a militia to carry out the slaughter, but they operated within a highly organised society. It was a very well-organised genocide.

3. French troops, fighting on the side of the Rwandan army, freed up resources which Colonel Théoneste Bagosora could redirect to speeding up the genocide (p.90). On the nights of 16 and 18 June French arms shipments were flown into Goma in Zaire and then ferried across the border to support the genocidal Hutu Power regime (p.155). Gourevitch writes of:

The French political and military establishment’s…blatant complicity in the preparation and implementation of the butchery. (p.155)

I was amused to read that as the RPF closed in a French military plane whisked Habyarimana’s wife, Agathe, the central figure in the networks of Hutu Power, the leading figure in the azaku, to safety back in the homeland of liberty, equality and fraternity. Vive la France!

Number killed

At least 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in just 100 days, making it the fastest mass killing in human history. People were slaughtered at a faster rate than even during the Holocaust. Some Tutsis, commentators and historians put the figure higher at 1 million, for example a Red Cross report published soon afterwards.

What’s Somalia got to do with it?

Six months before the genocide broke out American troops had carried out Operation Gothic Serpent, an attempt to take on the evil warlord, Mohamed Farrah Aidid.,who ruled Mogadishu, capital of Somalia, which led to the so-called Battle of Mogadishu on 3 and 4 October 1993 during which a black hawk helicopter was shot down and 19 American soldiers were killed and 73 wounded. Not just that. The American corpses were paraded through the streets, and filmed and the video footage beamed around the world. The world’s only superpower was humiliated.

This explains why, when trouble broke out in another faraway African state, the administration of President Bill Clinton desperately tried to ignore it, then downplay it. Gourevitch quotes the press conferences given while the genocide was being carried out in which the poor press secretary tried to explain the administration’s position that ‘genocidal acts’ were taking place but these didn’t amount to an actual genocide. Why the hair-splitting? Because if the Americans conceded it was a genocide, then they would be legally obliged under the Genocide Convention of 1948 to intervene. And Clinton refused under any circumstances to risk another Black Hawk Down humiliation. And therefore officials at every level of the administration were under strict orders never to use the g word.

A bit too neatly Gourevitch says that in May, as the genocide was in full swing, he was visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which happened to have been opened by President Bill Clinton who made a speech repeating the museum’s motto Never Again. But not only did it happen again, and the American government was the number one reason that the West, the international community and the United Nations did not do more to stop it (as explained in detail on pages 151 to 154). Disgusting.

French involvement and guilt

By June the RPF, attracting more and more Tutsi recruits, controlled the east of Rwanda, had surrounded the key cities including Kigali. In the same month France launched Opération Turquoise in the west of the country, entering from bases in the Zairian cities of Goma and Bukavu and eventually controlling the western fifth of Rwanda in order to create a safe haven for refugees. The fact that many of these refugees were Hutus, fleeing the advancing RPF army, and included many Hutu Power administrators and officials, has led to claims ever since that the French in effect protected those responsible for the genocide.

From the moment they arrived, and wherever they went, the French forces supported and preserved the same local political leaders who had presided over the genocide. (p.158)

Throughout the genocide French military spokesman argued that it was a ‘two-way’ genocide, both sides were as bad as each other and sneeringly referred to the RPF as the Khmer Rouge. The French had many motivations. 1. To maintain hegemony over the widest possible area of francophonie. 2. To maintain its credibility with the other African dictators it supported. Hatred of the English. Hard though it is to believe, the French government opposed the RPF because they originated in English-speaking Uganda. French culture must be preserved even at the cost of supporting the largest genocide since the Holocaust. This was recognised as a factor in France’s support for mass murder by as senior figure as Paul Kagame:

‘If they wanted people here to speak French, they shouldn’t have helped to kill people here who spoke French.’ (p.160)

The permanent grievance of the history’s losers.

The signal achievement of [France’s] Opération Turquoise was to permit the slaughter of Tutsis to continue for an extra month, and to secure safe passage for the genocidal command to cross, with a lot of its weaponry, into Zaire. (p.161)

Scum. cf p.289 and p.325.

End of the genocide July 1994

By late June the RPF had surrounded Kigali and took the capital on 4 July, followed on 18 July by the major towns of the north-west, forcing the interim government into Zaire. The RPF victory ended the genocide as well as the civil war. By the end of July 1994 Kagame’s forces held the whole of Rwanda except for the Turquoise zone in the south-west.

The international community, the UN troops on the ground and the French had done fuck-all to halt the worst genocide since the Second World War. (To be fair, Canadian General Roméo Dallaire sent his superiors in New York advance warnings he had learned from high-placed Hutu dissidents that a really huge massacre was being planned. When they ignored his warnings and actively reduced the UN presence on the ground, he and his reduced forces were at least able to provide refuge for thousands of Tutsi and moderate Hutu at its headquarters in Amahoro Stadium, at other secure UN sites, and assisted with the evacuation of foreign nationals.)

Instead the genocide ended solely as a result of the military intervention of Paul Kagame’s RPF (p.143). (Mind you, you could make the case that the genocide only came about because of the sequence of events following the RPF’s initial invasion of 1990, designed to overthrow the ‘legitimate’ Hutu government. Academics, commentators and advocates of all sides can spend the rest of time assigning blame.)

Map showing the advance of the RPF during the 1994 Rwandan genocide (source: Wikipedia)

Aftermath – flight of the Hutus

As the RPF closed in the Hutu extremists prepared not just to flee the country, but used state radio and local authorities to terrify the Hutu population into believing they too, in their turn, would be slaughtered by vengeful Tutsis. Which explains why some two million Hutu peasants took to the road and fled west into Zaire, eventually setting up huge refugee camps as big as cities.

And indeed the RPF were accused of themselves killing thousands of Hutu civilians as they took power, and of pursuing and Hutus across the border in Zaire as they tracked down members of the notorious Interahamwe. The RPF denies this was intentional but Gourevitch has Kagame admitting certain rogue elements in his army may have carried out illegal revenge attacks. He tried to restrain them, some were tried and imprisoned, but there’s a limit to his control.

But the bigger story, which Gourevitch dwells on at length, was the creation of vast Hutu refugee camps which became cities in their own right, homes to countless businesses, run with fear and intimidation by Hutu Power administrators, and funded and supported by the international community and hundreds of well-meaning aid agencies.

Ethnic cleansing in East Congo 1995 to 1996

The resulting situation in eastern Congo became chaotic with Rwandan Tutsis tracking down and massacring Hutus, and Hutu extremists regrouping in the vast refugee camps helped by Western governments and aid agencies a) launching cross-border raids back into Rwanda to murder survivors and kill witnesses and b) embarking on their own campaigns of ethnic cleansing against ethnic Tutsis who had lived in Zaire for generations, specifically in the area of Kivu around the Zairean town of Goma.

In other words, intense Hutu-Tutsi animosity, spilling over into massacres and ethnic cleansing continued for years after the genocide itself was ended by the invading RPF.

First Congo War 1996 to 1997

Gourevitch spells out how the genocide was a gift from God for Congo dictator Seko Sese Mobutu (p.281). The old bastard had been unceremoniously dumped by his Western supporters when the Cold War ended in 1990 and had gone through a lean time manipulating a succession of fig-leaf ‘democratic’ governments while he slowly lost control of the lucrative mining industries which had kept his kleptocratic state alive, inflation soared to 9,000 per cent, the economy collapsed.

But with the advent of nearly two million refugees in the far east of his country in 1994, Mobutu was suddenly the man the international community and countless aid agencies had to go through to help them and he proved a willing participant, seeing as he got to cream off significant percentages of the money passing through his capital and its crooked banks. Leading the charge was, of course, the dictator’s most loyal Western friend and the most avid supporter of the genocidal Hutus, France.

France, ever eager to bail out Hutu Power, broke ranks with the rest of what in Cold War parlance used to be called the ‘Free World’ and unilaterally restored aid to Zaire – which meant, of course, to Mobutu who shovelled the money directly into his Swiss bank accounts. (p.281)

Throughout the spring of 1996 Hutu Power militias based in the refugee camps funded by the West continued a campaign to ethnically cleanse the area of North Kivu of its native Zairean Tutsi population, Gourevitch tours the area after such cleansing, travelling through miles of devastation, meeting terrified refugees. The RPF Rwandan government demanded something be done to protect the Tutsis. Zaire protested no such cleansing was going on. The international community did precisely nothing (p.289).

Eventually Kagame was forced to consider direct military intervention into eastern Zaire where the camps were located. His ally Museveni had introduced Kagame to Zairean revolutionary and guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila. They began recruiting troops and creating networks of like-minded soldiers, militias and exiles which coalesced into the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation or AFDL.

Since North Kivu had been largely ethnically cleansed of Tutsis, Kagam predicted the Hutu Power militias would next turn on the 300,000 or so Tutsis living in South Kivu, known as the Banyamulenge after the town they were meant to have immigrated from back in the seventeenth century.

In September 1996 Hutu militias began attacking the Banyamulenge, burning houses, assassinating key officials, executing people in the street. They were fully supported by Mobutu’s army and media, who blamed the Tutsis victims for every atrocity. This was the same pattern and rhetoric which had led to the genocide. Tutsis fought back and were aided by Rwandan soldiers infiltrated into the area (p.295).

When the local Zairean governor declared that the entire Banyamulenge population had one week to vacate their homes and leave the territory, it was precisely the kind of categorical provocation Kagame had been waiting for. He immediately ordered the advance of the amalgamated forces which he, Museveni and Kabila had created into South Kivu. He tells Gourevitch he had three aims:

  1. protect the Banyamulenge Tutsis, arm them, empower them to fight and protect themselves
  2. to dismantle the notorious refugee camps and get their Hutu occupants to return to Rwanda where they would be treated decently
  3. to ‘change the situation in Zaire’ i.e. remove Mobutu as an active supporter of genocidal Hutu Power and replace him with a modern, neutral figure

The AFDL advance was as disciplined and effective as the RWP invasion of Rwanda 2 years earlier. It had the decisive effect of breaking the grip of Hutu Power on the camps and forcing an estimated 700,000 refugees to abandon the camps and trek the 20 or 30 miles back across the border into peaceful Rwanda, and return to their communities. Obviously, there were all kinds of problems with this enormous reintegration into such a densely populated country and with so many divisive memories, but the wholesale massacre of Hutu refugees which the Hutu Power ideologues had terrified the refugees with never happened.

But to the wider world’s surprise the invading AFDL didn’t just invade the Hutu camps, tracking down Hutu Power exponents, freeing the majority of the Hutu refugees into returning to Rwanda – they then declared their intention of marching on Zaire’s capital, Kinshasa, approximately two and a half thousand miles west.

Fall of Mobutu May 1997

It took the AFDL a long seven months to get there, more a tribute to the shocking state of Zaire’s roads and infrastructure than to any opposition put up by the rubbish Zaire army, the FAZ (which Gourevitch describes as ‘Mobutu’s famously cowardly army’, p.256).

As Kabila’s troops approached the capital, president Nelson Mandela of South Africa flew in to try and broker a deal, but failed. Mobutu wanted to stay on the scene, if only as a figurehead president, while Kabila, leading the winning army, wanted all or nothing. Mobutu, his family and cronies fled, Kabila’s troops entered Kinshasa and on 30 May 1997 Kabila was sworn in as president. Next day Kabile changed the country’s name from Zaire to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was to be president until his assassination in 2001.

The Second Congo War 1998 to 2003

Kabila turned against his own backers, responding to the Congo public’s dislike of the occupying army of Rwandans and Ugandans and summarily expelling them all in 1998. Bad move. Rwanda and Uganda again collaborated in putting together an invasion force, this time with the aim of overthrowing Kabila and installing a more compliant president. However, the conflict ended up roping six other African nations into the fighting which degenerated into chaos.

The conflict dragged on till 2003 by which time an estimated five million people had died as a result of the conflict. Some armed groups remain active in the areas near Rwanda’s border right up till the present day, 2021.

The post-genocide period

The last hundred pages of this 350-page book cover the period after the genocide. Gourevitch describes the surprising number of Tutsis who returned from exile all over the place, not just the neighbouring countries of Uganda and Tanzania, but Europe and America, once it was clear that a democratic, mixed ethnicity and peaceful government was in place. And the inevitable tensions this led to between those who’d lived through the horror and seen family and loved ones literally hacked to death before their eyes, and returnees from abroad who moved into the many empty houses, tidied up the mess left by the departing Hutus, had barbecues, laughed and joked as if nothing had happened. Many of the survivors Gourevitch interviews find this difficult to cope with (pages 229 to 241).

He covers the massacre of Hutu refugees at the Kibeho refugee camp. He visits post-genocide prisons packed with Hutus who are strangely passive. Considering that high-profile Hutus were being assassinated on the outside, many of them were relieved to be in the relative safety of prison, regularly visited by international aid workers and monitors. He describes in detail the paradox of Hutu Power genocidaires being protected and funded by western aid agencies, at the complete inability of the international community, yet again, to intervene to stop their attacks into Rwanda and their ethnic cleansing of North Kivu and, yet again, the only thing to stop it being a military invasion organised by Paul Kagame, this time in the shape of the coalition AFDL.

At this kind of thing – specific settings and the issues arising from them – Gourevitch excels and his book will remain a valuable record and testimony to the tense, disorientated spirit of the period after the genocide and before the second Congo war of 1998, the one which degenerated into the Great War of Africa. Gourevitch thought he was covering an event which had finished but ended up recording a moment in the continual, ongoing flux of human events, the edgy post-genocide moment which has itself become part of history.

Stupid remarks

Gourevitch peppers the books with remarks which are, presumably, intended to be insightful, but as someone who did a history GCSE, A-level, history-based degree and has spent my life reading history books and attending history exhibitions, I found disappointingly obvious and trite.

Colonisation is violence and there are many ways to carry out that violence. (p.55)

Every war is unconventional after its own fashion. (p.82)

They sound good, don’t they, they create a good literary, rhetorical effect, they sound profound, but a moment’s reflection tells you they are trite or untrue. He operates on a very superficial level. When he quotes Lord Acton’s hoary dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as if it was a useful contribution to the debate about the genocide, you realise you are dealing with a child. He quotes Stalin’s alleged saying that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic, as if it’s a dazzling new discovery (p.201). Disappointing.

Worst of all, Gourevitch develops a theory of human nature based on his literary feelings, on the premise that the most important thing about human nature is the power of the imagination. Instead of seeing things in political terms, he again and again reverts to modish blah about narratives and stories and identity and returns again and again to the importance of imagination, narrative and stories. He is more indebted to Coleridge than Clausewitz. John Milton, Charles Dickens, Rilke, George Eliot, these are his terms terms of reference. It is thin stuff and wholly inappropriate to the subject matter.

He keeps writing things I profoundly disagree with.

We are, each of us, functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us… (p.71)

(Note the prissy, attention-drawing use of commas, a rhetorical flourish to make the sentence sound more considered and profound.) I am a Darwinian materialist so I simply disagree. I would counter-suggest that we are, each of us, (sic) not at all functions of how we imagine ourselves, but functions of how our bodies work, products of our biology, of the complex interaction between our genetic inheritance and the myriad biochemical signals the environment we find ourselves in sends us or triggers in our bodies.

If I am starving to death in one of the world’s countless famines or dying of cancer or stroke or heart attack or delirious with malaria it doesn’t really matter what my imagination or anyone else’s imaginations are doing. I am a function, first and foremost, of my biology, all else is secondary.

He writes that the most basic function of power is to coerce us into its narratives. This reads to me like the modish bullshit of the English graduate. The whole approach reeks of the trend across all the humanities and high brow journalism to invoke the magic words ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ as if they explain everything about human nature and politics, but they don’t. If someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to do something or die, complex theories of meta-narrative and Coleridgean distinctions between imagination and fancy become irrelevant. When he writes:

I felt tempted, at times, to think of Rwanda after the genocide as an impossible country. (p.224)

I felt tempted to throw the book out the window. This is high-sounding bullshit. What does it even mean? A country is a country is a country, borders on a map, enforced by border police, with a government and administration and laws and a currency. Russia continues to exist after its century of Soviet tyranny, Germany is going strong, decades after the Holocaust and its violent partition, even Cambodia is still a country after the horror of the killing fields – and so on and so on. Clearly the worry that Rwanda is an ‘impossible’ country is a problem which only exists in Gourevitch’s head and shows you just how obtuse his responses can be.

There’s a lot to be written about the ideology of Hutu Power which drove the genocide and the way it shaped the actions of the génocidaires at all levels of Rwandan society, but Gourevitch doesn’t have the conceptual framework or academic training to do it. He makes repeated efforts to do so, but I found them shallow and disappointing.

The big takeaway

Leaving Gourevitch out of the equation, I think the biggest single thing to take away from study of the Rwandan genocide is that it wasn’t a one-off, inexplicable outbreak of barbarity. The one big thing you learn from studying it is that it was simply the highest point of a century-old culture of ethnic rivalry and hatred, which broke out from the 1950s onwards in repeated massacres and pogroms, exactly as the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe were subject to centuries of persecution and pogroms way before the Holocaust.

In that sense it is far from inexplicable, it is very, very explicable. What turned the long history of minor, localised outbreaks of ethnic violence into a genocide was the hard work of the Hutu Power ideologues who set out to organise the extermination of the Tutsis by harnessing the organisation and technology of a modern state, using state radio, magazines, and every level of the highly structured administration to promulgate simple messages of hate and desperation. It boiled down to: “Kill the cockroaches before they kill us!” and hundreds of thousands of Hutus, primed by decades of negative propaganda, bought this message and acted on it (p.251).

But study of the Rwandan genocide doesn’t stop in July 1994. Like all the other accounts I’ve read, Gourevitch shows how it leads directly on to the issue of the Hutu refugee camps and the way the Hutu Power génocidaires survived and recreated their power structures there, terrorising hundreds of thousands of refugees, carrying out deadly incursions back into Rwanda, and then setting about the ethnic cleansing of east Congo. And how that led directly to the AFDL invasion of Zaire which became known as the First Congo War, and how that led on to the second invasion of Congo, by Rwandan and Ugandan forces which led to the disastrous Great War of Africa.

For a few months the specific genocidal Hutu Power campaign was able to be carried out with unbridled ferocity, but the killing of Tutsis had been commonplace for decades before it, and the killing of comparable numbers of Hutus (maybe as many as 100,000 Hutus were killed in all forms of revenge attack, from individual reprisals and local pogroms through to the more organised massacres in the refugee camps) followed seamlessly after it.

Gourevitch ends his book gloomily with Bill Clinton’s flying visit to Rwanda in March 1998 (he didn’t even leave the airport) but during which he acknowledged that the events of 1994 had been a genocide and that ‘the international community’ had done too little to intervene. The later sections of his book testify over and over to the complete failure of the international community, America or the UN to act either to prevent the genocide or to intervene to prevent the regrouping of the génocidaires in the camps. Gourevitch gets progressively more angry about it.

But the thing that comes over in his last few pages is the way the killings resumed inside Rwanda. During 1997 and into early 1998, as he was finalising his account, the number of murders and massacres of Tutsis by revived groups of Hutu Power génocidaires was steadily increasing. In fact the book ends with yet another grim atrocity, an account of how a group of 150 Hutu Power militia and interahamwe attacked a boarding school in Gisenyi and hacked to pieces the 17 schoolgirls and a 62-year-old Belgian nun.

In other words, as he ended the book, the tide of communal hate killing had returned and was rising. I’ll need to read other books to find out what happened next…

A correct understanding of human nature

The Rwandan genocide itself was a definable and unique historical event with a specific start and a specific end-point. Gourevitch, throughout his book, professes himself puzzled and bewildered at how it could ever have happened, incapable of imagining the motivation and mindset of ordinary people who took up machetes to hack their neighbours and own family members to pieces.

But the more you study it, the more understandable the Rwandan genocide becomes, provided you have a correct understanding of human nature.

We humans are animals, part of the animal kingdom, subject to the same constraints and urges as other animals. My son who’s just completed his Biology degree, said one of his lecturers summed up all animal activity in a snappy motto: feed, fight, fuck. That’s it. Like all animals, we humans are programmed to mate and reproduce; to do that effectively, we have to fight or compete (albeit in socially mediated and sublimated ways) for a mate. But none of this can take place unless we can feed and water ourselves on a regular basis.

For sure, the so-called ‘mind’ and ‘reason’ which well-fed philosophers have pontificated about for millennia, beginning in the slave societies of ancient Greece and Rome, is also a deep part of human nature – but most people, even the most highly educated, are fundamentally irrational and easily swayed. Humans are very suggestible and easily steered towards courses of action which let them fulfil their primal urges – hunger, lust, violence, and the more socialised wishes for praise and acceptance, wealth and power, no matter how local and fleeting. (Presumably Gourevitch has heard of Sigmund Freud. If so, why has he not learned anything from him, from the grim conclusions Freud drew about human nature based on the First World War?)

The great appeal of war for young men in less-than-perfectly-disciplined armies is that you can fulfil a lot of these really primitive urges. As well as the joy of killing alongside a closely-bonded band of brothers, war all too often provides endless opportunity for risk-free sexual violence. Hence the outbreak of mass raping during every conflict in human history, including the Rwandan genocide.

Once you align your thinking with the basic facts that humans are fundamentally irrational animals, driven by a cacophony of unconscious primitive urges, which lead them to make all kinds of irrational mistakes and, given the opportunity, behave terribly – then most of human history, including all its atrocities, make perfect sense, indeed seem inevitable.

Human nature doesn’t change, at least not on a timescale which human society registers. Give or take a few differences in social conventions, we understand the motives of medieval kings and Roman emperors just fine. And they map very well onto to the behaviour of contemporary African dictators such as Mobutu or Bokassa, just as the lickspittles and hangers-on in the court of each would be interchangeable, and just as the lives of the ordinary businessmen or urban workers or peasants doing forced labour in the fields would be recognisable in 1st century Rome or 20th century Congo.

It is only if you have a wrong understanding of human nature that you are surprised by atrocity and barbarity. Only if you assume that everybody else is as highly educated as you, as well-read in Rilke and Milton, as able to eat out in 5-star restaurants around the world on New Yorker expense accounts. If you come from this blessed background then you might be tempted to think that everyone else is as kind and generous and thoughtful and concerned about issues of gender and equality and identity and narrative as you are. So it is only if you live in this cloud cuckoo-land, liberal arts culture that you are going to be shaken to your core when you visit a country where hundreds of thousands of people undertook the systematic slaughter by hand of their neighbours and even their own family members.

The Armenian Genocide. The Russian Civil War. The Ukraine Famine. The Second Word War. The Holocaust. 20 million Russian dead. Indian Partition. The Great Leap Forward. The Chinese Cultural Revolution. Pol Pot in Cambodia. The Yugoslav wars. Has he not heard of these and many other comparable mass murders?

Why has he not learned the simple lesson that this is what humans do. In the right circumstances, whipped up by the right leaders, humans are capable of any atrocity. The Rwandan genocide wasn’t an inexplicable outbreak of madness but just the most recent example of an enduring and central aspect of human nature.

Gourevitch displays the same naive or obtuse shock every time he comes to ‘think about’ the genocide. The shock and dismay of a privileged, literature-soaked author, at the pinnacle of his liberal profession in the richest country in the world, amazed to discover what life is like in one of the poorest countries in the world (which is how Rwanda was classified by the World Bank in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, a place where the average annual wage was estimated to be $80, far less than Gourevitch and his fellow editors of The Paris Review probably used to spend on one business lunch.)

It isn’t anything ‘wrong’ in human nature or ‘wrong’ about the human imagination which he is discovering. Human nature is human nature just like gravity pulls things towards the centre of the earth, the sun rises in the morning, fire burns and so on. It is a basic fact of the world we exist in.

The reason Gourevitch is shocked is that he had such a completely mistaken view of human nature in the first place. He had read about the Holocaust but not really processed its lessons, what it tells us about what ‘ordinary’ people are capable of, namely any level of cruelty and barbarity if they think it means they and their loved ones will survive.

It is the shock of a pampered American discovering that the rest of the world is not like America, in fact it is inconceivably different. (Gourevitch is well aware of the issue of American parochialness and American ignorance. He routinely criticises the sparse and uninformed commentary on the situation in Rwanda and Zaire which he reads in even leading American newspapers like the New York Time and Washington Post, e.g. pages 297, 343. What’s the title of the Green Day song, American Idiot.)

Because he has diametrically the wrong view of human nature, Gourevitch at various points describes the genocide and the killings which followed it as a kind of failure of political and cultural imagination (p.206).

On the contrary, from my point of view, the Rwandan genocide was a kind of fulfilment of the profound and bestial aspects of human nature which I’ve described – albeit carefully whipped up, legitimised and organised by the Hutu Power propagandists. The genocide is explicable because it derives from understandable, analysable aspects of human nature. Have you not read any human history? Do you not know it amounts to a catalogue of massacres and genocides?

The common objection people make to my view of human nature, starting with my own kids, is: “Well, it’s not like that where I live. Where I live everyone is nice and friendly and caring. If what you say is true, how come everyone isn’t at everyone’s throats all the time?”

But the answer is simple: we in the West are well fed. Really well fed. The biggest medical problem in the West is the epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Fat people don’t fight. Even the most casual knowledge of history shows a direct correlation between hunger and social upheaval. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Nazis took place in societies pushed to the brink by famine, hunger and extreme social stress; in Weimar Germany mass unemployment meant people were literally starving.

In these circumstances, the most basic human drives come to the fore and can be manipulated and directed by those who understand how: Danton, Lenin, Goebbels, Pol Pot and, in Rwanda, the  exponents of Hutu Power such as Hassan Ngeze and Colonel Théoneste Bagosora.

It follows that the fundamental aim of any government should be to manage the economy in such a way as to ensure that most of its citizens are fed, not only as a good in itself but as the basic protection against social collapse and reversion to barbarism. To take a leaf from Gourevitch’s book and quote a famous literary figure, it was Bertolt Brecht who wrote: “Food first, then fancy talk about morality”. (“Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” The Threepenny Opera).

Feeding your population, ensuring security of food, then of housing, then of work which is rewarded with a stable currency, are probably any modern government’s top priorities.

Gourevitch’s assembly of all the facts and his narrative of the deep history, build-up to and then catastrophic events of the Rwandan genocide are thorough and authoritative, and he has obviously interviewed an enormous variety of people who shed light on all levels of events, victims and perpetrators, as well as numerous UN and aid officials, ministers, government spokesmen, including president Kagame of Rwanda and president Museveni of Uganda. It’s a hugely impressive roster. He had tremendous, what the journalists call “access”.

For all these reasons his book tells a searing story and will remain important evidence. But every time he stops to ‘think’ about what he’s describing, he displays a regrettably low level of awareness about human nature, society and history. He demonstrates that he is an idealistic American unprepared for a world which is mostly not populated by well-read, New York liberals. His bewilderment is sometimes so total I wish I found it funny, but it ended up being deeply irritating and marring my admiration for the extensive and very impressive factual sections of his book.

Cecile Kayirebwa

We are animals, bound by the same fundamental facts and constraints of biology as all other life forms on earth. And yet we belong to a freak line of evolution which has led us to develop language, speech, writing, mathematics and technology, and create an impenetrably complex labyrinth of cultural artefacts. One among billions of these human artefacts is this song written by Rwandan poet and singer, Cecile Kayirebwa, which laments the victims of the Rwandan genocide.

Credit

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1998. All references are to the 2000 Picador paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on October 11, 2021

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In The Footsteps of Mr Kurz by Michela Wrong (2000)

Comparing Michela Wrong and David van Reybrouck

David van Reybrouck’s account of Congo’s modern history is basically an orthodox chronological account and political analysis interspersed with interviews with the many veterans and eye witnesses he has tracked down and spoken with at length.

Wrong’s account feels completely different, less chronological or, indeed, logical, more thematic. Instead of historical analysis, she brilliantly conveys what it felt like to live in Zaire under Mobutu as she sets about systematically exploring and describing different aspects of Zaire society and culture. Her vividness of approach is demonstrated by the way the book opens with the fall of Mobutu in 1997, going light on political analysis and strong on vivid descriptions of what it felt like to live in a crumbling, corrupt third world country.

Chapter one dwells on the role played in so many African states by key international hotels in their capitals, in Rwanda the Mille Collines, in Zimbabwe the Meikles, in Ethiopia the Hilton, in Uganda the Nile, hotels where presidents mingle with mercenaries, dodgy diamond deals are struck between smartly dressed middlemen, security goons lurked in the background muttering into their lapel mics, and the corridors were cruised by the most expensive hookers in town. And how it felt to be one among the pack of foreign correspondents living in Kinshasa’s Intercontinental Hotel as rumours swirled, troop carriers arrived, the president’s son turned up with a pack of soldiers furiously trying to track down the men who betrayed his father. And then suddenly, overnight, all the military figures switched to wearing tracksuits and casual wear in anticipation of the arrival of the rebel troops.

That’s the kind of picture painting and atmosphere Wrong is ace and conjuring up. How a country’s decline can be measured by the way the expensive carpeting in its hotels starts to smell of mildew, the lifts stop working, the blue paint on the bottom of pools comes off on the swimmers’ feet. Van Reybrouck takes an essentially academic approach spiced with extensive interviews. He is a historian whereas Wrong is a journalist, with a telling eye for detail and snappy one-line quotes.

Obviously, in this 314-page book she tells us an awful lot about the origins, rise and fall of the Mobutu dictatorship which lasted from 1965 to 1997, but it is the fantastically evocative way she conveys what it felt like that makes this book such a classic.

Van Reybrouck gives a detailed explanation of the ethnic tensions in eastern Congo which were exacerbated by the Rwandan genocide and then the constellation of political forces which led the Rwandan and Ugandan presidents to decide to invade eastern Congo and create a military coalition (the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire, the AFDL) and select as its leader the long-time Maoist guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila. This is to the good. His account is worth reading and rereading.

But Wrong tells you what it felt like to be in Kinshasa as the rebel army drew ever closer. The panic among Mobutu’s cronies, the so-called mouvanciers up in their gated mansions in the smart Binza district, the rush by the city’s moneyed classes to get visas for foreign destinations, the way the various western embassies practised evacuating their staff across the river Congo to Brazzaville, capital of the once-French colony the Republic of Congo which was unaffected by Mobutu’s fall.

Van Reybrouck gives you high-level analysis, Wrong gives you the sweat and the fear, the paranoia. She tells us everyone knew the game was up when the grizzled old piano player who’d been playing cocktail jazz in the bar of the Intercontinental for as long as anyone could remember one day disappeared.

She describes how the shopkeepers and population prepared for the mass looting which always accompanies regime change, and passes on the advice of an old hand that it’s best to select in advance one and only one item you want to loot and, once the anarchy begins, focus on getting that and only that. Wrong selects a $1,000 leather jacket for when the great pillaging begins.

She describes the way rumours are spread by ‘Radio Trottoir’, Pavement Radio i.e. word on the street. She conveys the mad, feverish atmosphere of a city about to be taken by rebel forces (p.27).

Another difference is that van Reybrouck sees the history of Congo as a tragedy, or series of tragedies, and he affects the reader with his sense of high seriousness. Wrong, on the other hand, has a lively sense of humour and an eye for the absurd detail. She finds almost everything about Zaire farcical, but then she appears to find all of Africa farcical and hopeless.

As for rebuilding the impression given by the scaffolding and myriad work sites dotted around Kinshasa is misleading. The work has never been completed, the scaffolding will probably never be removed. Like the defunct street lamps lining Nairobi’s roads, the tower blocks of Freetown, the faded boardings across Africa which advertise trips to destinations no travel company today services, it recalls another era, when a continent believed its natural trajectory pointed up instead of down. (p.20)

As this quote indicates, another difference is that whereas van Reybrouck’s account is focused with laser-like precision on the history of just the Congo, Wrong’s anecdotes and comparisons freely reference the many other African countries she’s visited and worked in as a foreign correspondent. There’s a lot more international comparison and perspective. Wrong visits places around Congo but also Brussels to interview historians, to visit the Congolese quarter, and Switzerland to track down some of Mobutu’s luxury properties.

And whereas van Reybrouck is optimistic, on the side of Congo’s bloodied but resilient people, Wrong is both more humorous and more pessimistic. According to her, the story is the same all across Africa, one of unstoppable decline and fall.

Talking to the melancholic Colonel, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the sense of tragic waste, of crippled potential that so often sweeps over one in Africa. (p.178)

In Ronan Bennett’s novel The Catastrophist the Belgian colonials who describe the Congolese as ‘children’ who need order, discipline and control and will make a horlicks of their country if granted independence are condemned as racist bigots – so you must never say anything like that. However, Wrong’s book freely refers to African politics as farcical, its politicians as clowns, and that, apparently, wins prizes.

At times, too many times, politics on Congo resembled one of those hysterical farces in which policemen with floppy truncheons and red noses bounce from one outraged prima donna to another. ‘I’m the head of state. Arrest that man!’ ‘No, I’M the head of state. That man is an imposter. Arrrest him!’ (p.66)

So it’s OK to mock Africans as long as you use the correct phraseology and attitude. Calling them children is a no-no; calling their countries farcical, absurd, ludicrous, surreal, Alice in Wonderland – that’s fine.

And perfectly acceptable to be tired and bored of the absurdity of Africa’s rulers, the comical proliferation of rebels and freedom fighters and guerrilla movements, the bleak iteration of yet another massacre or round of ethnic cleansing somewhere on this blighted continent, like the western media’s news producers and sub-editors ‘shaking their heads over yet another unfathomable African crisis’ (p.7). Africa is for Wrong, ‘a disturbing continent’, ‘Africa, a continent that has never disappointed in its capacity to disappoint’, whose countries brim with ‘anarchy and absurdity’ (p.10).

When the AFDL’s representatives started calling the BBC office in Nairobi in late 1996, claiming they would march all the way to Kinshasa, journalists dismissed them with a weary shrug as yet another unknown guerrilla movement, the length of its constituent acronyms only rivalled by its obscurity, making wild plans and farcical claims. Africa is full of them: they surface, splinter into factions – yet more acronyms – only to disappear with equal suddenness. (p.245)

Several times she mentions Liberia’s drugged freedom fighter who wore wedding dressed and pink lipstick as they mowed down innocent civilians and gang-raped the women. She describes the teenage  FAZ recruits preparing to defend Kinshasa who were so drunk they could barely lift their grenade launchers. When the AFDL rebel soldiers arrive they turn out to be mostly teenagers wearing flip-flops or no shoes at all. Kabila promised to relinquish power once he’d overthrown Mobutu but of course does nothing of the sort. In turn Kabila was himself assassinated (in 2001), replaced by a family member even more corrupt and the whole of East Congo engulfed in a huge, often incomprehensible and seemingly endless war. Farce and tragedy.

The Latin Quarter hit, ‘I’m hearing only bad news from Radio Africa‘ seems as true when Wrong was writing in 2000 or now, in 2021, as when it was released in 1984.

Chapter by chapter

Introduction

Wrong arrived in Zaire as a foreign correspondent in 1994, found her way around, did features on Mobutu and his corrupt circle, the prostration of the economy (‘a country reverting to the Iron Age’, p.31) the uselessness of the army, the universal vibe of fear and poverty. Less than three years later, in autumn 1996, the AFDL seized eastern Congo and began its systematic assault on the country, seizing the mining centre of Lubumbashi in the south while other forces marched on the capital Kinshasa in the west. Wrong is perfectly placed to report on the paranoia of the last days, to fly out to the hot spots, to interview soldiers, shopkeepers, street traders, as well as army officers and government spokesmen.

So the introduction gives us tasters, snapshots: Wrong flying to the pretty lakeside town of Goma which was pillaged by its own inhabitants when the occupying army left. Wrong wandering through the rooms of Mobutu’s legendary palace at Gbadolite, now ruined and looted, the five black Mercedes, the Ming vases.

And she explains the title which is a quote from Joseph Conrad’s classic novella Heart of Darkness about the madness and barbarism he, personally, encountered, in the Congo Free State in 1890, epitomised by the fictional character of Mr Kurz, the high-minded exponent of civilisation who is sent to man an ivory station up the Congo, far from civilisation, and decays and degrades to become an epitome of barbarism and nihilism. Wrong sees herself literally following in Kurz’s footsteps as she explores all aspects of the absurd rule of Mobutu in the mid-90s, then watches his regime collapse in ruins.

Chapter 1

Plunges us into the endgame with a wonderfully evocative description of the atmosphere in Kinshasa and the Intercontinental Hotel where all the foreign correspondents stayed, during the last few days in 1997 October 1997 before Laurent Kabila’s AFDL took the city and Mobutu and his cronies were forced to flee. Snapshots of a city under siege, with brief explanations of Mobutu’s rule, the character of the AFDL and its leader Kabila, their determination to clean up the pigsty and abolish corruption.

Chapter 2

Gives a brisk but effective summary of Stanley’s exploration of the Congo (with backstory about Stanley’s biography) and King Leopold’s disgustingly barbaric regime of cruelty and exploitation, which he called the Congo Free State, 1885 to 1908 (with backstory explaining why Belgium was a relatively new country – founded in 1830 – and its king wanted a colony so as to be taken seriously by the big boys.)

In Brussels she visits the Belgian scholar Jules Marchal, once a whip-wielding colon himself, who has devoted his life to editing and publishing definitive records of the Congo Free State. She visits the Royal Museum for Central Africa and is shocked by the complete absence of references to the atrocities the Belgians carried out there, and to learn that Belgian colonial history is not taught in Belgian schools (p.55).

She takes a tour of buildings by the noted Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta, before pointing out that all the raw materials crafted into these beautiful buildings – the hardwood, onyx, marble, and copper – all came directly from the forced labour of Congolese blacks. Horta was rewarded for his services to Belgian architecture with a barony.

She describes how many of the Free State’s exploitative practices continued after the colony was handed over to Belgian government rule in 1908, including forced labour and use of the dreaded chicotte, the whip made of dried hippopotamus hide. It was only after the Second World War that Congo became less brutally exploitative and a tiny black middle class began to emerge, but if anything the colour bar or informal apartheid against this new breed of évolués or ‘evolved’ blacks grew worse.

Which moves into a description of the appearance, sights and sounds and mentality of the Congolese quarter in Brussels. She ends by making a strong case that Leopold’s atrocities, many of which continued under Belgian colonial rule, acculturated an entire region for 85 long years to abject humiliation, subservience, black market, illegal operations and corruption. Prepared the way, in other words, for just such a dictator as Mobutu.

No malevolent witch doctor could have devised a better preparation for the coming of a second Great Dictator. (p.57)

Chapter 3

Interview with Larry Devlin, the long-retired former CIA station chief in Kinshasa, who emphasises that Wrong only saw the regime at its bitter, pitiful end. She never knew the young, vibrant, charismatic Mobutu or knew the situation of anarchy between elected politicians which his 1965 coup rescued the country from (p.61).

She makes clearer than van Reybrouck or Bennett that Lumumba had actively invited the Soviets to give arms and advisers to crush the secessions. Devlin thinks Lumumba was never a communist, but he was naive. He thought he could invite in thousands of communist advisers at no cost. Devlin says he’d seen that happen in Eastern Europe after the war: your country falls to a communist coup and then Moscow is in charge. So Mobutu’s first coup of September 1960 was not just to bring political peace but to keep the Congo out of Soviet hands – and it worked. Soviet bloc personnel were given 48 hours to leave the country (p.67).

His account emphasises not just that, when the UN and US were slow to respond, Lumumba turned to the Soviets to supply him with arms and strategic advice to put down the secession of two major provinces – but that people of Devlin’s generation had seen this happen before. This was how the Soviets effected their coups in Poland and Czechoslovakia. This is how they established their tyrannies, by taking control of the army and placing personnel in key administrative and political positions. It had never been done in Africa before, but the Americans weren’t about to sit back and watch the Soviets make the experiment. So that’s why the Americans, backed by his political enemies within the country, decided he had to be eliminated. President Eisenhower personally approved CIA plans to assassinate Lumumba (p.77).

Then she backs up to give us the hasty run-up to independence from Belgium in June 1960, the army mutinying for better pay and promotion within days, triggering a mass exodus of the Belgian administrators and technicians who kept the country running, the political rivalry between ‘lethargic’ President Kasavubu (p.66) and passionate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and how the deadlock between them was broken by young Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, previously Lumumba’s personal secretary, who Lumumba himself had put in charge of the army and who, very bravely, faced down the army mutiny and restored order. Mobutu was encouraged then and ever afterwards by America.

A detailed look at the boyhood and young manhood of Joseph Mobutu from the Ngbani tribe, one of the smaller of Congo’s 250 ethnic groups, emphasising his brightness, reasonableness and extraordinary charisma; educated by Belgian priests, expelled for being a trouble-maker, a few years in the Force Publique rising to rank of sergeant, then contributing (anonymous) articles to new magazines set up for the Congolese, before he committed to becoming a journalist and then came to the attention of Lumumba who was looking for a secretary (pages 68 to 76). Devlin, the CIA man explains how Mobutu was really the best man available when he staged his 1965 coup.

Soon after the 1965 coup Devlin was posted to Vietnam. When he returned to Zaire in 1974 he found a drastically changed man and country. Surrounded by yes men, drinking pink champagne in his palaces, Mobutu was ‘already round the bend’ (p.82).

Chapter 4 Economics

In the immediate aftermath of the coup there were hangings, a new secret police was set up and so on. But the fundamental fact about Mobutu’s regime was he was an economic illiterate. Therefore his sole economic policy was to loot and plunder his country’s natural resources (when the going was good in the late 60s and early 70s) and then creaming the top off huge loans from the World bank and aid agencies. In other words, he didn’t know how to create or run a modern economy. He built a few high-profle white elephants, like the Inga dam, but when the builders left Zaire had no technicians to run it and there was never any coherent plan to create the infrastructure to distribute the electricity to where it was needed. Thus Congo has the greatest hydro-electric potential in the world in the shape of its huge and mighty river – and yet is a country whose cities suffer continual power cuts and outages.

He took up the creed of Pan-Africanism pioneered by Kwame Nkrumah, first Prime Minister of Ghana (who made himself president for life in 1964 and was overthrown by a military coup in 1966 supported by the CIA).

Mobutu promulgated his policies of authenticité, forcing everyone in the country to drop their European Christian names and adopt African names, renaming the state Zaire, renaming Leopoldville Kinshasa and Elizabethville Lubumbashi. He forced everyone to stop wearing European suits and mini skirts and adopt traditional African dress (p.90). He persuaded promoters to hold Miss World and the Ali-Foreman boxing match in Zaire (described in detail in van Reybrouck’s book).

In other words, he demonstrated how facile it is to address ‘cultural’ issues, fuss over ‘identity’ and language and culture. Meanwhile, in the absence of an economic or development plan, the economy tanked and the infrastructure rotted. The first years of his rule were bolstered by the high prices for Zaire’s raw materials created by the Vietnam war, but the end of the war in 1974 combined with the oil crisis to plunge Zaire into an economic hole it never crawled beck out of (p.94).

In 1973 he launched ‘Zaireanisation’ i.e. all foreign held businesses were confiscated by the state with a view to handing them over to ‘the people’ (p.92). The only problem was that ‘the people’ turned out, as when Robert Mugabe did the same thing 20 years later in Zimbabwe, to consist entirely of cronies and clients of Mobutu, who needed to be paid off or kept onside. None of them had a clue how to manage anything and ran businesses large and small into the ground, selling off the assets, living high off the proceeds, then needing further bribes or corruption money when they ran dry. $1 billion of assets were confiscated then squandered. It was gangster economics, ‘Alice in Wonderland finances’ (p.124).

And run on a massive system of cronyism. Mobutu needed so much money because he had to distribute gifts to all his important stakeholders in the manner of a traditional chieftain. Mobutu bought properties for himself around Europe, but he encouraged a system where hundreds of thousands of people scrabbled into the state administration, into the army or civil service, and then used their positions to embezzle, steal, demand bribes and generally be as corrupt as possible. By the mid-1990s Zaire had 600,000 people on the state payroll, doing jobs the World Bank calculated could be done by 50,000 (p.97).

The ambassador to Japan, Cleophas Kamitatu, simply sold the Zairian embassy and pocketed the proceeds. France sold Zaire a fleet of Mirage jets and ten years later, Defence Ministry officials simply sold them and kept the money (p.256). Ministers allotted themselves huge monthly salaries, lavish per diems, and insisted on having two of the very latest Mercedes, and their example was copied all the way down through their ministries, in state-run businesses and onto the street. Everyone stole everything they could, all the time. That’s what a kleptocracy is.

Chapter 5 Congo’s ruined mineral industries

Wrong flies to Katanga to report how nationalisation, corruption and utter mismanagement ran Congo’s mineral industries into the ground, beginning with astonishing stats about the country’s mineral huge wealth, then on to how Mobutu nationalised the Belgian mining corporation, Union Minière, consolidating it into the state-run company Gécamines. Sounds good, doesn’t it, one in the eye for the old imperial power, claiming the nation’s resources for the nation.

Except the nation never saw any of the profits. By 1978 the central bank had ordered Gécamines to transfer its entire annual profit of $500 million directly into a presidential bank account. By 1980 American researchers discovered that company officials were stealing $240 million  a year from Gécamines. Not only stole but smuggled, with huge amounts of diamonds, gold and other precious metals never reaching the books because they were stolen and smuggled abroad. In such an environment, nobody at any level gave a damn about investing in the company, in its stock and infrastructure, and so everything the Belgians had bequeathed the Congolese slowly rotted, decayed, was stolen, till the entire plants were rusting skeletons.

Wrong tours these sites giving us eerie descriptions of entire towns full of abandoned workings, derelict factories, rusting railways. That’s what she means when she described the entire country as slipping back into the Iron Age.

Wrong testifies to the decrepitude of the Shituri plant, describes the white elephant of Inga dam project built solely so Kinshasa kept control over Katanga. Pays an extended visit to the diamond town of Mbuji Mayi in the neighbouring province of Kasai, and interviews traders who explain the deep-seated corruption at every level of the diamond trade and ‘controlled’ by the Societe Miniere de Bakwanga (MIBA). She interviews its long-standing government representative, Jonas Mukamba (p.118) who paid Mobutu a hefty slice of the profits and in exchange was allowed to run Mbuji Mayi as he liked.

Eventually the infrastructure of Mbuji Mayi crumbled and collapsed, as had the mining infrastructure of Katanga. World mineral prices slumped but also, what was being produced was now being almost entirely smuggled. The rake-off from official trade collapsed because official trade collapsed. As the 90s progressed Mobutu lost his power of patronage.

She visits the central bank and the alleyway behind it jokingly referred to as Wall Street because it’s lined with unofficial street money changers. As Mobutu borrowed more and more from abroad and printed more money inflation soared and the currency collapsed. Wheelbarrows full of notes. A 500,000 zaire (the currency) note was printed to general resignation. Printing money led to mind-boggling inflation 9,800% and printing of the 500,000 zaire note. Mobutu had presided over the utter ruination of the economy.

Chapter 6

The collapse in Kinshasa epitomised by 1960s high-rise ministries without functioning lifts. The collapse of public phone system which was replaced by mobile networks, Telecel, for the wealthy. The collapse of the health system exemplified by Mama Yemo hospital which employs guards to prevent patients leaving without paying their bills.

Wrong pays a visit to Kinshasa’s small nuclear reactor, built on sandy soil liable to landslips, hit by a rocket during Kabila’s takeover of power, which had no security at all on the day she visited, and where one or two nuclear rods have recently gone missing.

Chapter 7

An explanation of ‘Article 15’, which is, apparently, the much-quoted ironic dictum by which most Congolese live their lives.

When the province of Kasai seceded soon after independence, it published a 14-article constitution. So many ethnic Luba people returned to the region expecting to become rich that the exasperated secessionist ruler made a speech in which he referred to a fictional, hypothetical 15th article of the constitution, which basically said, in French, ‘Débrouillez-vous!’ meaning ‘get on with it’, ‘figure it out yourself’, ‘deal with it’ or ‘improvise’. Since 1960 has become a universal expression throughout the country to explain ‘the surreal alternative systems invented by ordinary Zaireans to cope with the anarchy’ (p.11) they find themselves living in.

And so Wrong gives an overview of the hundred and one street professions of a people struggling to live in an economy with no jobs and no wages. Wrong gives an extended description of the Mutual Benefit Society run by the disabled street people of Ngobila Beach and the tiny loopholes in the law they exploit to smuggle and sell items.

She meets a fervent Kimbanguist, the religion described by van Reybrouck. Van Reybrouck’s account of Kimbanguism is much more thorough, lucid and logical, but Wrong’s is an in-your-face explanation via one particular believer, Charles, a Zairian who combines high moral principles (‘we are never naked’) with the profession of ‘protocol’ or fixer of bribes at Kinshasa’s notorious N’Djili International Airport.

Chapter 8

Le Sape, Congo’s equivalent of Mods, snappily dressed proles. The origin and purpose of the Society of Ambiencers and Persons of Elegance (SAPE), as explained to Wrong by self-styled ‘Colonel’ Jagger (p.176) as a protest against poverty and the drabness of the constricting African authenticité style demanded by Mobutu.

Then she gives a portrait of the ex-pat community of European idealists and chancers and romantics who came out in the 1950s or 60s and stayed on past independence and into the Mobutu years. This focuses on the example of Daniel Thomas a French construction worker who has repeatedly tried to start small farming businesses only to be repeatedly looted and ruined by his neighbours, and now all of his money is tied up in a farm he can’t sell and who has lost all hope. His wife is exhausted and disillusioned and wants to leave this sick land but they are stuck.

Chapter 9

Wrong details the vast sums loaned or given to Zaire over the years by international banks and especially the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. She interviews insiders who explain that during the 1960s, 70s and 80s very few conditions were attached to vast loans which, predictably, disappeared straight into the bank accounts of Mobutu and cronies.

Chapter 10

Details of the vast palace Mobutu had built for himself at Gbadolite in the jungle in the north of the country, right on the border with Central African Republic. It’s said to have cost $100 million, with an airstrip big enough for Concorde to land on. Musical fountains, ornamental lakes, model farm, gilt, marble. This is what a lot of Western aid paid for. Eventually it came to seem too big and imposing so… he had another one built a few miles away at Kwale, with an olympic size swimming pool,

The story of Pierre Janssen who married Mobutu’s daughter, Yaki, on 4 July 1992, and so became the only white person in Mobutu’s inner circle and a few years later revealed all in a kiss-and-tell memoir. The Moules flown in from Belgium, huge bouquets of flowers flown in from Amsterdam, cakes flown in from Paris along couturiers and barbers.

The weirdness that after his first wife, Marie Antoinette, generally reckoned to be a restraining influence on him, died in 1977, he married his mistress Bobi Ladawa, and took as a new mistress…her twin sister, Kossia. They socialised together, were seen together. Wrong speculates that there might have been a voodoo, animistic belief that the twins would ward of the nagging spirit of his first wife, for twins are regarded in Africa as having totemic powers (p.223).

Chapter 11

A brisk account of the Rwandan genocide which is in a hurry to explain the longer and more significant consequence, which was the creation of vast camps for Hutu refugees just across the borders in Zaire and how these camps, supported by huge amounts of foreign aid, were reorganised by the thuggish Hutu genocidaires who set about planning their revenge attack on Rwanda. By 1995 there were some 82,000 thriving enterprises in the camps which had become mini-towns (p.239), no surprise when you consider that the UNHCR and aid organisations had pumped at least $336 million into them, more than the Kinshasa government’s total annual operating budget.

In early 1996 the Hutu leadership undertook a mission to ethnically cleanse the North Kivu region of its ethnic Tutsis, massacring those it could find, forcing the rest to flee. In late 1996 it was south Kivu’s turn to be cleansed. The local Tutsis, known as the Banyamulenge had watched the Hutus slowly take control of the region, launch revenge raids into Rwanda, and had called on the UN and Kinshasa to neutralise the Hutu genocidaires but the UN did nothing and Mobutu gave them tacit support.

Which is why in October 1996 four rebel groups, with the backing of the Rwandan and Ugandan governments formed the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL) and took the fight to the Hutus, forcing the genocidal Interahamwe to flee west and majority of the refugees to traipse back into Rwanda.

Chapter 12

The main thing about the so-called First Congo War is there was hardly any fighting. The Zairian army, the Forces Armées Zairoises, the FAZ, was a joke and ran away at the first threat of conflict. The only violence came from the FAZ as they looted, burned and raped their way through the villages en route back to Kinshasa. There were a few set-piece battles but for most of the AFDL forces the war consisted of a very long march through jungle, sometimes using Zaire’s decaying roads, mostly using the jungle paths which have replaced tarmacked roads in many areas.

Wrong interviews Honoré Ngbanda Nzambo Ko Arumba, for five years the feared head of Zaire’s security service who explains why the FAZ was so useless. It all stems from Mobutu’s basic management technique which was to keep the army divided between different factions, to create a series if confusingly titled security and military units, to have a multitude of generals and security ministers and to keep them all guessing. To set them in deliberate rivalry, to give them contradictory orders, to create permanent confusion, suspicion and paranoia. Why? Simples: to prevent any single person or unit from becoming a centre of real power and so a threat to his rule.

Also, most of these units were kept down in Bas Congo, close to Kinshasa. Zaire had almost no border guards or forces. Why? Because the army was not designed to fight other countries or protect the country’s security; it was an internal security machine whose sole raison d’etre was protecting the president.

Another reason was simple corruption. The many generals and senior ranks Mobutu created, solely with a view to placating the numerous tribes and/or keeping prominent figures onside, to a man practiced various forms of corruption and graft, the simplest of which was to take the soldiers’ pay for themselves. Which explains why soldiers went without any pay at all for months on end, sometimes half a year. Which was the central reason why they mutinied and not only mutinied but went on great rampages of looting; they were claiming their back pay, taking what they though society owed them. That was the root cause of the two great Pillagings of 1991 and 1993.

And then there was greed raised to the level of comic farce. Most officers or army administrators had been selling off stock for cash for years. Thus the FAZ had out of date East European guns, the wrong ammo for their guns. Initially army commanders in Kivu sold the best of their munitions to the AFDL for a quick profit, arms and ammo the AFDL then turned back on the FAZ, who turned and ran.

Lastly, the neighbouring countries turned against Mobutu. Rwanda and Uganda were the AFDL’s main backers, but the Angolan government had for decades resented Mobutu’s support for the UNITA rebels and took the opportunity to send forces into Zaire to crush their base camps. Zambia co-operated by letting the AFDL cross its land to reach the south. Zimbabwe and Eritrea sent the rebels modern arms and Tanzania turned a blind eye to rebel bases on its territory.

By March 1997 the AFDL had taken Kisangani, next came Mbuji Mayi, then Lubumbashi, capital of the mining region in the south. It took just seven months from the launch of their campaign till the first AFDL troops arrived outside Kinshasa prompting the atmosphere of paranoid panic Wrong describes in the first chapter of this book.

Chapter 13

As so often happens with tyrants, Mobutu’s overthrow coincided with his final fatal illness. It’s as if their imminent fall from power triggers a collapse in their bodies. King Leopold II lasted barely a year after he handed the Congo Free State over to the Belgian government (February 1908) and in an eerily parallel way, the AFDL’s seven-month advance on Kinshasa coincided with 66-year-old Mobutu’s diagnosis with prostate cancer.

As the rebel forces relentlessly advanced westwards, Mobutu was in and out of the most expensive private clinics in the world in Switzerland. Thus his personal intervention and decision making was almost entirely absent during the crucial months. When he returned to his capital in March 1997, he could barely walk and had to be supported from the plane.

On 16 May 1997, following failed peace talks chaired by President of South Africa Nelson Mandela, Mobutu fled into exile and Kabila’s forces proclaimed victory. Mobutu died in exile in Morocco 3 and a half months later, 7 September 1997.

This is where Wrong places a fascinating interview with Mobutu’s son by his second wife Bobi Ladawa, Nzanga Mobutu. He mourns his father and insists he loved his family and loved his country. Wrong gives her account of the very last few days, especially negotiation with the Americans who tried to broker a deal with Kabila, partly through Nzanga’s eyes, partly through the account of US ambassador Daniel Simpson who took part in the actual discussions, and Bill Richardson, the troubleshooter US President Bill Clinton handed the tricky task of persuading Mobutu to relinquish power and tell his troops not to fight the AFDL as it entered Kinshasa, a confrontation which would have led to a bloodbath, anarchy and another Great Pillaging (p.271).

What comes over is the absolute centrality of the Americans as power brokers in the situation, but the refusal of a very sick Mobutu to formally abdicate and of Kabila to make any concessions. Right at the last his generals abandoned him. The knackered Russian Ilyushin jet Mobutu and his close family flew out of Kinshasa to Gbadolite in was peppered with machine gun fire by his very pissed-off personal guard, the Division Spéciale Présidentielle (DSP) who he was abandoning to their fates (p.279).

Chapter 14 Ill-gotten gains

A few months after Kabila took power, he set up the quaintly named Office of Ill Gotten Gains (OBMA) to identify Mobutu’s looted assets, including his multiple properties abroad (p.286). Wrong meets the first director of OBMA, former nightclub owner turned rebel soldier Jean-Baptise Mulemba lists and visits some. Three years after his fall, Wrong visits his large Swiss mansion at Les Miguettes, now falling into neglect.

Epilogue

The epilogue reminds us that this book was published in 2000, when Congo was still in the toils of what became known as the Second Congo War and Kabila was still president. She was not to know Kabila would be assassinated in 2001 and the war drag on for years.

Wrong shows us the dispiriting process whereby the initial high hopes about him and his crusade to undo corruption soon faded, as he found himself having to resort to all Mobutu’s old techniques for trying to hold his wartorn country together, namely creaming money off foreign loans, the mining companies, and even introducing tougher taxes on ordinary Congolese, in order to keep the regional governors and all manner of fractious stakeholders onboard.

Anyway, as Wrong’s book went to press in 2000 it ends with a survey of the many depressing tokens which indicated that Kabila was falling into Mobutu’s old ways, only without the dictator’s charisma or shrewdness. Blunter. Cruder. She calls Kabila a ‘thug’ (p.300).

And she ends with an assessment of whether Mobutu’s missing billions will ever be recovered. The short answer is No, for the simple reason that they don’t exist. All the evidence is that millions went through his hands but en route to the key stakeholders, political rivals, regional warlords, he needed to pay to follow him.

At a deep structural level, the corruption and gangster economy run by Mobutu and then Kabila may be the only way to keep such a huge country, divided into starkly different regions, populated by some 250 different ethnic groups, together.

God, what a thought. The population of Congo in the 1920s when the first estimates about how many died during Leopold’s rule, was said to be 10 million. By the date of independence 1960 described in Ronan Bennett’s novel The Catastrophist it had only risen to 15 million or so. When Wrong’s book went to press in 2000 she gives Congo’s population as 45 million. And now, in 2021? It is 90 million! Good grief. What future for a ruined country overrun by its own exploding population?

France

The French come out of this account, as usual, as scumbags. France was ‘Mobutu’s most faithful Western friend’ (p.287), ‘always the most loyal’ of his Western supporters (p.258). From the 1960s Zaire came to be regarded by the French government as part of its ‘chasse gardée’:

that ‘private hunting ground’ of African allies whose existence allowed France to punch above its weight in the international arena. (p.196)

The French believed they understood the African psyche better than the Anglo-Saxon British or Americans. They clung on to belief in their mission civilisatrice despite their not-too-impressive record in Vietnam and Algeria. Since the 1960s the French government has promoted la francophonie “the global community of French-speaking peoples, comprising a network of private and public organizations promoting equal ties among countries where French people or France played a significant historical role, culturally, militarily, or politically.” (Wikipedia)

The practical upshot of this high-sounding policy was that the French government promised Mobutu their undying support, no matter how corrupt and evil he became. The French government funded schools and media – so long as they promoted the French language. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, French president from 1974 to 1981, was a great friend of African dictators and secured them many loans which just happened to coincide with a building firm run by Valery’s cousin winning quite a few contracts to build Zairean ministries and bank buildings and so on (p.131). Very handy.

It meant military aid, too. When rebels invaded Shaba from Angola, France parachuted legionnaires in to fight them. During the First Pillaging of 1991 France flew in troops to police the streets.

After his downfall, when the OBMA set out to track down the billions of dollars Mobutu had sequestered abroad, the lack of co-operation from the French government stood out.

Confronted with the AFDL’s legal and moral crusade, the silence from France, Mobutu’s most faithful Western friend, was deafening. (p.287)

But France’s standout achievement in the region was to protect the Hutu instigators of the great genocide of Rwanda. This is a hugely controversial subject, which I’ll cover in reviews of specifically about the Rwanda genocide, but in brief: the French government supported the Hutu government. The French president was personal friends with the Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana, so when his plane was shot down and the Hutu government went into panic mode, the French government’s first response was to support them and to carry on supporting them even as they carried out the 100-day genocide. When the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded Rwanda to put an end to the genocide, France continued to support the Hutus and helped the genocidaires escape, along with millions of other Hutu refugees into eastern Congo, where they continued to support them, even after the evidence was long in the public domain that they had just carried out the worst genocide since the Holocaust.

Because for the French government, all that matters is the glory of France, the prestige of France, the strength of the Francophonie. Morality, justice, human rights, all come a poor second to France’s unwavering commitment to its own magnificence.

Hence France’s unwavering support for the evil kleptocratic dictator Mobutu right up till his last days; hence France’s support of the Hutu government, even after it became clear they were carrying out a genocide. A guilt France has taken a long time to face up to, has finally admitted, albeit hedged with reservations and caveats.

Repeated stories

Stories, gossip and educational facts are learned through repetition. Wrong repeats the description of big statue of Henry Morton Stanley, long ago torn down and lying rusting outside a warehouse in Kinshasa. Several times she refers to the two great Pillagings of 1991 and 1993.

She repeats the story about the Congo’s store of uranium dug from the mines of Shinkolobwe being sent by a foresightful colonial administrator to New York where it was discovered by scientists from the Manhattan Project and refined to become the core of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima (p.140).

Her chapter about King Leopold’s rape of Congo under hypocritical claims of freeing it from slavery and barbarism repeats much of the material I’ve read in Hochschild and van Reybrouck. She repeats Hochschild’s mentions of Congolese historian Isidore Ndaywel e Nziem’s estimate that 13 million died or fled the region during Leopold’s rule.

Van Reybrouck thought the tragic story of Lumumba betrayed by his secretary and friend Mobutu was like a Shakespearian tragedy. Wrong thinks it is Biblical like Cain and Abel, two beloved brothers who end up betraying each other. It certainly haunts the imagination of novelists and historians and commentators in a way the later, long rule of Mobutu rarely did, and the rule of Laurent Kabila not at all.

Credit

In The Footsteps of Mr Kurz by Michela Wrong was published by Fourth Estate in 2000. All references are to the 2001 paperback edition.

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Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer by Tim Jeal (3)

Working for King Leopold, 1879 to 1885

The biggest blot on Stanley’s reputation is that he devoted the longest single part of his working life to working for King Leopold II of Belgium helping to map out and establish the core infrastructure for what would become the notorious Congo Free State. This was the enormous area, corresponding to the modern Democratic Republic of Congo, which Leopold managed to get assigned to his own personal rule at the Congress of Berlin in 1885. Leopold posed as a great philanthropist, a promoter of civilisation and Christianity and doughty abolisher of the widespread Arab slave trade which Stanley and all the other explorers had discovered.

It took until the late 1890s for news to leak out of the atrocities Belgian soldiers and overseers were committing on the native population, which slowly brewed up into an international scandal, which led Leopold to hand over the colony to the Belgian government, and the whole humanitarian catastrophe to become the quintessential example of imperialist hypocrisy, exploitation and brutality. The stories which leaked out of unimaginable brutality against the native peoples of the region formed the basis of Joseph Conrad’s harrowing novella, Heart of Darkness (1899). The whole story is told in Adam Hochschild’s harrowing history, King Leopold’s Ghost (published exactly one hundred years after the Conrad, in 1999).

Anyway, the point is that Stanley was approached by representatives of the king, entered discussions and finally agreed to sign a five-year contract to use his knowledge of the Congo to establish a basic transport infrastructure. This consisted of a road from the coast via a succession of small settlements he established or created trading stations at (Boma, Vivi, Isangile, Manyanga, Mfwa) up to the so-called Stanley Pool, designed to bypass the river’s many impassible rapids and cascades. He was a hands-on manager of the other Europeans and the many African labourers co-opted for the work, earning him the humorous nickname Bula Matari or ‘Breaker of Rocks’. Stanley was paid £1,000 a year.

Five years is a long time and much happened, notably: 1. Stanley became incensed by the brutality and racism of the Belgian officers under his nominal command. 2. He very slowly began to suspect Leopold was not the benevolent philanthropist he was posing as and Jeal notes the many letters he wrote Leopold insisting that the white man only had the right to lease property and no right to seize or claim ownership of native land. Stanley insisted that no Belgian officer was entitled to treat the Congolese:

‘as though they were conquered subjects ..This is all wrong. They are subjects – but it is we who are simply tenants.’

Up the roads he built were transported steamships, broken into sections and reassembled above the rapids, which hugely expanded access to the upper Congo.

3. Stanley faced the rivalry of the French explorer, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who entered the Congo from the north and tried repeatedly to claim the entire north bank of the river and its hinterland for France, requiring repeated negotiations, threats and recriminations, carried out not only on the ground in Congo, but in Paris, London and Brussels, as Leopold managed the threat from the French, while Stanley invoked the possibility of the British stepping in – the last thing both the continentals wanted.

Jeal is writing a revisionist biography. His aim is to exonerate Stanley. As such he describes in detail the various meetings between Stanley and Leopold, quotes from letters between them, the contract Stanley signed, correspondence with intermediaries, diary and journal extracts, all tending in the same direction, which is to show that Stanley took Leopold at his word and believed him a genuine philanthropist. To be fair, so did plenty of other politicians, statesmen, journalists, missionaries and concerned parties.

The crimes against humanity Leopold sanctioned (the most notorious was cutting off the hands of natives who had failed to collect a set amount of rubber per week) only began to take place in the 1890s, well after Stanley had completed his five year contract in 1884 – although he was kept on by Leopold on a retainer and a fractious relationship for a few more years. And news about the atrocities only began to leak out to the press via reports of a handful of activists in the later 1890s, over ten years after Stanley had ceased all contact with the king.

King Leopold juxtaposed with just some of the millions of Congolese who were mutilated during his personal rule

Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, 1886 to 1889

When the Khedive of Egypt had gone bankrupt in 1882 the British had stepped in to administer Egypt and Sudan. Partly as a response to Western ‘occupation’ there had arisen the Mahdi, a low-born Egyptian who presented himself as a charismatic Islamic leader and raised impressive numbers of followers. General Gordon had been administering the southernmost province of British Egypt, named Equatoria, since 1873.

Alarmed at the rise of the Mahdist forces, the British government sent General Gordon to Khartoum with instructions to secure the evacuation of loyal soldiers and civilians and to depart with them. In defiance of those instructions, after evacuating about 2,500 civilians he retained a smaller group of soldiers and non-military men and remained, fortifying the town against a siege which lasted almost a year.

During this time there was huge publicity in the press about plucky Gordon holding out against the mad Mahdi and the forces of barbarism. The government hesitated and worried about the cost but eventually sent an expeditionary force to fight its way through to Gordon and rescue him. As is fairly well known they were too late. After a long siege, the Mahdist forces finally breached the defences of Khartoum on 26 January 1885 and killed the entire British garrison including Gordon and most of the population of the town. An estimated 10,000 were killed.

Apart from the penny-pinching reluctance of the government to launch the relief expedition, and the way the British public memorialise British heroic failures (the charge of the Light Brigade, the siege of Mafeking, the Somme, Dunkirk) the other notable thing about the incident is the immense power of the press. Gordon’s heroics were very widely reported and the matter became one of general public interest, forcing the government to act.

All the same forces came into play in the Emin Pasha affair. With Gordon dead, there remained a British force even further south into Sudan, led by one Emin Pasha, and the issue now arose of how to rescue him and his ‘heroic’ soldiers. Pasha was depicted as a brave soldier of the Empire and a noble fighter against the evils of slavery. On the back of the outcry over Gordon, a committee was set up to lobby for the rescue of Pasha and his men, whose whereabouts was not known exactly. The money came pouring in from public subscriptions (the campaign raised a total of £32,000) and who was chosen to lead the expedition into a particularly obscure region of central Africa? Stanley.

In Jeal’s account almost every element of the two year long expedition was a fiasco and what wasn’t a fiasco was a catastrophe. It can be divided, maybe, into three components.

1. Pasha’s background

It is quite staggering to discover the discrepancy between the stereotype of the noble Christian administrator and abolisher of slavery which Pasha was painted as by the popular press, and the disappointing reality. The beauty of a biography as long and detailed as Jeal’s is you get to learn so much about minor or secondary figures that it at times has the richness and complexity of a novel.

Pasha was no dauntless Briton but had been born Eduard Schnitzer, to Lutheran parents in the Prussian province of Silesia. In 1864, aged twenty-four, this bearded and bespectacled German had qualified as a doctor in Berlin, but had failed on a bureaucratic technicality to be granted a government licence to practise, he settled in Albania – then a Turkish province – where he set up as a doctor. A brilliant linguist, he soon added Albanian and Turkish to the five other languages he already spoke. He was a first-rate pianist and chess player, and also excelled as a botanist and ornithologist. In 1870 Emin joined the staff of Ismail Hakki Pasha, Governor of northern Albania, and served with him till his death three years later. During this time he had an affair with the Pasha’s wife, and after she became a widow, lived with her as she were his own spouse. In 1875, he ran out of money and took Madame Hakki, her four children and six slave girls to stay with his parents in Germany. While there – realising he could not support ten people indefinitely – he abandoned Madame Hakki, and fled the country. He would not contact his family again for fourteen years. (p.315)

See what I mean by ‘like a novel’? By 1875 Emin had made his way to Khartoum (as far away from h is angry wife as he could get), set up practice as a doctor. He now posed as an Arab of Arab birth and came to the attention of General Gordon, Governor-General of the Sudan. In 1878 Gordon appointed Pasha Governor of Equatoria, then the Mahdi rising occurred, Gordon was massacred after a prolonged siege, and the British press clamoured for the noble Pasha to be found and rescued.

2. The expedition

It was the most gruelling and death-ridden of Stanley’s big three expeditions. The cause was starvation. The expedition was very well funded, it was the largest and best-equipped to go to Africa, had plenty of native porters and more white officers than Stanley had had before. It landed on the west coast with the aim of travelling thousands of miles up the Congo before branching off where the Congo makes its great turn to the south, to head east along the Aruwimi river, in order to strike overland to Lake Albert at the southernmost tip of Equatoria.

Leopold had promised Stanley use of his steamers above the Stanley Pool, which the explorer had been responsible for transporting there several years earlier, but in the event all but one were out of commission, which significantly delayed and complicated logistics.

At Yambuya on the Aruwimi, the expedition was running so low on food, and so many porters had deserted that Stanley took the fatal decision of dividing it in two, leaving the majority of goods with several white officers in the rear, depending on a promise from the notorious Arab slaver, Tippu Tip, that he would provide hundreds of additional carriers. Leaving the rear column behind, Stanley forged on through what turned out to be ruinously difficult terrain through the Ituri forest where his own men died of starvation and disease, before emerging into the territory of inhospitable and violent tribes. Of the 389 who set out from Yambuya, only 169 survived the gruelling trek through Ituri. But they had hired many more porters along the way, not least from the slave trader Tippu Tip, so it’s estimated that over 400 lives were lost in total (p.370).

It took some time to fight off the local tribes, try to negotiate alliances and safe passage, before Stanley located Pasha and his motley garrison of Arabs and Sudanese. The two men finally met on 29 April 1888 and Stanley was disconcerted to discover that Emin was in perfectly good health and none too keen on being ‘discovered’ or ‘rescued’. In fact Pasha and his men were able to feed Stanley’s emaciated and fever-stricken followers, thus ‘rescuing the rescuers.’

And, in a major disillusionment, it turned out Pasha wasn’t very keen to be taken back to ‘civilisation’ where he strongly suspected Madame Hakki would quickly take him to court (he was to be proved right about this) but more importantly he deceived Stanley about the paper-thin authority he had over his own troops, who didn’t want to take Stanley’s route of travelling east along the familiar slave route back to Zanzibar, and preferred to travel back north through their own native lands. Pasha’s men mutinied.

Meanwhile, Stanley trekked back towards the rear column with supplies. It is difficult for a modern reader to get their head around the incredible delays and protracted timeframes. The rear column had, by this stage, not had any word or instructions from Stanley for over a year. Half way back they encountered an officer named William Bonny who told them the disastrous fate of the rear column.

3. Pasha’s downfall

There were a lot of issues persuading Pasha to take the eastwards route to Zanzibar, and managing the potentially dangerous defection of many of his most senior officers, which Jeal describes in great documentary detail. What stood out for me was Pasha’s fate. When the survivors of this huge, devastating and gruelling expedition finally made it back to Zanzibar, the consul’s residence and ‘civilisation’, a big party was held. At the height of the festivities, Emin Pasha, the centre of the entire £32,000, three-year operation which had cost so many lives, was found badly injured in the street outside, having fallen from a second-storey balcony.

Did he get drunk, wander onto the balcony and, being short sighted, not see the low balustrade and simply fallen over it? Or was it a suicide attempt, given that the enormous publicity surrounding the affair, all across Europe, had alerted his long-abandoned wife, Madame Hakki, that Pasha was alive, and she had begun proceedings in German courts, which would not only ruin him financially, but blow the cover he had dedicated years and years to creating in Africa (p.378).

Pasha didn’t recover from his fall for months, till the end of January 1890 but he did not return to Europe. He found employment with the Germans who were Britain’s fiercest rivals in East Africa, but his hopes of claiming Buganda for Germany and being appointed its governor were dashed by the careful arrangements of the 1890 Anglo-German Agreement. Pasha fell out with his German employers and set out for the interior on a mission of his own which has never been clarified.

In 1892, a hundred miles from the Congo, Pasha was beheaded by Arabs in alliance with a warlord called Kibongo. The Pasha’s sixty Sudanese followers were all shot. (p.380)

A. J. Mounteney-Jephson, Stanley’s most loyal lieutenant on the trip, made a different calculation, estimating that they set out on the lower Congo with 708 people of whom only 210 survived (p.381). The numbers are variable because extra porters were hired all along the route, and the number of camp followers (wives and children) fluctuated. But the main point is clear. Hundreds and hundreds of natives and over half the white men who started on the expedition, perished, and for what?

The Emin Pasha relief expedition turned out to be the last of its kind, run by a freelance explorer, funded by a private committee. The era of freelance exploration had come to an end and from this point onwards, expeditions were to be funded and managed by the government departments which were taking over all aspects of colonial administration.

Stanley with the officers of the Advance Column, safely back in Cairo in 1890. From left  to right, Dr Thomas Heazle Parke, Robert H. Nelson, Henry M. Stanley, William G. Stairs, and Arthur J. M. Jephson

Marriage and frustration

Jeal gives detailed accounts of Stanley’s many attempts to find a bride. Obviously his prospects changed overnight when he became super well-known as the hero who had found and supplied Dr Livingstone, a fame boosted by swift publication of his bestselling account, How I Found Livingstone (1871).

It is interesting to read about the rather cold-blooded practicality with which Stanley and his friends set about trying to find an eligible partner for him (p.300). It is pretty clear that the best candidate would have been May French Sheldon, an interesting character in her own right. Born and bred in America, May married a banker and developed as a journalist, essayist and novelist. She and husband Eli moved to London, where she corresponded with and then met Stanley who she found fascinating and inspiring. According to Jeal, May and her husband enjoyed an ‘open marriage’, something she informed Stanley about, and they were much in each other’s company.

However, Stanley wanted a wife and children, not a mistress and so, ultimately, May didn’t work out. This was a shame as she continued to worship him and, after Eli died in 1890, she herself undertook several expeditions to Africa, travelling up the Congo (funded and directed by Leopold’s people who gained good publicity out of her) and, on another trip, travelling from Mombassa to Mount Kilimanjaro unaccompanied by any other white person (p.385). She wrote up her travels and undertook lecture tours, becoming well known and was one of the first women to be made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. In other words, she was right up Stanley’s street, and it would have been a match made in heaven

But instead Stanley was hooked by Dorothy ‘Dolly’ Tennant, scion of a rich family, a socialite and reasonably well known artist, exhibiting at the Royal Academy. Tennant came from a rich, well connected family, a family friend was the Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone. Dolly appears in the narrative on page 300 and then recurrently till the end of the book.

Dolly’s father, Charles Tennant, a lawyer and politician, was 58 when Dolly was born and died when she was 18. For years after his death she kept a diary in which she started each entry ‘Dear father’. With transparent psychology, she was attracted to father figures, men 10 or 20 years older than her, of high status, wealthy and married. She and Stanley became involved soon after he’d been invited to a dinner party at her family’s swanky London house in Richmond Terrace (June 25 1885), exchanging letters and love tokens.

Dorothy Tennant who married Stanley in 1890, painted by George Frederic Watts

However, Dolly was calculating. Jeal shows us how she spent most of the three years that Stanley was away on the gruesome Emin Pasha expedition (1886 to 1889), carrying on an impassioned (though presumably platonic) affair with Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall, Privy Councillor, member of the Council of the Secretary of State for India, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and, like most of Dolly’s crushes, twenty years older than her and married. There is no doubt she was in love with him. But, eventually, his detachment, his gloomy personality, and his married status forced her to acknowledge that he was never going to marry her.

Instead, as news arrived back in London that Stanley had reached Zanzibar, and as his fame exploded off the scale, she was happy to revive her correspondence with him and began telling all her friends that she had always had an understanding with the world famous explorer. Stanley, for his part, was naive, inexperienced, all too used to being rejected by the women he wooed, and so was bowled over when this beautiful, clever, rich and well connected young woman agreed to become engaged.

It was a massive, almost a state wedding. They were married in Westminster Abbey to which the blushing bride drove in a closed carriage along Whitehall through cheering crowds (p.400). The bishop of Ripon conducted the service, the signing of the register was witnessed by Gladstone and the two society painters, Millais and Leighton. What more could a girl wish for?

It took a while for them to realise that they were total opposites: she loved living in London, lived for socialising, loved being the centre of attention at high society parties, was perfectly at home with the very cream of London society, Prime Minsters and so on. Stanley was the extreme opposite, self consciously aware of his lower class origin, hating publicity and attention, preferring to be left alone to think and ponder. Stanley records the moment he realised it, after one of their first arguments because he had asked her to leave him alone for just a few hours to write his next book and she couldn’t understand why he wanted to be apart from her and burst into tears.

‘It struck me that is married life was to be a conflict of this nature, between marital duty and that which one owes to the public, there will be little happiness in future. The utter hopelessness of compatibility between her ideas and mine [was] revealed to me so suddenly that I was speechless for a time…’ (Stanley in his diary entry 4 September 1890, quoted page 403)

This caused much conflict until Stanley eventually bought a country house in Pirbright, Surrey, which he devoted himself to doing up and landscaping.

In 1885 Stanley had hoped that Leopold would invite him to become Governor of the new Congo state he was carving out. A large part of the evidence for Stanley’s lack of complicity in Leopold’s crimes of the 1890s is that Leopold never seriously considered this. He realised that Stanley was too fond of Africans and standing up for their rights to be the kind of obedient servant he (Leopold) was looking for. Then came the opportunity of the Emin Pasha expedition and Stanley was totally absorbed in that through till late 1889, then got married in 1890.

When he’d returned from that trip, an exhausted man, Stanley had hoped for several years that he might be asked by the British government to become a governor of the new colonies being legally defined, mapped and established across Africa. His good friend Sir William Mackinnon had been lobbying the government for years to carve out a legally defined British colony in Buganda and Kenya in order to compete against and contain the aggressive colonisation of the area by Germany, to finally stamp out the slave trade and to open the area for British trade.

In December 1892 Mackinnon, by now an old and ailing man, made a final offer of the governorship of the region to Stanley. To his everlasting disappointment, Dolly persuaded Stanley to turn down the offer, saying she couldn’t be parted from him, he was too old and ill, and so on. Instead she strongarmed him into standing for parliament, so he would become more like… her father, the politician. Stanley campaigned for and narrowly lost the election to become Liberal MP for Lambeth North, hating every minute of it, the public scrutiny, the big meetings, the heckling. In July 1895 there was another general election, Dolly again forced Stanley to stand, and he was elected Liberal Unionist MP for Lambeth, serving from 1895 to 1900. He hated it. For a man used to the widest, openest spaces in Africa, being cooped up for 14 hours a day in a badly ventilated, stuffy chamber listening to pontificating windbags, was his idea of hell.

It is heartening to report that the final years of Stanley’s life were made bright and happy after he adopted the six month son of one of his many distant Welsh relatives. The boy was brought to Pirbright and named Denzil and, as Stanley grew older and suffered a series of strokes, the small boy was to become the light of his life. He died in his bed at Pirbright on 10 May 1904, aged 63. Having read this long, thoroughly researched, ultra-detailed, and convincingly argued biography, I’m astonished he managed to last that long. What a life!

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Rushing to Paradise by J.G. Ballard (1994)

‘Is this how new religions begin?’ (Neil to Carline)

The problem with Ballard’s later novels

Empire of the Sun (1984) and The Kindness of Women (1991) are powerful displays of fictional autobiography, of Ballard taking autobiographical elements from his life and creating highly contrived, posed and arranged scenes and narratives, which both display the autobiographical roots of his peculiar imagination and arrange and elaborate them for purely fictional purposes.

However, as if in some Faustian fable, the imaginative effort which went into creating these two highly crafted novels seems to have involved some kind of trade-off, seemed to use up his ability to conceive decent plots or stories which adequately support, justify and contextualise his weird imaginative insights, obsessions and language.

What I mean is: the three early ‘disaster’ novels, and then the three ‘urban disaster’ novels of the 1970s, and then the two autobiographical novels, are all centred on clear narrative ideas which justify his dazed, feverish way of looking at the world. That the characters in The Drowned World, The Drought or The Crystal World go slowly mad seems a wholly adequate response to the extreme situations they find themselves in. Ditto Crash and High Rise where we accompany relatively small groups of people step by step as they go to pieces.

The power of all these books derives from the way you can half imagine yourself responding sort of the same way. Empire of the Sun may appear to be a realistic autobiography, but it is in fact very artfully designed – very focused in conception and shape and pattern to – again – draw us in to what, when you really examine it, is a tissue of feverish hallucinations and extreme mental states.

Ballard had already turned his back on traditional science fiction by the time of The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) in order to focus on the intense and claustrophobic urban situations depicted in Crash, Concrete Island and High Rise. The intensity is achieved by having small casts, set in concrete urban environments, who go to pieces. It helps that all three of these books are also relatively short, so that they read more like novellas, their brevity contributing to the feeling that they have an almost allegorical simplicity you get from fables.

However, around the time of Empire of the Sun (1984), and maybe as a result of writing it, Ballard seems to have made a conscious decision to let his fiction become longer and more discursive. As a result it becomes less focused. Since the stories are longer he comes to rely on plot structures which are much more ‘conventional’ than anything that came before, set in recognisably contemporary places, and featuring larger and larger casts of people. (He also comes to copy the plots of previous ‘classic’ novels, as I’ll explain below.)

The problem with all this is that contact with the modern world and a wider cast of characters somehow highlights how narrow, intense, weird and, ultimately, how unreal, unique and idiosyncratic Ballard’s vision is.

When one man, Robert Maitland, is marooned in a stretch of waste land between two motorway spurs, and goes hungry, and thirsty and becomes malnourished and feverish and eventually goes schizo, the reader can go all the way with Ballard because it is just one man, and accidents and extreme things do happen to individuals, and it is a short, punchy narrative which has the super-real power of a fable or deranged fairy tale.

However, in the later novels, Ballard takes on the attempt of describing relatively large groups of people, in a recognisably contemporary world, in the kinds of situation many of us might have experienced ourselves – and this results in the reader finding themselves repeatedly thinking, ‘Well, that just wouldn’t happen’, or ‘I just don’t believe they’d behave like that.’

Rushing to Paradise 1

Take Rushing to Paradise. A discredited English doctor (if I had a pound for every Ballard protagonist who’s a doctor), Dr Barbara Rafferty, a 40-year-old obsessive, was struck off the Medical Register for euthanasing some old ladies in England. She left the UK, knocked around the world a bit and has ended up running a home for disabled children in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Here she learns from Kimo, a disgruntled Hawaiian policeman (who got fired from the force because of his obsession with setting up an independent Hawaiian nation and kicking out the American tourists) that the French military are reopening a nuclear testing facility on Saint-Esprit, a remote atoll 600 miles from Hawaii and, in so doing, are wiping out the colonies of rare albatross that live there.

At a stroke Dr Rafferty takes up the cause of the albatross and starts carrying a banner reading SAVE THE ALBATROSS and hanging round posh Honolulu restaurants haranguing rich diners.

It’s outside one of these posh restaurants that rootless 16-year-old, Neil Dempsey, having just had dinner with his mother and American step-father, sees her being pushed around by security guards and takes pity on her.

Dempsey is the son of a London radiologist who died three years earlier. He is obsessed with nuclear weapons and abandoned nuclear test sites, partly because his father had attended the British nuclear trials held at the Maralinga test site in Australia, and his widow (Neil’s mother) claims that her husband’s cancer could be traced back to these poorly monitored atomic explosions.

Neil was brought out to Hawaii by his widowed mother who has fallen in love with an American colonel in the Marines, Colonel Stamford, but Neil packs in school, becomes a beach bum, and develops into a fit, long-distance swimmer who gets a job working as a part-time projectionist at the University of Hawaii.

When she learns about this job, Dr Rafferty is instantly convinced Neil must know all about cameras, so can film her heroic exploits, and bullies him into accompanying her and Kimo on a hired steamer all the way to the remote atoll.

Here they go ashore in an inflatable dinghy and are filming each other struggling to hang up one of her home-made SAVE THE ALBATROSS banners when a few lazy French troops emerge from the jungle and, when our little squad make a run for it, shoot Neil in the foot.

Cut to six weeks later and Neil has become a worldwide celebrity and poster boy for the environmental movement due to the footage of him being shot which has been shown on all the news channels. After remanding the hapless trio in custody for a few weeks, the French authorities had been forced by diplomatic and media pressure to repatriate them to Honolulu.

Here Neil watches from his hospital bed TV an endless loop of footage of environmental protests by students at universities round the world, intercut with Dr Rafferty making grandstanding speeches. She has become ‘the bag lady of the animal rights movement.’

She finds a sponsor, Irving Boyd, a reclusive thirty-five-year-old computer entrepreneur now living in Hawaii. He had recently retired after selling his software company in Palo Alto to a Japanese conglomerate, and is now devoting himself to wild-life causes, starting with media star Dr Barbara Rafferty. Boyd has donated the Dugong, a 300-ton Alaskan shrimp-trawler which he has had equipped as a floating marine laboratory, and which Dr Rafferty insists she’s going to sail right back to the Saint-Esprit.

Neil hobbles along to the Honolulu docks to watch the fuss around the Dugong as it is loaded with food and equipment, as tourists come down to watch and film it, as a pop up market appears to cater to the tourists, and as the whole ‘expedition’ turns into a media circus.

What is this book about?

At this stage, about page 60, I was really wondering what this book is ‘about’.

Is it a satire on the TV age, the media age, in which any damn fool with a cause can find themselves at the centre of a media storm?

‘The Dugong‘s a stage-set, Dr Barbara. Like the replica of the Bounty. For him everything turns into television.’ (Neil to Dr Rafferty)

Ballard was obsessed with television. The psychological impact of the supposedly desensitising affect of endless atrocity footage from Vietnam and Africa is at the core of The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash.

The simultaneously alienating and empowering power of the camera is also a recurrent theme in his fiction. In High Rise it is attached to the figure of the TV documentary film-maker, Richard Wilder, who makes a long, arduous and doomed ascent of the vast luxury high rise carrying his trusty ciné-camera, long after it has been smashed beyond repair and become a psychological talisman rather than a rational aid.

A central sidekick character in Day of Creation is the academic-turned-TV-star, Professor Sangar, who flies in with the full panoply of TV cameras and lights and tapes and monitors and editing machines so he can make a documentary about his heroic efforts to feed Africa, a plan which goes badly awry.

And one of the handful of recurring characters in the supposedly autobiographical book The Kindness of Women is Professor Richard Sutherland, psychologist-turned-TV pundit, whose scenes provide Ballard the opportunity for extended conversations / meditations on the peculiarly alienating effects of TV, which makes everything histrionic and fake while at the same time making even the genuinely weird seem domesticated and tame.

Is that the way to read this novel, as an extended riff on the theme of television fame, the odd combination of super-saturation and utter vacuousness which television creates?

Rushing to Paradise 2

No, is the short answer.

It turns out to be another utterly Ballardian vision of decline and fall, of the physical, moral and psychological collapse of a small group of initially posh, intelligent, middle-class types who end up hunting each other like feral animals.

It turns out, in other words, to be a rewrite of Lord of the Flies for the TV age. At the last minute Neil is persuaded to join Dr Rafferty on the second expedition, kidding himself that he is going to ‘look after’ her. Also on the team are:

  • Monique Didier, in her late thirties, daughter of one of France’s first animal rights activists, the writer and biologist René Didier. She and her father had set up a wild-life sanctuary in the Pyrenees for an endangered colony of bears. For years they endured the abuse and hostility of local farmers angered by the bears’ sheep-killing and their sentimentalised image in the metropolitan press. All this had made Monique prickly and defensive, but she was dedicated to her campaign, brow-beating her first-class passengers on the Paris-New York and Paris-Tokyo runs. After repeated warnings, Air France had lost patience and sacked her
  • A young Japanese couple, Professor Saito and his wife, professional botanists, who abandon their careers at the University of Kyoto to join Dr Barbara’s crusade.
  • A film crew of three – Australian director Janet Bracewell, camera-man, her American husband Mark, and Indian sound-recordist, Vikram Pratap
  • David Carline, the last volunteer to join the expedition. The president of a small pharmaceutical company in Boston, he had been on holiday in Honolulu when he learned of Dr Barbara and her mission to save the albatross. The family firm had for decades supplied its pharmaceuticals to the third world, and Canine had frequently taken leaves of absence to join American missionary groups in Brazil and the Congo, teaching in mission schools and delivering lay sermons at the open-air church services.
  • Captain Wu and his seven Filipino crew crew

When they arrive at the atoll after weeks at sea, things take an ominous and tragic turn. The Dugong is menaced by a French frigate which cuts across its bows and, in a freak miscalculation, sheers of the stern railing and walkway, tipping the cameraman, Mark Bracewell, into the sea where he is crushed to death between the hulls of the two boats. Mourning. Grief. The French crew take the expedition members aboard and give them medical treatment. The Dugong drifts onto the reef outside the atoll, where it is holed and starts leaking polluting engine oil. The crew go ashore to bury Bracewell, stay in makeshift tents and when they wake up – the French have gone. The French authorities recognise bad publicity when they see it and have decided to abandon the atoll and announce the cancellation of any forthcoming tests.

Our heroes are alone on the island with their passion and their albatrosses.

They had taken footage of the Dugong resisting the beastly French, which had been beaming out live to a worldwide audience of millions via Irving Boyd’s state of the art satellite technology, so a huge audience had watched Bracewell die on live TV.  The result is that a flotilla of volunteers and supporters deluge the atoll, bringing food and volunteers. Dr Rafferty gives TV interviews declaring the atoll a sanctuary and refuge for endangered species from around the world, and donors give greenhouses and human cages and all the equipment you need to house and nurture rare species.

The motley crew of nine (Rafferty, Neil, Kimo, Carline, Monique, the Saitos, Janet, and Vikram) begins setting up a camp and for months afterwards they find a) regular planes flying into the military runway bringing generous donations of food from round the world and b) a steady stream of ships, yachts and schooners anchoring inside the atoll’s reef and coming to interview the noble environmentalists, or also bringing endangered plants and animals from around the world.

The middle part of the book lists the various boats with oddballs, fanatics and genuine helpers who anchor and hang out, before moving on. One bunch who stay is a quartet of German hippies who arrive in a dishevelled yacht painted psychedelic colours, the Parsifal, and set up their own little camp on the beach, nursing a Downs Syndrome child, Gubby, between them.

But what follows is not a David Attenborough documentary. It is not only like Lord of the Flies but like The Beach by Alex Garland which was published two years after Ballard’s novel.

For weird changes are afoot. The relentless intrusion of the outside world makes Dr Rafferty increasingly antagonistic and bitter. She persuades them to pull down the French army’s radio aerial across the atoll’s military runway. The American, David Carline, had enjoyed running the radio shack which he used to guide planes with donations and supplies into the French airstrip, but one night it is burned to the ground. No more planes, no more of the generous supplies which were being landed every month by Captain Garfield, the cheerful sixty-year-old Queenslander.

The German hippies are always hanging round cadging food and one evening Dr Rafferty persuades the impressionable Neil to fire up the massive bulldozer the French left behind, and to bulldoze all the crates of food and material brought from the outside world, pushing them across the beach and into the sea. Now, Dr Rafferty beams at the dazed and appalled members of hewr little crew who have woken to find this sabotage being carried out. They will have to be strong, they will have to provide for themselves.

And so they have to turn to foraging, to finding yams and beating yarrow to make it edible. They lose weight. They develop sores and ulcers. Dr Rafferty eggs them on with over-bright eyes.

Ballard has turned the tropical paradise they arrived at into a passable imitation of the Lunghua Internment Camp whose long shadow hangs over Empire of the Sun (1984) and The Kindness of Women (1991). An outbreak of diarrhea weakens everyone. Dr Rafferty takes to lecturing everyone that the men are particularly weak, worn out by centuries of competition and fighting.

Slowly, the colony becomes more feral. The gung-ho American, Carline, takes to organising night-time ‘attacks’ on the German hippies in which the more fired-up colonists blow a whistle and then charge the hippies’ ramshackle tent on the beach, knocking it over, waving flaming brands in their faces, Neil accidentally swings a club into the (defunct) television screen they’d half embedded in the sand, shattering broken glass everywhere. The laid-back daytime activities of sunbathing and lazing give way to something much darker at night-time.

In the same spirit, everyone is shocked one evening to see the ramshackle yacht the hippies arrived on, the so-called Parsifal covered in psychedelic patterns, burning, all the masts and rigging burning down. Now even more impoverished and wretched, the hippies come begging to the main camp every day until Dr Rafferty loses her temper and declares no-one is to give them any more food, forcing a kind of moral decision on the colonists, whether to follow their conscience, or obey the Fuehrer. Most obey.

Gubby, the Downs Syndrome child of the German hippies, comes down with diarrhea and Dr Rafferty reluctantly agrees to admit it to her ‘clinic’ and treats it carefully, even as its condition deteriorates. Eventually Gubby dies.

Monique had been joined, back in the early weeks while there was still contact with the outside world, by her ageing father, René Didier the famous environmentalist. Now he too becomes very ill, bed-ridden, and one night dies of a stroke.

But Neil sees the pillow which he suspects Dr Rafferty held over Gubby’s face. And later sees the same marks and a few bloodstains on René Didier’s pillow.

The other men fall ill. Professor Saito keeps himself to himself in the special greenhouse he’s constructed from donated material to house his collection of rare fungi. But he too falls ill and, the more Dr Rafferty tends him in her ‘clinic’, the sicker he becomes.

Now, it is no secret that Dr Rafferty was struck off for performing illegal euthanasia on her elderly patients back in Britain. Neil read the full details in a magazine profile of Rafferty published back in Honolulu. What puzzled me is that the book presents the sequence of events on the island as if it is all an imponderable mystery instead of being bleeding obvious. Neil is portrayed as going along with Dr Rafferty’s explanations for the mysterious deaths, despite the fact that we are told that he read about Dr Rafferty’s record of criminal euthanasia while he was in hospital in Honolulu. Later on, he admits that he’s known all along that Dr Rafferty is killing off the men, but at the time he is powerfully under her sway. We are meant to believe he knows and doesn’t know, at the same time. Basically, for me, this doesn’t work.

This is vividly demonstrated when the increasingly psychotic Dr Rafferty disappears after Gubby’s death. She just ups stumps and disappears.

Her crew are bereft without her but Neil, more given to roaming the atoll’s forest than the others, comes across her holed up in some kind of concrete bunker embedded in a cave half way up a densely forested hill. Here Dr Rafferty completes her domination and enslavement of Neil by a) getting him to help her steal endangered animals from the compound, whisk them away, and cook and eat them outside her cave; and b) having sex with him.

Swaying her shrivelled dugs over his face, Dr Rafferty rides Neil’s penis with feverish eyes until she climaxes, then stands over him and urinates all over the sores on his chest, before finally lying on his body and letting him stroke her fevered hair. Quite enough to enrapture any 16-year-old boy, let alone one already deranged by an obsession with nuclear war, and in the standard Ballard state of advanced malnutrition and feverish decay.

After a few weeks, Dr Rafferty returns to her colony and they, who had been bereft without her, welcome her back as a saviour. It turns out to have been a clever psychological move.

Throughout this long period of decline, as the mood darkens and intensifies, Neil is warned and protected by Major and Mrs Anderson, American donors who wisely choose to remain aboard their yacht anchored in the lagoon. Neil himself realises that they are just the latest in a succession of surrogate parents which he seems to attract.

In this respect he slowly comes to resemble, the wayward feverish teenage protagonist of Empire of the Sun right down to the way the others are always trying to ‘calm’ his feverish over-excitement.

But one night, as they are visiting ashore, the Andersons’ yacht, like the Germans’ before them, is hit by a drastic fire which burns most of the superstructure. The Major swiftly makes a decision to leave, totally sure the fire was no accident but arson. They don’t have many supplies and their dinghy was damaged in the fire but they sail off. As they leave, Neil happens to be swimming in the lagoon and finds himself swimming out to them, and for a few minutes believes he’s going to grasp the hand the Major is reaching out to him. But as usual, he is conflicted and ambiguous, and when voices call him from the shore he finds himself turning back, and watches the Andersons sail away as best they can in their damaged boat.

In among the other slow deteriorations in morale, as Professor Saito falls ill, as Kimo comes down with dysentery, the German men spend their time trying to repair what’s left of the Parsifal. One day the German hippy girls wake to discover their menfolk have left, sailed off in their leaky boat to get supplies from the nearest island. According to Dr Rafferty, that is. The characters appear to believe her, but the reader doesn’t, which makes the characters appear dim and slow.

Although the first flush of publicity has long waned, other boats do occasionally still call by the island, anchor and come ashore. In every case all the women are welcomed ashore but, after a few days, their husband’s or parent’s boats abruptly leave, usually leaving a message with Dr Rafferty that they have left to go fetch food or cruise a bit more before returning…

Eventually, in a succession of dialogues, Dr Rafferty explains to Neil that she is building a feminist colony, a sanctuary for women.

‘Saint-Esprit isn’t a sanctuary for the albatross, it’s a sanctuary for women – or could be. We’re the most endangered species of all… Who were the first domesticated animals? Women! We
domesticated ourselves. But I know women are made of fiercer stuff. We have spirit, passion, fire, or used to. We can be cruel and violent, even more than men. We can be killers, Neil.’

Professor Saito wastes away and dies, but by this time his hard-eyed wife is so indoctrinated by Rafferty that she doesn’t care.

Part of the reason she doesn’t care is because she’s pregnant, but not by her husband. As the narrative becomes weirder and more intense, Dr Rafferty plays on Neil’s naivety and trust (and his strikingly fit, lean body and his teenage hormones) to suggest that he, er, impregnates all the women.

The idea takes a while for Neil to process, and maybe the women, too – and yet Ballard has, by now, created such a weird feeling about the island of dead men, that the reader accepts that the German hippy women, then angry Monique, and even fierce Mrs Saito, let him inseminate them. Or in Mrs Saito’s case, briskly and brutally milk him for his seed.

Other degradations happen. The women are now openly killing, butchering and cooking the once-precious endangered species. It is under the eerily empty eyes of these towers and bunkers, built to monitor nuclear test explosions across the lagoon four kilometers away, that this Lord of the Flies scenario plays out.

There are strange and beautiful descriptions of Neil learning to dive deeper and deeper into the reef offshore, in order to catch fish for the increasingly malnourished little crew. He finds that classic Ballard prop, a drowned warplane which crashed decades earlier, whose pilot was still in his straps but has long ago been eaten by the fishes.

Poor Kimo had been wasting away with the same illness as Professor Saito. He dies almost unnoticed.

Women recruits arrive in dribs and drabs: the Van Noort sisters, daughters of ‘an amiable Amsterdam architect and his handsome wife’ in the yacht Petrus Christus; two New Zealand nurses, Anne Hampton and Patsy Kennedy; the grand-daughters of a rich Canadian couple. They are welcomed, taken in, start helping with chores and maintenance. One night a few weeks later the van Noort parents ship anchor and sail away, leaving a message with Dr Rafferty for the girls that they had sailed for Tahiti and would return in a month or so’s time.

But a few days later, from up on the mountain, Neil realises he can make out the shape of a yacht sunk beyond the reef. Because he is the colony’s fit sea-diver it is easy for Neil to swim out and then down to the submerged yacht and to discover that is it the Petrus Christus, the yacht which brought the Dutch sisters. Not only that, but it is attended by a festival of fish, feasting on fresh food stored below decks. Having read one or two books, and seen one or two thrillers, the reader has a good idea what has happened. The parents have been murdered and their yacht scuttled.

Neil surfaces, swims ashore and rushes to tell Dr Rafferty about it but almost faints from hunger and the effort of diving and swimming. Dr Rafferty soothes him (‘calms him’ in the lexicon of the novel), deflects all his excited claims by saying he is tired, he needs rest, he should come to the clinic where she can look after him, and, pressed against her chest and smelling her smell, Neil falls under her sexual-psychological spell and forgets his urgent message.

He settles into the ‘clinic’ and into the same routine of ‘care’ as Dr Rafferty administered to Prof Saito and Kimo. Neil is reassured and soothed by her mothering presence even as he becomes more feverish and weak, but deep down knows what happened.

A few weeks later he wakes from his fever in the night and staggered to the doorway of the clinic where he had seen Carline, the only other man left in the expedition, and who continues to have a very odd, tangential relationship with the psychotic doctor, slipping down to the beach in the middle of one night and hours later, returned dripping wet. Next day, Neil overhears that the Canadian grand-parents have sailed off in the night but left a reassuring message with Dr Rafferty for their puzzled grandchildren. But now Neil knows now that Carline goes silently out to their yachts and kills them, all the inconvenient male or older relatives, sails the yachts a little beyond the reef, and scuttles them, leaving the colony of young women to grow.

Also on board the Petrus Christus when it first arrived had been a copper-skinned 14-year-old Moluccan cabin boy, Nihal. As Neil gets sicker and sicker in the so-called clinic, he is aware that all the by-now heavily pregnant women have taken to petting and feeding Nihal. He is their new favourite. Neil realises he is past his sell-by date. By now he is spending all his time in bed ill with an intense fever, in the same bed where Professor Saito sweated his last, and is being regularly injected by Dr Rafferty. He is so delusional that he still trusts her, and this is really the hardest part of the entire story to believe.

Problems with Rushing to Paradise

We are now in the final third of the book and there are two glaring objections to the whole thing:

  1. Neil is a bright boy. He must have known for a long time that Rafferty was becoming psychotic, had killed off the other men, commissioned Carline to murder the adult yachters, and is now killing him.
  2. For this long second half of the book I think readers are meant to be puzzled and a little unsure what’s happening, thus giving the book some elements of thriller or whodunnit… But – as Ballard’s earlier ‘whodunnit’, Running Wild – it was extremely obvious to me what was going on: that Dr Rafferty was going psychopath crazy from fairly early on, and then there were hundreds of clues all pointing one way.

Is the book intended to be a whodunnit? Is the reader meant not to understand what is going on? Are we meant to be on tenterhooks of suspense?

In which case it’s a fail, because not only is the entire decline and fall narrative super-familiar – it’s Ballard’s basic plot – but the ‘clues’ are so blatant as to generate no suspense and no tension at all.

Or is Neil’s slowness on the uptake meant to indicate the strange psychological hold Dr Rafferty exerts over everyone so that they all know exactly what is going on but accept it? This is a subtler artistic goal, and the book comes closer to achieving it, but it boils down to whether you go along with Neil’s self-deceit: this is why the backstory of his dead father, his distant mother and his obsession with nuclear test sites are so structurally important: they are meant to indicate that Neil was psychologically damaged or vulnerable from the start and so easily manipulable by Dr Rafferty even though he knew what was going on.

In a way the entire novel stands or falls on whether you accept the character of Neil and his schizophrenic gullibility.

By presenting events very artfully Ballard is able to elide obvious common-sense questions like: doesn’t Mrs Saito care that Dr Rafferty murdered her husband? Don’t the two German hippy girls care that Dr Rafferty murdered their child? Doesn’t Monique care that Dr Rafferty murdered her father? And doesn’t Neil, in the end, care that Dr Rafferty murdered the kindly gentle Hawaiian Kimo, and the whip-smart troubled Carline who always gave Jim, er I mean Neil, such good advice?

No. All of them are swept along by the logic of the narrative which can brook no hesitation or complications.

I’m guessing that in interviews about Rushing To Paradise Ballard would invoke the real-world example of the Jonestown Massacre (November 18, 1978) in which a total of 918 people died from cyanide poisoning, many murdered, but many willingly going to their deaths, and all overawed, frightened by or obedient to their charismatic leader Jim Jones. Or maybe the tragic events surrounding the Waco Siege, which reached its bloody climax in February 1993. Maybe he said this novel was an ‘investigation’ of the way one charismatic psychopath can come to dominate a group of submissive well-intentioned helots, and lead them eventually to their deaths…

But saying that something similar happened in real life doesn’t help you when your book is judged as a work of fiction. I mean it needs more than factual references indicating that something like this is possible. It needs to persuade us, to show us how it is possible.

I suppose Ballard and his supporters would argue that the novel is an extended fictional investigation of the nature of fanaticism and that the environmentalism topic is just a current, modish focal point for what has obviously been an enduring type of fanatical human behaviour. Ballard appears to have had a dim view of environmentalists, as this casual remark Super-Cannes suggests:

 ‘It could be racist, or some mad animal rights thing. Fanatical Greens always veer off-course, and end up trying to save the smallpox virus…’ (spoken by Paul Sinclair, the 1st-person narrator of Super-Cannes)

Ballard must have taken pleasure in conceiving the genuinely unnerving reversal of the entire colony’s environmentalist aims when we learn that, first Dr Rafferty, and then by insensible steps, all the other women, take to killing, butchering and cooking the endangered species which have been brought from all round the world and entrusted to their care, and which are meant to provide the colony with its raison d’etre, while Neil watches and accepts this, as he does every other twist and perversion of their original purpose.

All this sounds like a good idea, it is quite a good idea – the problem is whether you really believe or buy into the actual execution of it in this novel. I struggled.

Rushing to Paradise 3

Anyway, Neil is obviously being brought to death’s door by the good doctor’s ‘treatment’ when one day, by accident, he stumbles out of the ‘clinic’ and around Dr Rafferty’s vegetable garden which she’s been digging and preparing for as long as anyone can remember. Only to discover that this is quite literally where the bodies are buried. Delving with the spade sh’d left in the earth, Neil discovers that here are the two German hippies buried one on top of the other, and here is Carline who everyone had assumed had left with one of the many yachts which mysteriously vanished in the night, and here…. here is a shallow grave prepared for Neil, and already filled with his few spare clothes!

Finally, finally, sparked to act on all his knowledge and suspicions, Neil staggers off away from the settlement and up into the forested hillsides. Here there is freshwater, berries and he is able to kill wild animals and eat them raw. Slowly his ‘fever’ wears off and he realises the extent to which Dr Rafferty was poisoning him.

Several mornings in a row, he sneaks back to the camp and pinches the fresh bread left out to cool by Monique who has emerged as the baker among the colony of pregnant women. Except that the second time he tries it the women are lying in wait with knives and machetes. He is stabbed in the arm and has burning coals thrown over him before he can break out of the circle of vengeful women, and run off into the jungle.

The women chase him like maenads in a Greek myth but he has built up a good knowledge of the jungly hills and goes to ground in a cave and dozes. He wakes from a fevered sleep to realise the hillside is covered in smoke, The mad women are pouring gasoline from the French army bulldozer all over the hillside and setting fire to it.

At this point, I realised the narrative was following William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies not just in a general way, but has converged to become almost an exact copy. In the Golding book the schoolboys-turned-into-savages hunt the last decent boy, Jack, through the tropical forest, and set fire to it to flush him out.

Now we find Rafferty’s women doing exactly the same, setting fire to the island to flush Neil out.

And then, exactly as in Lord of the Flies, as the chase reaches its climax and the women confront Neil with their terrifying knives and are just about to kill their sacrificial victim… they all hear the sound of a helicopter overhead and then see a French naval vessel out at sea. The grown-ups are back. The descent into hell is over.

(Realising just how closely the climax of the book copies the climax of Lord of the Flies reminded me of how much Day of Creation mimics Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Ballard is not exactly plagiarising – the original stories are too well known for anyone to think he’s pinching them. On one level he is rewriting them for the age of satellite TV. On another level he is invoking their power as predecessors, as so many literary authors do. In another way he is laying claim to be the successor to these feted authors. There are probably other elements to it, but this deliberate echoing of two super-classic narratives in his two post-Empire novels is very noticeable.)

The women flee although the hillside is still in flames. Some time passes while Neil checks it is safe, and then makes his way by circuitous paths back to the camp. Here he wanders in a daze and discovers that half the women are lying dead in their bunks, the hard core followers Monique and Mrs Saito dead in each others’ arms, the other women dying of poisoning. Looks like Dr Rafferty persuaded them all to be injected with poison and end their lives rather than capitulate to the enemy or let the colony be broken up by the approaching French.

Just like Jim Jones persuaded all his followers to die rather than ‘surrender’ in the Jonestown Massacre.

Dr Rafferty has disappeared. The last Neil saw of her she had taken Carline’s gun and was shooting and stomping the dying albatrosses. Dying? Yes, for some time Dr Rafferty had been injecting poison into the fish on the shoreline which the albatross ate. Why? In order to exterminate them. Extermination. ‘Exterminate the brutes’ as Colonel Kurtz said. The degradation of the environmentalists’ cause into its exact opposite is symbolically complete.

Then she ran off into the forest.

Neil comes across some of the more recent converts, the New Zealand nurses and the Canadian girls, half conscious and is able to get them to vomit up the poison Dr Rafferty had administered and to massage their circulations back into life. And it was this obvious life-saving action, testified to by the survivors, which stands him in good stead when the French ship finally anchors and sends ashore a landing party. The French had been tipped off by Major and Mrs Anderson whose yacht did indeed sink, as Rafferty and Carline had intended, but who managed to survive and be picked up by a rescue ship. Now the French authorities come ashore and try to establish exactly what has happened in this madhouse.

Rather like the reader. The last word is given to Neil who lies to the authorities, telling them he saw Dr Rafferty running into the waves to her death. But she didn’t. She escaped into the jungle. And Neil knows that if she resurfaces, alive, and if she asked him to join her again on another of her expeditions… he would! Thus right to the end the psychological ambiguity of Neil is the keystone on which the entire narrative depends.

What was that all about?

It’s about so many things that, is Rushing to Paradise about anything in the end?

1. Television I dislike Ballard’s obsession with TV and the media, it feels sooo dated. I worked in broadcast TV from 1987 to 2000 and so much satire about TV, in my opinion, makes obvious points about celebrity and media circuses, goes on to claim that TV has created a new ‘reality’ and so on but somehow misses the point. The truth is subtler than that. Everyone knows that TV is not ‘reality’, but it does create a certain kind of discourse, or whole networks of discourse, which have a variety of effects, which would repay careful study, but… there’s nothing that subtle in this book. When Ballard writes that:

The endless bedside interviews and television appearances had done their work, Neil reflected. He was now a talisman of the animal rights movement, to be carried shoulder-high like the stuffed head of a slaughtered bison.

You reflect that it sounds good, but that TV celebrity is not actually like that. Ballard’s view on it is distorted by his wish to present it as some kind of latter-day religion, creating tribal totems. But even if we think about Greta Thunberg, who is quite a close comparison with Neil, the media discourses around her are more interesting, more complex, and far less melodramatic than what Ballard needs for his macabre tale of decline and fall.

2. Environmentalism Similarly for the big central theme of the novel which appears to be satirising environmental activism. No doubt there is a satirical novel to be written about Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, but this isn’t it, not least because, by the end, the Lord of the Flies horror show has drowned out anything which isn’t drenched in blood and psychosis.

Satire works best when it has a sympathetic understanding of its subject, and knows just where to stick the knife for maximum effect, but in his book Ballard describes Dr Rafferty is a deranged old baglady from the beginning, and one with an unhealthy old lady-murdering past.

Friends of mine work for The Worldwide Fund for Nature and the Forestry Stewardship Council. The ambience and mindset is nothing at all like this book. Ballard isn’t interested in ‘investigating’ environmentalism, it’s just a hook for his enduring central obsession with mental collapse.

3. Feminism in the second half of the novel Dr Rafferty is given a stream of speeches promoting women, declaring women are stronger than men, that women do all the real work, women have more endurance yet are exploited and abused in the real world.

‘There are too many men, Neil. We simply don’t need so many men today. The biggest problem the world faces is not that there are too few whales or pandas, but too many men… Their time has passed, they belong with the dugong and the manatee. Science and reason have had their day, their place is the museum. Perhaps the future belongs to magic, and it’s we women who control magic. We’ll always need a few men, but very few, and I’m only concerned with the women. I want Saint-Esprit to be a sanctuary for all their threatened strengths, their fire and rage and cruelty…’

As she goes into a phase of declaring the island will be a sanctuary for women as well as other endangered species, women who, it turns out, will be fertilised by one tame male kept as a farm animal, but easily eliminated when he is surplus to requirements.

‘Men exhausted themselves building the world. Like tired children they’re always fighting each other, and they can’t see how they hurt themselves. It’s the women’s turn to take over now – we’re the only ones with the strength to go on. Think of all-women cities, Neil, parks and streets filled with women…’

If it had stopped there, the novel might have been a sort of satire on feminism, except that it, of course goes further, and in the end even Dr Rafferty’s beloved women, like her beloved albatrosses, turn out not to be up to her demanding vision, and she tries to exterminate both groups.

So what is it saying? That feminism – like environmentalism – is a creed which attracts homicidal maniacs? Or are both the environmentalism and feminism included solely to show how a psychopath can twist any cause, no matter how well-intended, to his or her purposes? Or did Ballard’s long-term girlfriend, Clare Churchill, just tell Ballard to put more feminism in his books?

4. Group psychology Is it a fictional investigation of the Jim Jones-Waco psychology – of the fanatical leader-worship which leads a group of already slightly unhinged followers to go off to a remote jungle fastness where they can go suicidally nuts? On paper, yes, it certainly is something like that: the entire narrative can best be summarised as a group of high-minded environmental activists find themselves marooned on a remote Pacific atoll where they submit to the homicidal impulses of their psychotic leader.

In the six weeks since the destruction of the radio-cabin the sanctuary had come to resemble the encampment of a religious sect….

Maybe it is the simplest and most obvious interpretation of what the novel is ‘about’.

5. Sympathetic magic But although this sounds like a reasonable description, in fact almost all the characters are mentally unstable right from the start. Doc Rafferty we have already established was an enthusiastic murderer of old ladies, but Neil himself, the central figure, is mostly defined by his unhealthy interest in nuclear weapons and testing grounds. He doesn’t give a damn about the albatross, he wants to see another nuclear weapon detonated at Saint-Esprit.

And alarm bells ring – we realise we are among hard core Ballard characters – when we learn that the Japanese taxonomist Professor Saito’s wife thinks they are travelling to Saint-Esprit as the delegates of all the nuclear casualties of World War II. We enter the world of Ballard logic when she says that, by saving the albatross, they will be helping the spirit of many people in Hiroshima, and all other casualties of nuclear bombing and testing.

As I read this passage I suddenly realised that this kind of thinking, which afflicts so many of Ballard’s characters, is a form of sympathetic magic.

Sympathetic magic, also known as imitative magic, is a type of magic based on imitation or correspondence.

A shaman sticks pins in a doll, the person the doll represents will feel pain; a shaman does a dance mimicking the falling rain, it will rain. In just the same way, the Japanese couple believe that, if they can ‘save’ the albatross, they will also ‘save’ the Hiroshima victims, and all the other people either physically or mentally damaged by nuclear weapons. Professor Saito has brought along a terracotta jar of human ashes, a small sample entrusted to him by the keepers of a Hiroshima ossuary, which he hoped to bury beside dead albatross on the quiet sands of the Saint-Esprit lagoon.

If it’s an investigation of how charismatic psychopathic leaders emerge, it’s also a description of an odyssey from Western ‘rational’ thought into the realm of more primitive, tribal psychology.

Descent into primitivism

‘Is this how new religions begin?’ (Neil to Carline)

Maybe looking for a ‘rational’ explanation is pointless because Ballard is determined to push us towards far more primitive, pagan forces at work. There are distinct and eloquent passages about:

  • the television age
  • modern feminism
  • environmentalism

But rumbling along beneath the entire text is a deeper bass drone about the fundamentally irrational roots of human behaviour, and in particular a careful littering of the text with numerous words  and terms connected with primitive religion:

  • A concrete blockhouse sat in a grove of tamarinds, a forgotten totem of the nuclear age that seemed more ancient than any Easter Island statue
  • ‘You’re a shaman, Neil, you’ll live in the forest with Professor Saito and count the winds.’ (p.82)
  • The towers on the high island had been swallowed by the advancing forest, ancient megaliths left behind by a race of warrior scientists obsessed with geometry and death.
  • Dr Barbara lifted the flap of the tent and pointed to the runway, where Kimo and Carline, Monique and the Saitos sat under the palms beside the bulldozer, watching the clouds. The surface of ground coral had been swept by Kimo to befit the arrival of a queen. ‘Waiting for the sky. We’re turning into a cargo cult.’
  • He was now a talisman of the animal rights movement, to be carried shoulder-high like the stuffed head of a slaughtered bison.
  • Dr Barbara clasped the rusty safety pin between her breasts, a talismanic brooch… (p.100)
  • The gleaming complex of reaction vessels and separation chambers filled with ion exchange resins sat under the trees like a machine deity, its bowels emitting curious noises and a few drops of rusty water… (p.105)
  • Too busy to consider this, Dr Barbara hacked away at the undergrowth, and at last Monique took pity on them and told them to consult the desalination plant, which she described as the island’s oracle… (p.106)
  • This glass structure became their tribal wigwam, around which they gathered in the evenings to smoke their pot. (p.109)
  • ‘Saint-Esprit isn’t a sanctuary, it’s a rubbish tip picked over by TV crews. You may not realize it, David, listening to your head-phones, but you’ve been running a cargo cult.’
  • Werner muttered a mantra over the creature, plucked a feather from its wing and stitched it through the collar of his sheep-skin jacket. (p.139)
  • Around this dour tribe the endangered plants and animals thrived and bred like visitors from another planet
  • Neil replied cautiously, aware that Dr Barbara was standing among the trees above the beach, a latter-day Margaret Mead watching the courtship rituals of an island tribe. (p.149)

Noticing the care with which Ballard has scattered these references through the text makes me realise:

  1. What a canny and careful contriver he is, in this as in all his other books, creating themes and topics and threads for readers no notice and unweave.
  2. How it doesn’t work. It works intellectually – any fool could write a paper about ‘The Imagery of primitive religion in Rushing To Paradise‘. I mean it doesn’t excite, surprise or amaze the reader. It feels too artful and contrived.

And the fundamental message – that beneath the veneer of ‘civilisation’, we’re all ‘savages’ – wasn’t even that new when Freud wrote about it in the 1920s, and has been the subject of vast swathes of literature and art ever since, sepecially after the Nazis and the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Ballard is so often described as a ‘prophet’ and prescient writer of the future, and yet the future he writes about is eerily reminiscent of the past, of the darkest perceptions of the 1940s and 50s – just updated to include satellite TV and Greenpeace.

Ballardisms

And also, woeven into the narrative, are the same handful of key words which push and compel and constrain our responses into the same narrow set of emotions and attitudes. Neil and the feverish Doc Rafferty are always having to be calmed:

  • Kimo steadied the trembling gate, his huge arms raised as if to calm the air.
  • Neil tried to calm her trembling shoulders, but she pushed him away.
  • Neil pulled her hands from the air and pressed them together, trying to calm her
  • Neil tried to calm himself…
  • Though thrilled at first by her own daring, Dr Barbara soon calmed herself…

This is because the lead characters are permanently at odds with the world, ill at ease and unsettled.

  • Neil had been unsettled by the fate of the huge birds, but he already realized that he was filming a well-rehearsed scene in the theatre of protest.
  • Neil was still unsettled by the suicide of his father, a radiologist who had diagnosed his own lung cancer and decided to end his life while he could breathe without pain.
  • The sight of the unguarded stores and the three inflatables on their trailer seemed to unsettle him Neil felt distanced from the rest of the expedition.
  • He missed Louise, and had been unsettled by her self-immersed chatter on the radio-phone.

The next stage beyond unsettled is the state of permanent over-excitement which so many Ballard characters seem to spend their entire lives in, or are stricken with the symptoms of actual fever. In the last quarter or so of the book Neil is in the Clinic suffering a permanent fever caused by Dr Rafferty’s slow poisoning of him, and the word ‘fever’ appears multiple times on every page.

  • The ordeal of Didier’s first month on the island and the nights of feverish sleep had wasted the old ecologist.
  • After a feverish night he ate a bowl of tepid tapioca, which set off another bout of vomiting and diarrhoea…
  • Dr Barbara helped herself to a second glass of communion wine. Already her face and neck were flushing, and she ignored the feverish ramblings of Professor Saito in his mosquito net.

And the next stage beyond feverish hallucination is actual insanity.

  • Neil held her around the waist, fearing that the deranged physician would leap into the bloody waves…
  • Neil tried to restrain her whirling hands, moving across the night air like deranged birds…
  • This storm-battered sloop was the Parsifal, and its hull and patched sails were painted with psychedelic colours, slashes of mauve and acid green that flared from the waves like the fins of a deranged kraken…
  • Carline rowed through the burning waves, his oars scooping up pockets of flame, grinning owlishly to himself like a drunken parent at a deranged children’s party…
  • A delirious convention was taking place, a deranged banquet of the fathoms…
  • Carline stood at the controls, working the brake levers with his frantic hands like a fairground organist grappling with a berserk calliope…

I don’t know what I think about Ballard’s obsessive use of the same key words over and over again, in book after book.

On one level it is a highly stylised gesture, like Japanese or ancient Greek theatre, a narrow set of stylised masks and gestures, created and arranged with a limited compositional vocabulary in order to create a more narrow and intense effect.

On the other hand, it means the reader is not surprised. If characters are described as ‘demented’ right from the start, then there isn’t a long way for them to fall, and you lose the psychological and fictional interest of following the process of watching someone really falling apart, travelling from a state of what most of us would call ‘normality’ to genuine psychosis. Describing your characters as ‘deranged’ almost from the start of the book, removes the element of surprise when they actually do start behaving deranged.

If anything it has the opposite effect. I knew Dr Rafferty was killing off the ‘patients’ in her ‘clinic’ well before all the other characters, and got bored waiting for them to catch up.

Because Neil himself is an odd boy right from the start, because he begins the story with feverish dreams of atom bombs and searing light across the lagoon, we miss out on any genuine sense of shock when he makes his final discovery, of the murdered bodies in Dr Rafferty’s ‘garden’. My reaction wasn’t one of shock and horror but relief that he’d finally cottoned on to what the reader has known for a hundred pages.

In another author’s hands the various stations of the community’s descent into madness might have been accompanied by genuine jolts of adrenaline. For example, I still remember the genuine bolts of terror I felt when I read Ira Levin’s two brilliant chillers Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives. They are very focused narratives which are written in a cut-down prose which is incredibly effective at conveying shock and then terror.

There was nothing like that in Rushing To Paradise. It’s a much more literary book, self-consciously stuffed with ideas and issues, and conveyed in a highly wrought prose full of careful analogies and repeated diction, whose characters are bonkers from the start. And therefore the entire thing feels more like a dream or fantasia, like a kind of slow-motion nightmare, than an actual thriller.

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Posted by Simon on March 10, 2020

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The Day of Creation by J.G. Ballard (1987)

The sutures of my skull were opening, letting the cool wind into the chambers of my brain. I stared up at the cloudless, cyanide sky, like the domed roof of some deep psychosis. (p.275)

This is a poor book. It is long, packed with detail, has an exotic setting, a reliably demented protagonist on a mad, quixotic quest – and yet it feels like a shadow of Ballard’s earlier works.

The Day of Creation shows the peculiar thing that happened to Ballard’s writing after he had revealed the source of his strange delirious worldview by describing his boyhood in a Japanese internment camp during World War Two in Empire of the Sun. It was like cutting off Samson’s hair. Overnight the neuroses which had enmeshed Ballard’s fiction, were freed and disappeared. The weird alchemy which held together Ballard’s first ten or so classic novels, and nearly a hundred short stories of obsession and psychological collapse, didn’t exactly disappear but somehow, magically, lost their genuinely disturbing power.

One symptom of this is that Ballard’s novels got longer. The Atrocity Exhibition barely stretches to 110 pages but I think it’s his best book. Crash, 171 pages, Concrete Island 126 pages, High Rise 140 – he was best in short, extremely concentrated, bursts.

By contrast The Day of Creation is a bloated 287 pages long and has lost its reason for existence long before the end.

The plot – part one

The story is told in the first person by Doctor John Mallory (if I had a pound for every Ballard protagonist who is a doctor). Having been born and raised in British Hong Kong, Mallory didn’t fit in at medical school in Cambridge or in England more generally, and so took up jobs with aid agencies, ending up working for the World Health Organisation.

A series of overseas assignments ends with one bringing him to the dead end town of Port-la-Nouvelle somewhere in the heart of Africa, between Chad and Sudan.

I found the opening chapters of the book deeply confusing. It took me a while to understand that it opens with Mallory being forced to his knees by a soldiers from a rebel group led by skinny, angry rebel leader, General Harare, once a dental student, now afflicted with boils and bad teeth, whose guerrillas periodically invade what is left of Port-la-Nouvelle, do a little gentle looting and return to the forest.

Specifically, he finds himself on the wrong end of a rifle held by a 12-year-old rebel girl who probably has a tale of terrible suffering behind her but when Mallory moves to take the rifle off her, she pulls the trigger. Luckily there’s a duff cartridge in the chamber so the gun doesn’t fire. He seizes the rifle and throws it away.

We learn that all this is being photographed by a young Japanese woman photographer, Miss Matsuoka, a type of the ambitious and amoral photojournalist. About fifteen minutes later the rebels have been fled as the town’s official army force arrives led by the ‘huge and clumsy’, 6-foot (p.28) Captain Kagwa and the situation sort of returns to normal.

‘Normal’ is that Mallory has been here in this empty town for the best part of six months, living in a scruffy trailer and, by his own admission, hitting the whiskey bottle at breakfast and carrying on drinking all day (p.72).

He had a brief affair with one of the only other white people in the locality, Nora Warrender. She kept a little sanctuary for wild animals with her husband till her husband was shot dead by the rebels. Mallory caught her on the rebound and they slept together for a few days until Mallory realised she had absolutely no interest in him whatsoever.

What seems like half an hour after the traumatic encounter with the rebels, a light airplane flies in and disgorges none other than Professor Sangar, sometime biologist-turned-television documentary maker, who has flown in on some cock-and-bull mercy mission with a plane full of rice, an assistant and a camera crew for whom he can pose as saviour.

Except that, as the deeply antagonistic Mallory who takes an instant dislike to the preening fool bluntly points out to him: a) the locals don’t eat rice, at all, their stock food is manioc, and b) there’s no locals here, anyway; they’ve all long ago fled the rebel guerrillas.

Sangar is actually laconically laid back about all this but is accompanied by an extremely tense and jumpy assistant, an Indian named Mr Pal who takes umbrage at every one of Mallory’s sarcastic quips.

All this is presumably intended to be satire on TV bullshit artists, particularly scientists-turned-TV gurus (remember that the car-sex-obsessed lead figure of Crash is a once-reputable scientist-turned-TV presenter). But not only is it crude satire, but it feels very clumsily deployed.

In fact the whole opening thirty or forty pages felt deeply clumsy, introducing characters pell-mell in the midst of events which are so badly described I didn’t understand what was going on.

What is the book about?

In a similar manner, it took me some while to understand the central plot of the book, in fact I only actually understood it from the blurb on the back:

Mallory has remained in Port-la-Nouvelle, despite having no patients to speak of (they’ve all run off to avoid the rebels) because he has developed the entirely irrational, quixotic and obsessive idea of rewatering this dry, arid part of central Africa.

The Port has jetties and quays which stretch out into Lake Kotto but this is bone dry, having dried up two years earlier, and whose bottom is not just dry but covered in parched dust.

Similarly, the one-time river which flowed into it is an arid ditch. Mallory has been using the small funds given to him by the WHO to pay for the drilling of a series of wells across the lake bottom, driven by a mad fantasy of a third river Nile to fertilise this whole region.

What happens next I found incomprehensible in every way. Mere pages after the rebels have left, and way before we have really understood and processed the depths of Mallory’s quest, and entirely by accident, a bulldozer which is meant to be extending the town’s small runway, lifts the immense root of a rotted old oak tree out of the sand at the end of the runway and… a trickle of water emerges. A trickle which turns into a stream, and then a good solid flow of water.

I didn’t really understand how such a flood of water comes from one dislodged tree root and I struggled to understand what happens next: which is that the source of this water appears to move, to shift location from coming out of one small scooped hole, and turns into a flood which moves further and further back into the jungle. As well as flowing downstream to begin to refill the barren lake, the source moves backwards, upstream. We find Mallory wading miles into the jungle to try and find the ever-receding source.

In some mystical way the accidental breaking open of a small spring changes morphs into a mighty river whose source is deep in the jungle, and the river becomes so mighty that, as the days go by, it gets bigger and bigger, it refills Lake Kotto, so that Port-la-Nouvelle’s piers and jetties are once more lapped by water and the level rises so high that it starts to threaten the runway and the lower parts of the town with inundantion.

But here’s the thing which I found genuinely incomprehensible: because the water didn’t come from the wells he’s sunk – and despite the fact that the river is doing just what he wanted it to, namely rewatering the region – Mallory takes against it and declares the river his enemy.

As futilely as he once drilled wells in a bone dry lake-bed, now he futilely tries to block, dam and reroute the river. It’s become Him against The River. I didn’t understand this, follow it or believe it, but it becomes the core of the remaining two hundred or so pages.

Ballard loses it

Now, I have faithfully accompanied Ballard as he described the manias of obsessed protagonists who feel compelled to revisit the derelict gantries of Cape Kennedy, or live in hotels in abandoned resorts, or go to die on the derelict beaches of nuclear testing sites, or set off south towards the radioactive wastelands and — I understood all of them.

Ballard had the gift of taking you inside the heads of each of his deranged protagonists to the unnerving extent that you began to understand their obsessions and visions.

But not in this book. The basic obsession is overthrown in the first thirty pages. Mallory’s abrupt taking against the river and declaring it The Enemy seems utterly irrational and unnecessary. His alienated relations with Captain Kagwa or the worn widow-woman Nora Warrender are, on paper, right out of the standard Ballard handbook for the detached, alienated relationships between the handful of characters which his books normally describe. But somehow, eerily, without any of the real psychological punch which all his previous novels conveyed.

Lacking the strange and uncanny setting of so many of his earlier stories, the unnamed African location comes over as strangely dull and boring. Ballard’s described tropical jungle before. Compare and contrast Day of Creation with the opening scenes of The Crystal World which are dazzling, or the just-as-good opening pages of the brilliant short story A Question of Re-Entry.

Those stories had some pretty cheesy, clichéd elements (like the globetrotting media star who’s turned his back on fame to live with a primitive tribe in the Amazon rainforest who is at the heart of Re-Entry). But they were carried by the fierceness of vision, the charge of Ballard’s imagination, and also the sentence-by-sentence brilliance of Ballard’s language.

But overnight his gift with the English language seems to have abandoned him, and the force that drives his earlier fictions – the powerful combination of intense scenario with crisp but somehow visionary prose – has evaporated. Instead the book is a collection of mannerisms. Whatever ‘it’ is, Ballard had lost it.

The plot – part two

The first effect of Mallory’s ill-fated attempts to dam and reroute the river (why?) is that the half-built dam made of logs and empty oil drums suddenly gives way. Mallory himself is caught by the flood and tumbled down to the bottom of the gravelly torrent, is nearly drowned and only just rescued up by Kagwan’s soldiers to spend the next few weeks recuperating at Nora Warrender’s refuge for rare animals, where he lives in uneasy company with her group of feminist black women.

And where he learns that the collapsing dam made of oil drums and logs had caught up the Japanese snapper Miss Matsuoka and killed her. This seems to have no impact on anyone at all, least of all the reader.

After all this confused motives and off plotting, it’s only around page 100 that the book finally settles into a groove. Recovered from his near-drowning, Mallory decides to steal the knackered old ferry, the Salammbo, which has just arrived at the newly navigable quayside of Port-la-Nouvelle, and to use it to follow the river to its source. I still don’t understand why he wants to do this, but it is at least a comprehensible narrative device: the quest, the odyssey.

The 12-year-old girl who tried to shoot him, then ran off into then jungle, has emerged in recent days as a kind of damaged orphan and built herself a home-made coracle made from plastic wrapped over a metal frame. She’s paddling around in the river in the darkness on the night when Mallory wades out into the river under the noses of a couple of Captain Kwanga’s half-asleep guards, and stealthily unties the front and rear mooring ropes.

As the boat slowly starts to drift away from the quay, the soldiers realise what’s up and start shouting, one of them clambers down into the shallow river and bangs with his rifle butt on the steamer’s sides. But Mallory manages to ignite the starter motor, then get the big diesel motor engaged and, as the Salammbo heaves about and begins to head upstream into the magic river, two things happen: the soldiers start shooting at it, and the girl paddles enthusiastically close to the steamer but then loses control and, just as her coracle is crushed under its heavy progress, Mallory pulls her to safety, then returns to the helm.

And so they set off up this fanciful African river, this unlikely pair, Mallory the shiftless doctor, a heavy drinker crushed by a sense of failure and inadequacy, who has entered into an irrationally intense love-hate relationship with the river, and the girl whose name, we learn, is Noon, whose black face bears networks of scars she’s picked up in an obviously abused childhood and who, as a result, Mallory thinks suffers from mutism. She is dumb.

It is a journey or metaphysical quest up a river in Africa undertaken by a man named Mallory, just as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a metaphysical quest up a river in Africa undertaken by a man named Marlow. Hence the Heart of Darkness-style illustration on the first edition of the book. But unfortunately, Conrad’s novel is a timeless classic, whereas this novel is a confused mess.

Cover of the first edition of The Day of Creation showing the old steamboat Salammbo which Mallory steals

The steamer had been operating as a ferry. It is carrying on its deck a black Mercedes limousine, ordered by Captain Kwanga who has grand visions of himself rising to become governor of a province which is newly enriched by the new river flowing through it. For the next hundred pages or so Kwanga’s repeated attempts to recapture the Salammbo are motivated by angry wish to get hold of his stolen limo.

Things happen. Noon turns out to be a handy pilot, warming Mallory about sandbanks and blockages ahead, as they chug forward under the protection of the overarching tropical canopy. There’s a bag of rice in the boat, which Mallory boils a ration of each day, and Noon turns out to be a dab hand at jumping into the river and spearing fish on a spear she’s made from a sharp leaf. Nonetheless, quite quickly Mallory is feeling feverish. He hadn’t been eating properly to begin with, had been drinking heavily, and now is not eating enough. This combined with his weakness from his near-death experience when he was half-drowned when the ramshackle dam collapsed fifty pages earlier, all means that he is in very poor shape, and quickly becomes feverish.

And THIS, you realise, is the place Ballard wanted to get to: the first half of the book often felt clumsy and rushed because this is the point, the core, the aim, the focus of the narrative, possibly the image Ballard began with: the image of a half-mad, obsessed, feverish white man struggling to steer a decrepit steamer up a mysterious river in the heart of Africa, helped only by a dumb-mute African girl. Possibly this is the key image you’re meant to take away from the novel, and it is weird and intense, if with a rather heavy sense of déjà vu.

Captain Kagwa comes chasing him in a military helicopter which, to being with, strafes the steamer with machine guns. The second time they return, the helicopter is equipped with pontoons which means they can land on the water, and discover that Mallory has run aground on the half-submerged equipment of a quarry which the river has flooded. Thus Kagwa can warily clamber out along the submerged metal to within hailing distance of the bridge.

At that point Kagwa lets off a pistol shot which misses Mallory although a ricochet cuts part of his scalp. Mallory lifts the rusty old Lee-Enfield rifle which originally belonged to Noon (the one she nearly shot him with) and shoots, not Kagwa, but one of the helicopter’s landing pontoons which bursts and starts to deflate so that the helicopter almost immediately starts to lapse into the water. The pilot shouts at Kagwa who clambers his way back to it and just about manages to climb in as the chopper rises into the sky.

Exhausted, and bleeding from his head, Mallory collapses. He’d found a deckchair from somewhere and now Noon resourcefully rigs up a sun canopy over it. In this deckchair Mallory lapses into the classic Ballardian mental state of fever dreams, delirium, hallucination and driving obsession. He must get to the source of the river (whether to block it for good or rechannel it into the desert to make the Sahara bloom, is unclear and increasingly inconsequential).

There I sat like a totem, propped in the bows of this strange ship piloted by a child on its journey towards the sun. (p.139)

(This, incidentally, reminds the hard-core Ballard fan of the scene in The Drowned World where the central figure, Dr Robert Kerans, is captured by the crew of a pirate ship and tied to an old chair placed on a table and worshipped as a tribal god.)

I didn’t mention something which happened earlier. Irrationally convinced that it was he who created the river (although we saw that it arose by sheer accident when a bulldozer clearing the huge stump of a dead oak tree at the end of the town’s runway unwittingly releasing an underground stream), Mallory is not surprised when Sangar laconically informs him that rivers need to be registered with the authorities and with national geographic societies etc, and so he – Sangar – has used his radio to contact world geographical societies and magnanimously named the river – the Mallory.

This seemed improbable and silly at the time, and becomes more and more silly as the book progresses. But then again, the book’s intention is not ‘realistic’, but entirely programmatic. Contriving to get the river named after him allows Mallory to hallucinate that the river is his alter-ego, his other self, an ally and an opponent, as he enters the increasingly fevered state.

After our escape from Captain Kagwa I was aware that a duel was taking place between myself and the Mallory (p.139)

This sounds intriguing, if pretty contrived, but repetition soon drains it of meaning and brings out its silliness.

Already I had begun to resent the river, and realised that in the Mallory I had created a dangerous rival. (p.143)

I needed to destroy the Mallory, but at the same time I wanted to enlarge it… (p.146)

During his numerous trips to the engine room to adjust and fix the motor, Mallory has picked up an elaborate set of oil streaks across his increasingly thin and wasted body, not to mention rust and paint marks and blood stains from the wound in his head. When Noon looks at him, Mallory realises that he is turning into a savage. Heart of Darkness all over again.

And then they bump into Sangar the documentary film-maker and his sidekick, Mr Pal again. The pair are cruising the other way down the River Mallory (with the current) in a long ancient launch, loaded, obscurely with defunct television monitors, and Sangar greets Mallory in his sly, laconic way. The ferry collides with their overloaded launch and Mallory has to help the pair aboard with as much of their equipment as they can save before the launch sinks. He discovers that both Sangar and Mr Pal are as emaciated and malnourished as he is.

Suddenly I realised that the entire dynamic of the story is from Waiting For Godot. In part one of Waiting For Godot we are introduced to a handful of characters engaged in absurd projects, led by the two tramps Vladimir and Estragon. But the play is in two parts, and part two opens to reveal the same handful of characters, but this time in a significantly advanced state of decay. Same here: Sangar and Mr Pal are in almost as bad shape as Mallory, both have lost lots of weight and have running sores.

  • With its swollen eyelids and fungal skin infection, [Mr Pal]’s youthful face resembled that of a starved apprentice in a backstreet tannery. (p.158)

And I thought again of Godot when I read this sentence, right at the end of the book when a weakened Mallory tries to help injured Sangar to his feet amid the mud and detritus of the burst barrage:

Together we tottered in the shifting earth, trying to find our footing in the sliding mud, two tramps dancing on a garbage hill. (p.262)

Surely that is a conscious decision to reference Godot which is about two utterly destitute tramps.

More than that, their intention of making some kind of ‘documentary’ about Mallory and his quixotic quest, has also degraded. They don’t have batteries for their equipment. No lights, no tapes. They do appear to actually film sequences of Mallory and the girl, but it appears hopelessly random.

Ballard’s intention is obviously to say something important about the TV Age. He has his illiterate, mute freedom-fighter girl-child, Noon, become entranced with Sangar’s camera equipment and, finding herself caught on tape by Mr Pal, she begins to practice posing for the camera. Ballard editorialises that she has leapt from the Stone Age to the late 20th century in a few days, bypassing language on the way (p.160)

In these passages about the decrepit TV presenter and his desperately ill assistant (who ends up dying of malnutrition-caused infections) you get the strong sense that it is probably more interesting to read Ballard’s interviews about the TV age and the other subjects touched on in the book, than these rather clumsily fictionalised ‘ideas’.

In another surreal touch (one of many consciously surreal touches with which the book is stuffed) Sangar and Pil’s equipment – cameras and tapes and monitors and mixing desks – which Mallory brought aboard the steamer from their sinking launch, contains tapes of what appear to be radio programs about Africa. These are of a jokey Marxist provenance so that the words ‘neo-colonial’ and ’empire’ are liberally thrown around. The satirical-surreal aspect is that the mute damaged black girl, Noon, is fascinated by the tapes, and spends hours inside the limousine playing them over and over on the car’s expensive sound system. Damaged, mute African girl plays expensive tapes of Western lecturers sounding off about neo-colonialism. That rustling sound you can hear is a thousand doctorates about Ballard and neo-colonialism being finalised for submission to their Cultural Studies tutors.

Sangar and Pal both go drastically downhill as the steamer putters north. Pal slips into a delirious fever and eventually dies. Sangar is covered in sores and eventually tries to attack Mallory, who pushes him overboard into the river, before passing out.

Mallory wakes up in a bed surrounded by bare bosoms. Slowly he realises he has been ‘rescued’ from the Salammbo by none other than Nora Wallender, now with short cropped hair, and leader of a gang of four tough, possibly vengeful black women.

He has woken up aboard the Diana, ‘a bordello boat, the white ship of the widows’ – previously a floating brothel to service government soldiers, hence the way its bedrooms or ‘cubicles’ are covered with rococo paintings of topless nymphs cavorting in a fantasy French countryside.

He remains there for three or four days, fantasising about taking control of the boat and captaining these black Amazons, only to discover he is barely strong enough to stand up, and any of the women can just nudge him and he collapses. He realises some of the women go ashore, not only to stalk and shoot birds to cook and eat, but he watches them stalk and shoot a male soldier. Maybe they’re taking their revenge on all the men who ever fucked them.

Suddenly one day the Diana starts sinking. The women think it’s holed, but Mallory realises the level of the river is falling. While the women try to identify the leak, Mallory grabs Noon’s arm, they jump into the river and make it back to the Salammbo.

One week later they arrive at the place where passage of the river becomes impossible because of cataracts. Not only that, but local farmers have dammed one wing of the river with an extensive barrage and siphoned the water off into an extensive system of irrigation channels. ‘His’ river has turned the desert green again.

He is promptly arrested by General Harare and brought to him at the ruined infirmary of the abandoned French airfield at Bonneville. All of the scenes with either Captain Kagwa or General Harare are tripe. Ballard’s ear for dialogue was always poor, and the ‘conversations’ between these characters are a mix of raw ‘ideas’ and show-off sentences – ‘They have water now, doctor, their precious see-through gold’ – with very little concern for notions of character or psychology. They all sound the same.

The plot becomes even less rational than before. Close up Mallory can see that the water from the makeshift-dammed river has been used very badly; the nomad farmers simply don’t know how to manage water. Thus most of it is polluted with human faeces, and mixed with engine oil so it ends up polluting not nurturing their crops, while the nomads continue to live on hovels assembled from the detritus of the abandoned French air base, sheets of asbestos and the like.

Similarly, having been more or less co-opted into General Harare’s ragtag crew, Mallory suggests that they completely dam the Mallory, dry it up and so prevent Harare’s enemy, Captain Kagwa advancing up the river with his boats.

Harare agrees and so Mallory rams the Salammbo into place on the cascades between the river bank and a central island, thus creating a caisson around which the native women can build a dam across the second branch of the Mallory, damming it for good and drying up the river course all the way back down to Port-la-Nouvelle. The barrage is an impressive collection of post-industrial detritus:

Less than a month later the barrage across the river was complete, and the Salammbo, which had carried us so untiringly from Port-la-Nouvelle, sat in its last anchorage, surrounded by a refuse tip of freezers and enamel stoves, water coolers, aircraft tail-planes and radio antennae, together forming a terminal moraine of modern technology.

Ballard-land! Like the ziggurats of abandoned washing machines or televisions erected around the The Unreal City.

Mallory gets used to life in Harare’s crew. They let him continue sleeping in the wrecked bridge of the Salammbo, while he treats Harare’s sick soldiers with ineffectual medicine. Everyone is suffering fevers brought on by the foetid, malarial waters of the River Mallory, which have been diverted into a thousand blocked, unflowing, brackish irrigation channels, breeding grounds for mosquitoes and infectious diseases.

There is some kind of satirical irony going on here – that Mallory’s intention had been to ‘turn the Sahara green again’ but the reality turns out to be a poisonous fiasco. Is he telling us it is pointless digging wells and irrigating the Third World?

Meanwhile, the Diana, the brothel ship, which Mallory and Noon had escaped from a few chapters earlier, shows up and moors next to the barrage built around the Salammbo. Nora Warrender and her crew of four black widows quickly recruit young widows from the surrounding nomad villages, rig up the ship’s lights to a generator, open a bar and it’s business as usual, with groups of soldiers rowing out to the ship to drink beer and then be taken below by the sometimes teenage whores, to be serviced.

Ballard, as usual alert to surreal possibilities, has his almost-blind and malnourished TV presenter Sangar rig up a basic closed-circuit TV network playing into a TV monitor set up in the bar, so the drunken sailors can watch themselves getting drunk. Sangar sits out of the way of the violent drunks, leaning his head against a cage of marmosets, these fierce creatures chatting away as if describing to Sangar a seen he can no longer see with his own eyes.

In a deep fever, staggering with hunger, Mallory finds himself stumbling belowdecks on the Diana, waking to find a very young whore dressed in flashy clothes wiping his feverish brow, who he then only half-remembers touching up, pushing back onto the sweat and semen-stained mattress, and fucking. He drifts back to sleep. Later, the presence of her ancient Lee-Enfield rifle clinches the fact that this was Noon.

I know Ballard’s books are meant to be transgressive in all kinds of ways, but – personally – I didn’t like the way the central character is described increasingly lusting after Noon’s barely pubescent body, noticing her budding breasts etc, as the journey progresses.

And now this ritual deflowering. It’s not so much that it’s a pedophilic scene, as that it’s just so horribly inevitable: hairy, sweaty, deranged middle-aged man is put into forced proximity with a 12-year-old girl who keeps stripping off to go fishing in the river and… It seems so hairily, sweatily inevitable that he’ll end up fucking her. How much more interesting if they had kept up a strange adult-damaged child relationship right to the end.

I felt soiled by this scene.

Next thing that happens is Captain Kagwa’s gunships and helicopter arrive, having fought their way steadily upstream despite the river being dammed up. They make a heavily armed attack on the Diana and in doing so destroy the barrage, unleashing a tidal waves which sweeps down into the pool below it, sweeping away all Kagwa and Harare’s fighting men.

The next chapter starts with Mallory surveying the devastation. On the one hand this is an impressive scene; on the other, Mallory subjects it to the same rubbish, cheapjack psychology which underpins the entire narrative, the notion that Mallory somehow ‘created’ the river, has been engaged in a duel with it, and has finally ‘destroyed’ it, although not before it poisoned and infected a host of nomads who dammed it up and are now dropping like flies due to malaria.

‘You poisoned her, Mallory, with your sick river, like all these desert people. They’re sick with your dream…’ (p.263)

He sets out in search of Noon (as he has done plenty of times before), kicking the decrepit Sangar out of the way after having a typically stagey dialogue with him about who’s to blame for this disaster, ‘It’s all your fault etc’.

Mallory climbs the muddy, rubbish-strewn river bank up to the (by now) heavily battered limousine parked on the bank of the now empty, slimy river. Sure enough Noon is inside, sick and ill. Mallory is just trying to reassure her when Kagwa’s helicopter clatters into the clearing (yet again). It lands with the same old French pilot handling a carbine and watching as Captain Kagwa gets out and walks towards the limo, unbuttoning his holster.

At that moment Noon pushes her hand into Mallory’s hand. She is clutching some bit of metal which, he suddenly realises, is a bullet. For the entire length of this humungous narrative she has guarded this, the third and final of her bullets. In a typically salacious detail, Noon forces Mallory’s nails into her nipple ‘to give him courage’.

Mallory puts the bullet into the breech, cocks the bolt and, as Kagwa walks towards them coolly taking his gun from his holster, Mallory shoots him through the head.

That kind of blunt assassination reminds me of similar moments in previous fictions, particularly when the protagonist of The Drought simply rises to his feet and shoots dead the man who’d been preventing his people get to the beach.

Anyway, so that’s General Harare and Captain Kagwa dead. Mallory goes to check on Sangar but when he gets back to the limo, Noon has gone. Again.

Cut to a few days later and Mallory has rigged up a kind of raft with an outboard motor and has headed up over the cataracts, into the upper river, looking for Noon (again). He’s brought Sanger along with him. He was about to abandon him by the wrecked barrage, but suddenly saw Nora Warrender and the widow whores watching him (like a Greek chorus) and was shamed into bringing Sanger along, clutching his (by now) utterly broken and ruined cine-camera.

(This demented character clinging on to a cine-camera which is broken beyond repair but has become a psychological talisman is a direct copy of Wilder, the TV documentary maker who sets off to climb the massive luxury apartment building in High Rise, at first to make a documentary about the occupants, but by the end he has forgotten the point of his quest, and the gutted camera is just one among many trinkets and talismans he has picked up in his increasingly psychotic odyssey.)

Mallory and Sangar now enter a primeval zone of hard rocks and lizards. In case we hadn’t realised it, Ballard rams home the symbolism that the journey up the river is also a journey back in time, or at least time zones. They keep glimpsing Noon in her metal skiff, just half a mile ahead then disappearing round a bend in the narrowing river.

Finally they arrive at a ‘When dinosaurs ruled the earth’ landscape of volcanic rock and trilobite fossils where the water smells of sulphur and hot springs and the Mallory opens out into a huge ‘primeval lake… the original mud world’.

Here Mallory repeats the rather forlorn attempt to explain how the river came about: some tectonic shift fractured the bed of a huge primeval lake and created an underground river which the soldier in his bulldozer released when he dug up the giant tree root way back at the start of the novel; and then, in the bit that doesn’t make any sense, the river somehow went overground, creating an actual surface river; and that’s the river which the narrator, with breath-taking irrationality, is convinced that ‘he created’ (p.279).

I never really understood or bought into this basic premise of the book, which is why I remained outside its imaginative forcefield.

Finally, exhausted beyond endurance, the reader arrives at the final pages, in which Mallory clambers out of the river into the warm sulphur mud banks and wades through these towards the last of several pools above which rises the source of the damn river. It narrows, three feet wide, two feet wide, then only a hand’s-width wide. Mallory kneels by its silvery presence amid the hot sand, trying to cradle it, to separate it from the silver sand and then:

The Mallory died in my arms.

We are now so far beyond narrative logic that we are in a Surrealist painting: a mad doctor kneels at the source of a mythical African river cradling it as it dies in his arms.

Looking up he scans around for Noon and sees her in the distance, turning to look back at him, with the body and face of a woman his own age. Surrealism. Drugs. Hallucination. And then, of course, she vanishes without a trace.

He kicks the walls of some pools which are drying out, makes them puddle together and push Noon’s abandoned skiff into a further pool, he lets himself slip and be carried down back towards the raft where Sanger is still desperately clinging with his smashed cine-camera, and both of them, too weak to move, let the raft slowly set off on its last journey to the sea.

Epilogue

Two years later. The river has long disappeared and Lake Katto and Port-la-Nouvelle have returned to their former dusty barrenness. It took three weeks for Sanger and Mallory’s raft to drift back the full length of the river, and then for them to be picked up police and taken to hospital. During his long recovery, Sanger disclaimed all knowledge of Mallory.

Did Mallory dream the whole thing? Above all, did he dream Noon? Did such a girl ever exist, or was she an entirely fictional justification for his psychotic quest to go to the source of the river?

The events definitely happened. He’s been flown by government helicopters up the dry bed of the river and seen the Salammbo still embedded in the ruined barrage. But of Captain Kagwa and General Harare and their men, and Nora Warrender and her vengeful widow women, no trace has ever been found.

Mallory has got another job working for WHO 30 miles away to the south-west. But every weekend Mallory drives back to this dusty town, and scours the footprints left in the dry mud along the river bank. He swears he has seen the distinctive footprints of his dream girl-woman.

Sooner or later she will reappear, and I am certain that when she comes the Mallory will return, and once again run the waters of its dream across the dust of a waiting heart. (p.287)

Ballardian clichés

Antagonists Ballard characters, even as they go slowly mad, always need an antagonist. In some ways his stories are like narratives stripped down to the basic bare-bone structure:

Protagonist sets out on Quest; has one loyal Helper; two or three peripheral characters; and is pitched against an Antagonist, who dogs his steps and blocks his path.

In this book the Antagonist is Captain Kwanga, and this explains the surreal detail of the captain’s Mercedes limousine being trapped aboard the steamer Mallory has stolen. It gives a sort of rational pretext for what is really a far deeper narrative structure which Ballard wants to construct (and which, by this stage, the regular Ballard reader may well be a bit bored with).

Calm The other characters are always telling Mallory to calm down and not get so carried away, there are continual references by everyone to his unhealthy obsessions.

I totally understand how these references are designed to portray Mallory as a deeply unreliable narrator, and how it justifies Ballard’s intention to make Mallory’s obsession with the river so utterly irrational. My complaint is that, in the half dozen or so narratives preceding Creation, Ballard had used just the exact same technique and precisely the same word, so that the narrator of Hello America or Empire of the Sun is repeatedly told by the other characters to calm down. I get it. He is using a tried and tested technique. Except that in the other books, it works. Here it just feels like going through the motions:

  • Calming myself, I stood and watched Captain Kagwa climb the gangplank

Dreams All-too-easily the word ‘dream’ slips off the end of Ballard’s pen, to describe the protagonist’s hopes, ideas and intentions. Everything becomes a dream. The whole location and situation becomes a dream.

  • When I returned to the launch Sangar and Mr Pal were still sitting together against the engine-locker, two Alice-like figures stranded in this backwater of the wrong dream. (p.156)
  • I knew now why I liked her to bathe naked in the river, to immerse herself in that larger dream that sustained our journey. (p.169)
  • ‘You’re still obsessed with this absurd dream? To reach the source of the river?’ (p.174)
  • An immense white dream flows silently across the land, spreading over the drained surface of the lake. (p.284)

Fever The narrator quickly gets a fever as most Ballard characters do. Then, up at the barrage, the rancid waters of the dammed Mallory ensure that everyone gets a fever. The word ‘fever’ or ‘feverish’ appears on every page. The idea and the word ‘fever’ are essential and utterly predictable elements in Ballardland.

Illness In pretty much all his core stories, Ballard characters become ill and quickly deteriorate to advanced stages of malnutrition and illness. It’s where Ballard like to have his characters.

  • Exposure sores covered my face and forehead, flourishing in my beard like fungi in a damp meadow. (p.172)
  • Sangar’s face was covered by the brim of his wide straw hat, but I could see that his lips and cheekbones were pocked with insect bites that had festered for weeks, his neck inflamed by a sun-induced viral response. (p.173)

Put bluntly, Ballard has to move his protagonists as quickly as possible into a condition of almost complete collapse in order to justify his prose style, which is one of almost continual fever dreams and hallucinations.

The plots are not sequences of meaningful events in the traditional sense, but scenarios concocted to position his characters into situations where they can experience Ballard’s intense, weird and visionary psychological states.

There were unstated bonds between myself and this antique vessel. The metal debris in which it was embedded set up a constant wailing and groaning, and in my fever I almost believed that I was embarked on an even stranger voyage across the garbage pits of the planet. (p.235)

Ballard’s imagination is a non-stop fountain of weird sentences like that, but the rest of his creative mind sometimes struggles to concoct the ‘plots’ or situations which can justify them.

Motives Ballard characters are always unsure of their own motives and everyone else’s motives. In pre-Empire books this creates an unsettling ambience of uncertainty and human alienation. It makes all the human relationships ‘ambiguous’ and fractious. In the post-Empire books it is just part of his schtick.

  • I was wary of revealing myself to this likeable but sly opportunist, particularly as I was still unsure of my own motives. (p.157)

Naked Nakedness has become an increasingly prominent aspect of these later stories. It’s a very prominent feature of The Unlimited Dream Company that the protagonist early on strips off and from then on dares the inhabitants of Shepperton to look at him and acknowledge it. It’s an important part of the apparition of ‘President Manson’ in Hello America that he is naked, sitting naked in an old wicker chair in front of a huge array of TV monitors so that Ballard gets to describe the images projected from the screens flickering across his pale, fat naked body.

And here, in this book, it’s an important element that soon after he’s stolen the steamer, Mallory strips off, partly to be naked with all the continual sense of sexual arousal that implies, partly so that his body can display the increasingly complicated matrix of diesel oil smears, rust from old machinery, paint from the peeling ship’s hull and bloodstains, a coded indication of his decay.

It is typical that it is only after three or four days aboard the Diana and mingling with its female crew, that Mallory realises he has been naked all along. Neither he nor any of the women have noticed or commented on it. It’s as if Ballard is mounting a sustained campaign to get his readers to relax about being naked. Like every other aspect of his liberal 1960s treatment of human sexuality, this seems terribly naive and dated now, now we are in the grip of a new Victorianism which is reviving fear and revulsion at male sexuality.

Physical collapse In Empire of the Sun the extreme physical deterioration of the characters was explained by their situation i.e. years of slowly starving on minimum rations from their Japanese gaolers which, in the last months of captivity, dwindled almost to nothing.

So it’s all-too-easy to believe in the bone-thin characters, wasted and exhausted, covered in festering sores and with bleeding gums, who stagger through that narrative. In this book, however, all Mallory or Sangar would have to do it contact the outside world and a World Health Organisation plane would fly in all the money and food they wanted. Thus the malnutrition to which Ballard submits both Mallory and Sangar seems utterly wilful and contrived and unnecessary and therefore silly, therefore a bit insulting to the memory of the genuinely starved characters in Empire.

Audiobook

Credit

The Day of Creation by J.G. Ballard was published by Victor Gollancz in 1987. References are to the 1993 Flamingo paperback edition.

Related links

Reviews of other Ballard books

Novels

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The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard (1962)

‘This is our zone of transit, here we are assimilating our own biological pasts….’ (Dr Bodkin, page 91)

This was Ballard’s second novel and the one which really launched his career, because it is the first one to give readers a true flavour of the strange and eerie, dystopian psychodramas which Ballard was to become famous for.

Mise en scène

It’s a short novel (170 pages) set in the near future. About seventy years before it opens – i.e. in our ‘present’ – the sun began erupting in solar flares. These solar flares:

  • blasted away the layers of atmosphere, including the ozone layer, which protect the world from radiation
  • massively raised global temperatures, so that at the equator it’s now 150 degrees Fahrenheit or more
  • melted the icecaps and all the world’s glaciers, and so
  • raised the world’s sea levels by well over a hundred feet – six storeys of high-rise buildings are now under water

When it comes to the melting ice and rising sea this is something we’ve all become imaginatively familiar with thanks to the widespread publicity surrounding global warming – the one unexpected detail in this scenario is that Ballard says that the melting glaciers and calving ice caps have carried with them into the oceans and across the continents huge swathes of silt, mud and sludge (p.22).

All these factors explain why, 70 years later, the cities of Europe are entirely underwater, but swirled around their submerged cinemas and skyscrapers and town halls are sandbanks of silt out of which huge tropical foliage – rainforest trees and bushes and giant ferns – luxuriously sprout.

What is left of humanity has been forced to retreat to the very tips of the planet at the Arctic and Antarctic as the rest of the world not only heats up beyond human habitability, but is swept by devastatingly violent typhoons and hurricanes.

And an even bigger problem than the heat is the radiation – the loss of the ozone layer has exposed the middle parts of the world to life-threatening levels of radiation. This has accelerated the rate of mutation in the natural world, quickly giving rise to modern-day copies of prehistoric fauna and flora, but it has also, of course, decimated the human population. The birth rate has plummeted. Barely one in ten couples are able to have children (p.23). There are maybe five million humans left alive.

The mapping mission

The novel’s first part describes the work of a UN mapping team which is on a three-year mission to map the abandoned and overgrown lagoons and creeks which is what most of Europe’s cities have been reduced to. The mission has been sent from the home base, Camp Byrd in Northern Greenland (population 10,000, p.23). We quickly meet the key personnel:

  • Dr Robert Kerans – 40, tanned, white-haired, the main protagonist
  • Dr Bodkin – much older, number 2 to Kerans
  • Colonel Riggs – brisk and businesslike head of the military team, which numbers about a dozen
  • Sergeant Macready – reliable
  • Lieutenant Hardman – tough and intelligent
  • Beatrice Dahl – beautiful, langorous rich girl’s daughter who the mission discover living in a luxury apartment in one of London’s drowned hotels – much given to sunbathing in the dawn and evening light beside a drained swimming pool on the roof, painting her toenails, and drinking too much. Kerans is having a sort of affair with her which doesn’t appear to involve any physical element.

To begin with we are introduced to the rather boring routine of the scientists as they go about their mapping work. They have a floating ‘testing station’ (a two-storey drum some 50 yards in diameter, p.40) which is towed along behind the bigger military ship, as well as a flotilla of scows, a catamaran and a helicopter.

This begged the question for me, right from the start, of where they got all the fuel and power this would require. Or food. Or fresh water. Although Ballard fills in loads of other military and logistical details, on the big practical questions he is oddly quiet. But this is because his interest is in setting the stage for a different kind of story.

The double meaning of the phrase ‘the drowned world’

So it is that about 50 pages into the novel we learn the title has a double meaning. We learn that some of the ostensibly sensible, military-type characters have begun to have bad dreams. And they’re not just dreams. Dr Bodkin explains to Kerans that what they’re experiencing is the revival of prehistoric memories.

The world has reverted to the climate, flora and fauna of the Triassic age. And now humanity’s unconscious and preconscious minds are reverting, too. Bodkin tells him that Camp Byrd has received radio messages that something similar is happening to the other scouting mission.

Kerans comes across Bodkin giving some basic anti-reversion treatment to one of the most stolid and phlegmatic of the team, Lieutenant Hardman, who, apparently, has the most advanced dreams. In fact they’re not really dreams. The protagonists are slipping away into a prehistoric dreamworld which makes this one seem less and less real or urgent. They are in the TRANSIT ZONE between modern consciousness and reverting to something ancient and strange.

‘The innate releasing mechanisms laid down in your cytoplasm millions of years ago have been awakened, the expanding sun and the rising temperature are driving you back down the spinal levels into the drowned seas submerged beneath the lowest layers of your unconscious, into the entirely new zone of the neuronal psyche.’ (Dr Bodkin explains what is happening to them, p.74)

What is rising up and taking over their minds is the drowned world of their ancient primeval memories.

Tracking Hardman

Next day Hardman has disappeared. Colonel Riggs can’t let this pass and so they go up in the helicopter to find him, tracking back and forth across the routes through the lagoons and creeks and covering tropical jungle which head north.

Until Kerans has a sudden and utterly plausible insight: Hardman is not heading north back to their base camp and ‘safety’; he is heading south, into the heart of the mystery, into the truth of their condition.

So the team change their area of search and eventually discover a set of fresh tracks in mud leading up to abandoned buildings south of their base camp. They land the helicopter and track Hardman, eventually finding the fugitive, who eerily and wordlessly runs from them, leading them a merry chase through abandoned apartment blocks and then into some kind of town square, higher than the waterlevel, across a ruined piazza and up the steps of a law court or some such institution – in scenes which seem very like a de Chirico surrealist painting come to life.

Hardian ultimately gets away, though not before their helicopter pilot has crashed the helicopter into the facade of one of the buildings – an accident I would have thought would be fatal to the mission’s survival, but which everyone takes in their stride.

Kerans, Bodkin and Beatrice stay behind

Through the first 70 or 80 pages we have watched the prehistoric dreams take over Kerans’ mind as he slowly realises that he will, he must stay behind when the rest of the mission returns to base. In fact Colonel Riggs has been ordered to cancel the mission and head back north immediately, apparently in response to the outbreak of dreams among his crew.

The night before the scheduled departure Dr Kerans and Dr Bodkin reach a kind of wordless understanding. Both are far out, now, in the ‘archaeopsychic zone’, half their minds buried in Deep Time. In the depths of the night they scuttle the floating research station and make off in their own boats.

Next morning Kerans is with Beatrice in her luxury hideout as they watch the UN helicopter hovering overhead and Colonel Riggs shouting through a loudhailer at them to join him. The couple keep out of sight and have covered any possible landing site with old oil barrels. Eventually Riggs gives up, and Kerans and Beatrice watch the military team finish packing up and their little flotilla of ships head out of the lagoon, along a creek and out of sight beyond the drowned city’s ruined buildings, heading north back to Camp Byrd.

Now Kerans and Beatrice are alone and obviously facing a dread future. Bodkin has left them under no illusions. The world is still heating up, the temperature where they are will eventually become impossible for human life, not to mention the increased radiation exposure, or the storm belt which is on its way north.

But – and this is the point of a Ballard book, the special atmosphere he and only he can create – they don’t care. They don’t care that they don’t care. They are operating in a different type of mentality or consciousness altogether.

Strangman arrives

I expected them to continue dreaming and sleeping and watching the rooms they’ve rigged up in various abandoned hotels slowly fall to pieces around them in a trippy entropic kind of way.

But no – there is an abrupt change of mood when a massive hydroplane arrives in the lagoon with a trio of supply boats, accompanied by a surreal eruption of thousands and thousands of crocodiles. It is the arrival of Strangman, tall, white, ghostly leader of a crew of blacks under their foreman Big Caesar – who is systematically looting and stripping cities of all their treasure as he heads north.

I thought this might be a brief episode but it turns into the main subject of the last 100 or so pages of the book. Kerans, Bodkin and Beatrice realise they have to admit their presence to Strangman and his marauding crew and from that point onwards get caught up in his surreal and bizarre psychodramas.

Strangman has brought luxuries on his refrigerated ship. He holds elaborate dinner parties with chilled champagne. He is a bit like Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, an entrepreneur and impresario, who loves showing off his treasures and his loyal pack of devoted Negroes, but whose mood changes in a second to anger and threat.

Strangman’s team have diving suits and Kerans is coerced into putting one on and going down down down to the depths of the sunken world. Strangman wants him to locate the buried treasures he is sure must be down there but Kerans goes completely off-mission, wandering into a sunken planetarium, looking up at the light glimmering through the cracks in the roof and having a typically trippy Ballard prehistoric vision of it as a new set of constellations:

He walked back down the steps and stopped half-way down the aisle, head held back, determined to engrave the image of the constellations on his retina. Already their patterns seemed more familiar than those of the classical constellations. In a vast, convulsive recession of the equinoxes, a billion sidereal days had reborn themselves, re-aligned the nebulae and island universes in their original perspective. (p.109)

Then Kerans passes out from lack of air being pumped to his suit and has to be rescued by some of Strangman’s skin divers.

There is a growing mood of eeriness and wariness and uncertainty and psychic nerviness all round. Then Strangman invites the three survivors to a grand dinner party at the high point of which he performs a magic trick – he drains the lagoon! He has discovered that most of it is blocked by accumulated junk, mud, silt and seaweed, with only a small ingress of water. This he has blocked and now uses powerful pumps to evacuate the trapped water.

In a scene which piles surrealism on surrealism, our protagonists watch the water level slowly drop drop drop, revealing the six or so storeys of long-sunken buildings all the way down to the dripping, seaweed infested pavements, with long-underwater cars and buses alive with expiring fish and jellyfish and starfish, swathed in seaweed and ooze.

And it isn’t just a party trick. For the next few weeks Strangman and his team systematically scour the huge area they have unearthed (or unoceaned) and which turns out to be centred on Leicester Square (the city is London!) by day, and by night get drunk, wandering the deserted stinky streets like medieval carousers, carrying flaming torches and drinking heavily from looted wine cellars.

In these scenes Strangman feels more like Colonel Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, a resemblance emphasised by the way his drunken, only barely restrained crews are entirely made up of blacks, portrayed as jungle savages ready at a moment’s notice to revert to brutal beatings.

And this is indeed what happens. One evening, pressed into yet another tedious meal with his scary host, Kerans and Strangman notice a silhouette running along the top of one of the mud barrages which keeps the vast pressure of the ocean out of their island of dryness, and realise it is Bodkin carrying a bomb and evidently intending to blow up the barrage.

Strangman’s team start firing at the silhouette but it is Strangman himself who springs into action, runs to the nearest building and up a series of fire escapes, onto the mud barrage and along to the place where Bodkin had deposited his bomb, and gives it a hearty kick into the deep ocean the other side of the dam.

For a moment the reader had had a vivid imagining of what it would be like if the bomb had gone off, destroyed the dam and unleashed a flood of water six storeys high down onto the partying humans sitting at the bottom of the well. Strangman goes off in pursuit of Bodkin and Kerans barely registers or cares when he hears a number of shots out of sight, beyond the ruined buildings.

Kerans the god

But having killed Bodkin damages Kerans’ reputation with the only barely controlled blacks and with Strangman their master. Returning to the ‘party’ they set upon Kerans, beating him unconscious. When he comes to he discovers he has been tied to an elaborate chair and for the next few days he is left there to endure the blazing heat of the days, bleeding, semi-conscious.

At first he discovers he is the votive god at a Feast of Skulls. Piling surrealism on surrealism, Ballard says the marauding parties have discovered a cemetery where bodies long ago came adrift from their burials and, in a scene which must be deliberately echoing Heart of Darkness they set tied and bound Kerans up on a throne before a pile of bones and use other bones to beat out a primitive jungle rhythm which they dance around him to. Kerans has become their god, god of their weird cargo cult.

But this has unintended consequences. The men slowly become afraid of the dehydrated and increasingly delirious Kerans, and Strangman, who had obviously expected him to be beaten to death or die of exposure, also becomes superstitiously wary of him.

At the end of the second day they lash the throne Keran is tied to up onto a cart, force the hollowed out head of a dead crocodile onto his head to turn him into a real fetish god, then the drunk men get between the traces and pull the cart through the high and dry city streets, singing Haitian voodoo chants, until the cart goes out of control down a sloping alley and crashes into a sump of stinking mud, throwing Kerans and his throne head first into it. Still singing and chanting, the drunken blacks stagger off into the night leaving him there.

Slowly the semi-conscious and dazed Kerans realises that one of the arm rests of the throne has broken and so he can slip his bound wrist over the broken end, releasing it to untie his other wrist and slowly free himself.

Not a moment too soon does he stagger off into the darkness, as he sees Strangman and Big Caesar return down the alley towards the mud. Big Caesar is carrying a gleaming machete. Obviously they intended to finish Kerans off.

Kerans rescues Beatrice

Kerans hides out in a fifteenth floor apartment, drinking trapped rainwater and cooking small lizards to get his strength back before making a cautious return to his penthouse apartment at the abandoned Ritz. He discovers Strangman’s men have comprehensively and vengefully trashed it. However, they did not find the hiding place where he had secreted his Colt .45 pistol.

Now, in a passage which suddenly drops into effective thriller prose not unlike one of the James Bond novels which were being published at this time (late 50s, early 60s), Kerans makes his way at midnight silently across the empty lagoon floor to where Strangman’s hydroplane rests on the dry flagstones, and slowly climbs up the propeller and rudder, hoists himself over the stern rail, and tiptoes into the superstructure looking for the stateroom. He is going to rescue Beatrice.

And he finds her sitting at a table alone, in a turquoise dress and covered with fake jewellery spilling out of chests at her feet and idling with a glass of wine. She starts as Kerans moves silently forward through the bead curtains then runs to him. She might almost say, ‘James! You came to rescue me! But it is dangerous, James – Dr No / Blofeld / Goldfinger is after you!’

Instead, there is a flicker of movement out the corner of his eye and Kerans just has time to duck as a machete goes whirling across the room, burying itself in the wooden cabin wall behind him, closely followed by the enormous mishapen Negro, Big Caesar, who hurls himself at Kerans who just has time to lift the revolver and fire. Big Caesar falls to the floor gurgling his last.

Strangman closes in

Kerans hustles Beatrice to the ship’s gangway, and they run down it as the alerted crew take pot shots at them from above, make it in one piece to the ground and are heading across the seaweedy flagstones when out of the darkness looms Strangman and a cohort of his black crew, fanning out to block their way. Turning, Kerans and Beatrice realise another group of crew members are coming up behind and fanning out. They are surrounded.

Stepping forward like the baddie in a James Bond movie, Strangman twirls his thin black moustachios (well OK, he doesn’t, but he might as well do) and tells Kerans to surrender or else he’ll kill the girl as well as him. For good measure he lightly, suavely comments on what a good mask her face would make once separated from her skull. Oooh, gruesome!

Kerans gives up, hands the gun to Beatrice and steps forward as the voodoo crew close in on him, raising their machetes and pangas to strike, when –

The return of Colonel Riggs

Someone catches his elbow and pulls him back and the amazed Kerans watches Colonel Riggs emerge from the darkness accompanied by soldiers with rifles set with bayonets, along with a squad of soldiers who quickly erect a machine gun on a tripod, and another one which turns a searchlight from up on the hydroplane onto Strangman and his crew, who freeze in astonishment.

Riggs has returned and forces Strangman and his crew to drop their weapons. Cut to a few hours later in the stateroom, after Kerans has been tidied up and the situation stabilised. Turns out Riggs got permission from his superiors at Camp Byrd to return to search for Hardman and also to reclaim the biology ship (the one Kerans and Bodkin sank).

Hooray, saved! But Riggs now explains to Kerans that Strangman will not, however, be prosecuted or charged. In fact by draining the lagoon he will more than likely win a reward from the government in Greenland, which has offered rewards for anyone who can reclaim any part of the earth’s surface.

There is more chatter and planning to leave the next day. But Kerans, now in an advanced state of schizophrenia or psychosis, has other plans. He goes searching and eventually finds the secret stash of dynamite he guesses Bodkin must have made all those weeks ago. Now he, too, rigs up a simple bomb with a 30-second fuse, clambers up to 6th floor of a building, over a balcony and onto the thick sludge dyke which holds back the water.

Like Bodkin he is spotted, this time by Sergeant Macready, who fires a burst of machine gun at him, one bullet winging him in the ankle, but Kerans still has time to place the bomb in the middle of the barrage and set the timer. Sergeant Macready makes his way out to the bomb just in time to be blown to smithereens when it explodes, while Kerans throws himself to the floor of the nearest hotel balcony he’s clambered onto.

The dyke is breached and Ballard gives a vivid description of a six-story-high tsunami of water and logs bursting down into the streets below, smashing Strangman’s hydroplane and drowning his crew. Riggs and some other troops are quicker to react, climb up fire escapes, then angrily pursue Kerans through ruined apartment blocks, firing every opportunity they have.

Kerans just manages to keep a few hundred yards ahead of them, limping along on his damaged ankle, before dropping off a balcony onto a raft which it had taken him all his strength to rig up overnight. Now Kerans kicks in the little outboard motor and is 200 yards away by the time Riggs and another soldier emerge into his docking space and fire at him across the water and through the tropical foliage, holing Kerans’ sail in several places, before he turns a corner of the jungle and is out of sight.

Towards the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun

The final ten pages describe Kerans’ weird compelled odyssey south, which finds him extracting the bullet from his leg, patching himself up with a stolen medical kit, and eating bars of chocolate filched from Riggs’s army supplies, as his boat chugs south through the steaming tropical mangrove swamps.

It is a prolonged purple passage-cum-psychodrama of extraordinary, visionary power, utterly persuasive and compelling in taking you into Ballard’s imagining of a sunken London turned into a Triassic swampscape.

Eventually the outboard motor runs out of fuel and Kerans chucks it into the sea, watching it disappear downwards in a wreath of bubbles. He sails on south through archipelagos of tropical islands and sandbanks, finally beaching the raft on a particularly extended bank which stretches off in both directions.

At first Kerans breaks up the raft into drums and planks and tries to lug them over the dunes but eventually gives up, watching an oil barrel disappear into some quicksand. Everything collapses. Everything falls apart.

He comes to a rise with a ruined church at the top and here, in the downpour of one of the approaching tropical storms, by the ruined altar, comes across the shrivelled, sun-blackened body of Hardman who is barely alive, who is all but blinded by cataract cancers, but is staring point blank at the big red sun, far gone in deep time, in ‘chrono-psychosis’.

Kerans builds a shelter and tries to nurture Hardman to health, feeding him with wild berries, but isn’t surprised when he wakes one day to find Hardman gone. With what remains of his strength he has obviously set off staggering south, always south, towards ‘the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun’.

Kerans waits a few days more and then resumes his own ‘neuronic odyssey’, after many days blundering though mangrove swamps and tropical jungle coming to a vast lagoon, dotted here and there with the top storeys of buried high-rises emerging like gleaming holiday chalets beside the calm black water.

Exhausted, Kerans breaks into one of the abandoned apartments and rests, pondering the strange series of events which have brought him to this pass. Tying a strip of bamboo as a splint for his leg, which is now black and seriously infected, Kerans scratches a last message on the wall, words no-one will ever read:

27th day. Have rested and am moving south. All is well. Kerans

The Ballard effect

Any reader of Ballard quickly realises that his interest is not in a ‘plot’ or storyline. In fact it’s barely even about the characters, who interact like zombies or robots.

Ballard’s interest is in the schizoid dissociation of characters from their surroundings, their descent into alternative modes of consciousness – what he at one point calls ‘torpor and self-immersion’ – even as they are fully aware of the changes coming over themselves and retain the capacity to analyse what is happening to them.

But I think another crucial ingredient in the Ballard style is the immensely straight-faced, stiff-upper-lip attitude of the punctilious and correct Brits who all this happens to, who watch it happen to themselves with highly educated bemusement.

It is no accident that so many of Ballard’s protagonists are doctors, who are trained to observe and interpret symptoms and have the correct psychological jargon to hand to describe their descent into the various psychoses and alternative mental states which his books describe.

Ballard’s protagonists don’t fall to pieces like a bunch of shouty American teenagers in a cheap sci-fi shocker. They retain their middle-class manners and politenesses. It is entirely fitting that Kerans has rigged up an air-conditioned room in the wreckage of the former Ritz hotel, that Beatrice has survived with generator-powered air conditioning in her apartments in a building across the lagoon, that Strangman isn’t a hoodlum but a well-mannered psychopath who hands round chilled champagne, that Colonel Riggs observes all the niceties, even when telling Strangman and his men to put down their weapons.

I.e. one of the unsettling aspects of Ballard’s fiction is not only a) the dystopian scenarios or b) the psychological reversals and dissociative states the characters enter but c) the way they do it all in such unnervingly prim and correct Englishness.

Ballard’s purple prose

Novels almost certainly need plots and characters, and maybe themes and symbols.

But at the end of the day, they are unavoidably made of words and sentences – and the easy thing to overlook if you focus solely on Ballard’s themes and weird psychology, is the more straightforward fact that he loves writing fantastically lush, hallucinatory, purple prose.

This novel made an impact back in 1962 not only for its weirdness, but for its luxurious and deeply persuasive descriptions of the strange new world Ballard had imagined so completely into existence:

The last sunlight was fading over the water as Kerans paddled his raft below the fronds of the fern trees dipping into the water around the lagoon, the blood and copper bronzes of the afternoon sun giving way to deep violets and indigo. Overhead the sky was an immense funnel of sapphire and purple, fantasticated whorls of coral cloud marking the descent of the sun like baroque vapour trails. A slack oily swell disturbed the surface of the lagoon, the water clinging to the leaves of the ferns like translucent wax. A hundred yards away it slapped lazily against the shattered remains of the jetty below the Ritz… (p.144)

There are scores and scores of long descriptive passages like this which make the novel more than an experience of science fiction, or experimental psychology, but a prolonged and deeply sensual pleasure to read.

Related links

Reviews of other Ballard books

Novels

Short story collections

Other science fiction reviews

Late Victorian
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1900s
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1910s
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1920s
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover…

1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the most sweeping vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars

1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950s
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the  Foundation Trilogy, which describes the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence, powered by ‘spindizzy’ technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them until one fireman, Guy Montag, rebels
1953 The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – a breathless novel set in a 24th century New York populated by telepaths and describing the mental collapse of corporate mogul Ben Reich who starts by murdering his rival Craye D’Courtney and becomes progressively more psychotic as he is pursued by telepathic detective, Lincoln Powell
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fast-paced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard-man, Gulliver Foyle, is looking for revenge
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding novel of Blish’s ‘Okie’ tetralogy in which mayor of New York John Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1959 The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – Winston Niles Rumfoord builds a space ship to explore the solar system where encounters a chrono-synclastic infundibula, and this is just the start of a bizarre meandering fantasy which includes the Army of Mars attacking earth and the adventures of Boaz and Unk in the caverns of Mercury

1960s
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Kerans is part of a UN mission to map the lost cities of Europe which have been inundated after solar flares melted the worlds ice caps and glaciers, but finds himself and his colleagues’ minds slowly infiltrated by prehistoric memories of the last time the world was like this, complete with tropical forest and giant lizards, and slowly losing their grasp on reality.
1962 The Voices of Time and Other Stories – Eight of Ballard’s most exquisite stories including the title tale about humanity slowly falling asleep even as they discover how to listen to the voices of time radiating from the mountains and distant stars, or The Cage of Sand where a handful of outcasts hide out in the vast dunes of Martian sand brought to earth as ballast which turned out to contain fatal viruses. Really weird and visionary.
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space-travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1962 Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut – the memoirs of American Howard W. Campbell Jr. who was raised in Germany and has adventures with Nazis and spies
1963 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – what starts out as an amiable picaresque as the narrator, John, tracks down the so-called ‘father of the atom bomb’, Felix Hoenniker for an interview turns into a really bleak, haunting nightmare where an alternative form of water, ice-nine, freezes all water in the world, including the water inside people, killing almost everyone and freezing all water forever
1964 The Drought by J.G. Ballard – It stops raining. Everywhere. Fresh water runs out. Society breaks down and people move en masse to the seaside, where fighting breaks out to get near the water and set up stills. In part two, ten years later, the last remnants of humanity scrape a living on the vast salt flats which rim the continents, until the male protagonist decides to venture back inland to see if any life survives
1964 The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s breakthrough collection of 12 short stories which, among more traditional fare, includes mind-blowing descriptions of obsession, hallucination and mental decay set in the present day but exploring what he famously defined as ‘inner space’
1964 Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter George – a novelisation of the famous Kubrick film, notable for the prologue written as if by aliens who arrive in the distant future to find an earth utterly destroyed by the events described in the main narrative
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin’s first novel, a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1966 – The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Sanders journeys up an African river to discover that the jungle is slowly turning into crystals, as does anyone who loiters too long, and becomes enmeshed in the personal psychodramas of a cast of lunatics and obsessives
1967 The Disaster Area by J.G. Ballard – Nine short stories including memorable ones about giant birds, an the man who sees the prehistoric ocean washing over his quite suburb.
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1966 The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis –
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undertake a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced native lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s breakthrough novel in which he manages to combine his personal memories of being an American POW of the Germans and witnessing the bombing of Dresden in the character of Billy Pilgrim, with a science fiction farrago about Tralfamadorians who kidnap Billy and transport him through time and space – and introduces the catchphrase ‘so it goes’

1970s
1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve ever read
1970 The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s best book, a collection of fifteen short experimental texts in stripped-down prose bringing together key obsessions like car crashes, mental breakdown, World War III, media images of atrocities and clinical sex
1971 Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard – nine short stories including Ballard’s first, from 1956, most of which follow the same shape, describing the arrival of a mysterious, beguiling woman in the fictional desert resort of Vermilion Sands, the setting for extravagantly surreal tales of the glossy, lurid and bizarre
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that is dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic, leading to harum scarum escapades in disaster-stricken London
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1972 The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – a mind-boggling trio of novellas set on a pair of planets 20 light years away, the stories revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets’ shape-shifting aboriginal inhabitants who murdered the first earth colonists and took their places so effectively that they have forgotten the fact and think themselves genuinely human
1973 Crash by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s most ‘controversial’ novel, a searingly intense description of its characters’ obsession with the sexuality of car crashes, wounds and disfigurement
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1973 Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s longest and most experimental novel with the barest of plots and characters allowing him to sound off about sex, race, America, environmentalism, with the appearance of his alter ego Kilgore Trout and even Vonnegut himself as a character, all enlivened by Vonnegut’s own naive illustrations and the throwaway catchphrase ‘And so on…’
1974 Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – the short and powerful novella in which an advertising executive crashes his car onto a stretch of wasteland in the juncture of three motorways, finds he can’t get off it, and slowly adapts to life alongside its current, psychologically damaged inhabitants
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything
1974 Inverted World by Christopher Priest – vivid description of a city on a distant planet which must move forwards on railway tracks constructed by the secretive ‘guilds’ in order not to fall behind the mysterious ‘optimum’ and avoid the fate of being obliterated by the planet’s bizarre lateral distorting, a vivid and disturbing narrative right up until the shock revelation of the last few pages
1975 High Rise by J.G. Ballard – an astonishingly intense and brutal vision of how the middle-class occupants of London’s newest and largest luxury, high-rise development spiral down from petty tiffs and jealousies into increasing alcohol-fuelled mayhem, disintegrating into full-blown civil war before regressing to starvation and cannibalism
1976 Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut – a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife
1979 The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard – a strange combination of banality and visionary weirdness as an unhinged young man crashes his stolen plane in suburban Shepperton, and starts performing magical acts like converting the inhabitants into birds, conjuring up exotic foliage, convinced his is on a mission to liberate them
1979 Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut – the satirical story of Walter F. Starbuck and the RAMJAC Corps run by Mary Kathleen O’Looney, a baglady from Grand Central Station, among other satirical notions including the new that Kilgore Trout, a character who recurs in most of his novels, is one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prison at the gaol where Starbuck serves a two year sentence, one Dr Robert Fender

1980s
1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – set in an England of 2035 after a) the oil has run out and b) a left-wing government left NATO and England was promptly invaded by the Russians – ‘the Pacification’, who have settled down to become a ruling class and treat the native English like 19th century serfs
1980 The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard – seven very early and often quite cheesy sci-fi short stories, along with a visionary satire on Vietnam (1969), and then two mature stories from the 1970s which show Ballard’s approach sliding into mannerism
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1981 Hello America by J.G. Ballard – – a hundred years from now an environmental catastrophe has turned America into a vast, arid desert, except for west of the Rockies which has become a rainforest of Amazonian opulence, and it is here that a ragtag band of explorers from old Europe discover a psychopath has crowned himself President Manson, has revived an old nuclear power station in order to light up Las Vegas, and plays roulette in Caesar’s Palace to decide which American city to nuke next
1981 The Affirmation by Christopher Priest – an extraordinarily vivid description of a schizophrenic young man living in London who, to protect against the trauma of his actual life (father died, made redundant, girlfriend committed suicide) invents a fantasy world, the Dream Archipelago, and how it takes over his ‘real’ life
1982 Myths of the Near Future by J.G. Ballard – ten short stories showing Ballard’s range of subject matter from Second World War China to the rusting gantries of Cape Kennedy
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – Gibson’s stunning debut novel which establishes the ‘Sprawl’ universe, in which burnt-out cyberspace cowboy, Case, is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool, at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall, who they plan to kidnap but is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero; while the daughter of a Japanese gangster who’s sent her to London for safekeeping is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990s
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative version of history, Charles Babbage’s early computer, instead of being left as a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population suppressed

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Posted by Simon on January 21, 2020

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The Word For World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin (1972)

A short novella, 128 pages in the Gollancz paperback edition, this is a furious satire on the arrogance, ignorance and grotesque violence of colonialism, fired by Le Guin’s anger against American behaviour in the Vietnam War. It is cast in the shape of a science fiction story which slots into the ‘Hainish’ universe and so it set on a planet far away and in the future. But the despicable behaviour of the marauding human colonists clearly reflects media coverage of the American army in Vietnam.

Athshe

Le Guin invents a planet from her ever-expandable range of planets set in the so-called Hainish universe. This one is named Athshe and consists mostly of warm ocean, but has one archipelago of islands covered in rainforest. Hidden away in burrows and primitive villages in the forest live the metre-tall, furry Athsheans, who spend a lot of their lives in ‘dreamtime’.

[As with all the planets in the Hain cycle or universe, the idea is that the humanoid Hain achieved space travels hundreds of thousands, maybe a million years earlier – and colonised or populated a range of habitable planets across the galaxy. These varieties of human have evolved in sometimes striking different directions but are, genetically, all part of one genus. Thus, despite their physical differences, the Athsheans are, at bottom, human and, in their own language, refer to themselves as ‘men’ every bit as much as the humans who arrive on their planet.]

Men, yes, men, because, alas, four years before the story started, colonists from Earth arrived on Athshe (known to Terran explorers as Planet 41 and named by the settlers ‘New Tahiti’). They immediately set up logging camps in all the forests of all the main islands, and proceeded to chop down all the trees, strip & shape them and ship them back to Earth, which is a sterile world of concrete in this (characteristically) dystopian future.

The colonists call the natives ‘creechies’. The natives call the colonists ‘yumans’.

Le Guin makes these human invaders as blunt and gung-ho, Yankee, big-swinging-dick, macho shitheads as she can, led by one Captain Davidson, head of the ‘Smith’ logging camp.

We watch Donaldson beating and berating the little furry Athsheans, getting them to fetch and carry and slave for the white man. In case we don’t get that he’s a prime slab of toxic masculinity, Davidson is shown swaggering around the camp fnah-fnahing with his logger mates about the new consignment of womenfolk who’ve just arrived on a spaceship from earth, prime meat, get it while you can boys, yee hah! And all that’s before we learn that he raped and killed one of the Athshean females.

Attack on camp Smith

Captain Davidson flies to Centralville, the headquarters of the colony, for a little R&R but, upon his return, is astonished to find Camp Smith a heap of smouldering ashes. The Athsheans have risen up and wiped out the 200 or so men there and burned everything to the ground.

A couple of them then jump Davidson, take his gun off him and let him loose to go and tell the other men that the Athsheans are having their revenge. Just to rub in what a toxic slab of male cowardice Davidson is, Le Guin has him whining and mewling that it’s not fair that he doesn’t have a gun anymore.

Sometime later he returns in a helicopter from the nearest surviving camp which is, characteristically, equipped with machine guns and flamethrowers, and ravages the entire area, in mad psychopathic anger – a sci-fi equivalent of the ship Marlow sees off the coast of Africa firing its canon into the forest out of blank, hopeless rage and frustration in Heart of Darkness.

Selver and Lyubov

Then the scene cuts to follow the Athshean who confronted Davidson, Selver, making his way through the vast tropical rainforests to the nearest native village. He jumped Davidson alright, but not before the big white man got off a shot on his blaster which badly burned his shoulder.

Selver comes to a native settlement which seems to be made of burrows in the ground. He is greeted by an old man of the dreamtime, who introduces himself as Coro Mena of the Whitethorn. Our guy replies that he is Selver of the Ash – for these people are organised into clans named after species of tree.

From that point we are taken deeper and deeper into Athshean society, culture and customs: the novel is, in other words, another of Le Guin’s anthropological exercises.

Something which is made unmistakable by the way that, as so often, the lead (human) character is an anthropologist – in this case described as a ‘hilfer’, a professional student of Highly Intelligent Life Forms, the only Terran who has made the effort to half-understand the Athsheans and their strange mystical relationship with a) the all-encompassing tropical rainforest and b) the dreamtime.

His name is Raj Lyubov. Before the narrative started he had befriended Selver and learned some of the natives’ language and beliefs from him.

But it’s very characteristic of Le Guin that this fragile understanding and cross-cultural friendship is doomed to be crushed under hard, not to say cruel, events. For now we learn that the trigger for all the events is that, before the story started, Davidson had plucked Selver’s furry little wife from the pen where the ‘yumans’ locked up the creechies every night, and he raped her, and she died during the experience.

At the first opportunity afterwards, Selver tried to kill Davidson by attacking him in the street of Camp Smith. Davidson, at twice Selver’s height, was defending himself, in the centre of a circle of cheering, jeering jock humans, when Lyubov pushed through and pulled Selver free, carrying him back to his house. Here Lyubov washed Selver’s wounds and tended him back to health, the other colonists too ashamed to intervene.

Selver and Lyubov form a friendship of sorts, Selver helping the hilfer understand native language and, above all, the central importance of dreaming, of being able to go off into dream states, to Athshean culture.

But Selver is still driven by bitter anger and it is this, compounded by other horrors which are casually mentioned (for example, we learn that one of the colonists, Benton, likes to castrate ‘uppity’ creechies in front of the others), which lies behind the creechies’ massacre of the settlers at Camp Smith.

The cycle of violence

Just when you thought Davidson couldn’t get any more loathsome, he leads a group of gung-ho soldiers on a retaliatory attack on a totally innocent Athshean village. They napalm the burrows and burn alive the furry little natives as they run out. They stamp on them to break their backs, they shoot them and burn them alive. In a bitterly satirical aside, Le Guin says they didn’t even reserve a few of them to gang rape, they were that consumed with blood lust.

There is a plot of sorts, but I found it hard to read because by this time I was feeling pretty sick. As I commented about City of Illusions, Le Guin can, when she wants, write extended descriptions of the natural world but…rarely a page goes by without it being ruined, spoilt, desecrated, by horror, terror, violence, beatings, killings, rapes and, as in this novel, castrations. The cumulative effect isn’t insightful or evocative, I just find it grim and depressing. Depressing because this is fiction. She could write about anything – but she chooses to write about burning people alive and raping and castrating.

The authorities intervene

Back in the plot, the spaceship from Terra which arrived with the women colonists also carried two humanoid aliens, a Cetian and a Hainish, and the unexpected massacre at Camp Smith compels them to jet down for a conference with the military leaders of the colony.

As it emerges out that the colonists are using the locals for slave labour and raping their women, the two officials are not impressed. The meeting/conference is described in some detail, and especially the role of Raj Lyubov who tries to respectfully disagree with his military masters and make the truth known to the ambassadors, painfully aware of how the soldiers look at him with growing hatred, Davidson in particular.

Now these ambassadors are carrying an example of a new invention, the ansible, which they had been tasked with taking on to another colonised planet. Now they decide to leave it here so that the colonists can be in instantaneous communication with the Administration back home. They point out that in the years since the colonists arrived, the Earth has joined the League of Worlds, and has moderated its rapacious demands on other planets. Now instructions start being conveyed from the home planet Administration via the ansible, live, in real time.

Of course the military, especially numb-nuts Captain Davidson, not only reject this but suspect it is a hoax, a con, the ansible is a fake and the strict new, native-friendly rules being sent through it and imposed on the military are some kind of alien coup cooked up by the pallid Hainish and the hairy little Cetian.

Davidson is painted as such a cowardly, murderous, psychopathic rapist – and the Athsheans such lovable tree-hugging, green furry dreamers – and Raj Lyubov so much the sensitive man-in-the-middle who ends up alienating both sides – that I couldn’t help have a sneaking liking for Davidson. In free indirect speech Le Guin lets us overhear his thoughts and share his worldview, and captures the big swinging dick, macho bullshit of testosterone-overdrive American culture so well. Monsters are often thrilling. That’s one of the most obvious findings or discoveries of literature.

That said, there is a running stream of feminist comments throughout the book, a counterblast to Davidson’s appalling macho mindset.

The Athshean communities are run by headwomen. Casually we are shown female Athsheans being messengers and doers. I was particularly struck by the idea attributed to the thoughtful Lyubov, that what the colonists really needed was not big-breasted dolly birds but more old women. Old women have a special wisdom. Old women speak their minds and (though it isn’t expressed) old women can shame full-grown men into half-decent behaviour.

Lyubov is spurned by the Athsheans

Once the ambassadors or administrators from Terra have moved on, leaving a chastened military leadership reluctantly following its new orders from the home Administration back on Earth via the ansible – Lyubov ventures out to the nearest Athshean village. Here he is shocked to find the headwoman and other elders no longer talk to him or even look at him. He is the most sympathetic and understanding of the yumans but the days of peace are gone. Lyubov encounters Selver, who is recovering from leading the attack on Camp Smith. The other Athsheans look on him now with awe, as a human who can wreak such devastation in the ‘real’ world.

From Lyubov’s memories of rescuing and helping Selver we gather a lot more information about a) the Athsheans’ culture and language and especially about their ability to dream with their eyes open and remember and in some sense live by their dreams, and also b) more of the backstory about how Lyubov rescued Selver from probably being beaten to death by Davidson, nursed him, and in doing so struck up an intense relationship in which they taught each other their languages. But the violence has severed that link. Now Selver can barely talk to him. Devastated, Lyubin returns to the main human settlement, which they call Centralville.

The cycle of violence continues

That night Lyubov wakes from ominous and fateful dreams to discover that Centralville is under ferocious attack from the Athsheans. Later we get the detail of how about 5,000 Athsheans, organised by Selver and others who had been slaves at Camp Smith, launched a carefully planned attack, cutting off the water supplies, surrounding the base, planting a huge pile of dynamite in the central HQ then waiting with flamethrowers (!), some guns and plenty of knives and laces for the terrified yumans to emerge into the night.

Later we learn that the Athsheans knew the human women had been sent for safety from all the remote colonists’ settlements to Centralville and took special care to target the women’s dormitories and – annihilate them – mostly by burning them to death inside their buildings, or as they tried to escape, or slitting their throats or stabbing them with knives or lances.

All this we discover later, but at the time the scene of carnage, explosions, burning and screaming is described through Lyubov’s terrified perceptions, right up to the moment he goes to the help of a screaming woman running out of a building, just as the building topples forward and crushes them both, smashing Lyubov into the mud.

Next day, amid the smouldering ruins, Selver wanders dazed at what they’ve done. All the women, some 500, were massacred, as planned, to prevent the colonists breeding like locusts. The surviving men have been rounded up and placed in a pen, a lager, a camp. Wandering the smouldering streets Selver is dismayed to come across Lyubov’s body, crushed under the beams of the fallen building. He cradles the hilfer’s head but Lyubov can’t move because his back is broken and after a few words he dies. Or, as Selver perceives it, passes into the dreamworld.

See what I mean by hard and unrelenting and callous and cruel? I found it a struggle to finish this short book, not because it reflects the brutality of Vietnam – it doesn’t particularly – for me it felt like a continuation of the callous, heartless violence I’ve experienced in all of Le Guin’s novels. Remember the helicopters hovering over the protest meeting in The Dispossessed and suddenly opening fire with machine guns and massacring hundreds. All seven of the novels I’ve read have been characterised by wilful, hard, unbending, unsentimental, bleak, cruel violence.

The colonists at bay

The surviving men colonists are rounded up and kept in a pen. I kept envisioning this as like the camp in Bridge On The River Kwai. Selver has by now established himself as leader of the Athsheans, who have no central organisation or government or leadership in our sense. We are shown younger creechies watching in awe as he passes by. He is regarded as a ‘god’ because he has brought something from the dreamworld into the real world – namely war and death.

Now he negotiates with the remaining leadership among the colonists.

Cut to Davidson who hadn’t been at Centralville when the big attack took place, he was at a different settlement called New Java. Now he gets radio messages from his superiors inside the camp, telling him they’ve made peace with the Athsheans and he must cease any engagement with them.

The novel really becomes about Davidson now: it emerges as the portrait of a military psychopath because Le Guin takes us inside his head, hearing all his rationalisations and justifications for disobeying military discipline, for ignoring direct instructions to ceasefire. He decides his superiors have gone soft, and leads the more gung-ho elements on a series of helicopter attacks on nearby villages, once again, carpeting them in napalm and bombs, watching entire settlements – of sweet organic burrows mostly buried in the ground amid the roots of the great rainforests – going up in flames and watching the little creechies run around on fire.

Another Athshean attack

As you might expect, after some days of this there is a massive Athshean attack on Davidson’s camp. Amid all the explosions and confusion, Davidson and a few others make it to a helicopter and take off. In the dark night Davidson orders the pilot to return and strafe their own camp.

What I haven’t really brought out is the extent to which Davidson has gone nuts. From a technical point of view, one obvious interest in the narrative is the way Le Guin plots Davidson’s progression from gung-ho soldier, to disobedient officer and then onto crazed killer.

Davidson argues with both the other colonists in the chopper, including the one flying it. He gun-punches one of them, knocking him out and then, in a mad moment, turns out the cabin lights in the chopper – the aim being to see the lights of the flames from the camp so they can return and strafe it.

It’s only for a moment but it’s long enough for the chopper to lose enough height to crash into tress and then topple down through the treecover crashing down to within a few feet of the ground, in a way we’ve all seen in umpteen action movies. Davidson comes round from concussion, falls the few feet to the ground, realises that he’s slithering around in the sticky remains of the pilot’s body (yuk), has all kinds of delusory thoughts about flying back and killing everyone but…

Instead he regains consciousness and is confronted with his nemesis, Selver. Selver says he is mad. (There is a lot of rhetoric about madness and sanity in the book.) And so they’re going to do what they do with natives who go insane – take him to a desert island, in this case, one of the ones the humans have utterly devastated. Dazed Davidson feels a rope noose being lowered over his neck and capitulates.

Coda

The spaceship which dropped off the women colonists at the start? It’s back from its mission to some other planet bringing with it the only two grown-ups in the story, the Hainish and the Cetian representatives of the League of All Worlds.

They apologise to Selver (who has emerged as the leader of the Athsheans) for the behaviour of the colonists, and explain that the entire colony is shutting down. All the humans and all the equipment will be removed. No more humans will arrive or disturb them. Athshe has been made subject of a League Ban, and will be protected.

The last thought is Selver explaining how his culture considers new inventions or discoveries to originate in the dream world and be brought from there into the real world, and how those who bring them about are considered ‘gods’ (in their local language; in fact different from what we consider gods).

Anyway, the last thought is that his people consider him a god because he has brought forth organised fighting on a scale his world has never known. Now, sadly, he thinks his discovery of killing will not go away…

In this excerpt of the novel’s last page, Lepennon is the name of the Hainishman, Lyubov – although dead – continues to haunt Selver’s consciousness and Davidson – as we’ve seen – is alive but isolated on an island for the mad (something Lepennon and all the other Terrans are [ironically] unaware of.)

‘Sometimes a god comes,’ Selver said. ‘He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.’

Lepennon laid his long hand on Selver’s hand, so quickly and gently that Selver accepted the touch as if the hand were not a stranger’s. The green-gold shadows of the ash leaves flickered over them.

‘But you must not pretend to have reasons to kill one another. Murder has no reason,’ Lepennon said, his face as anxious and sad as Lyubov’s face. ‘We shall go. Within two days we shall be gone. All of us. Forever. Then the forests of Athshe will be as they were before.’

Lyubov came out of the shadows of Selver’s mind and said, ‘I shall be here.’

‘Lyubov will be here,’ Selver said. ‘And Davidson will be here. Both of them. Maybe after I die people will be as they were before I was born, and before you came. But I do not think they will.’

Conclusion

This book should have thrilled me since a) I am interested in, and have read fairly extensively about, the Vietnam war:

and b) I like science fiction.

But, although it has some elements which showcase Le Guin’s characteristic Deep Thought (the sleep/dream culture which she invents and ascribes to the native species, as well as their cultural tradition of holding singing contests instead of fighting) – nonetheless, I was disgusted and repelled by the unrelenting, sickening violence of the story which simply, for me, had no redeeming feature.

Related links

Reviews of Ursula Le Guin novels

1966 Rocannon’s World
1966 Planet of Exile
1967 City of Illusions
1968 A Wizard of Earthsea
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness
1971 The Lathe of Heaven
1972 The Word for World Is Forest
1974 The Dispossessed

Other science fiction reviews

Late Victorian
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1900s
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1910s
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1920s
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover…

1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the most sweeping vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars

1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950s
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fastpaced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard man Gulliver Foyle is looking for vengeance
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

1960s
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undergo a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love

1970s
1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve read
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that is dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything

1980s
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – burnt-out cyberspace cowboy Case is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall who they plan to kidnap but is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero, while the daughter of a Japanese ganster who’s sent her to London for safekeeping is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990s
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative history Charles Babbage’s early computer, instead of being left as a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population suppressed

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by Simon on December 15, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Politics, Science Fiction
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Posted by Simon on December 15, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/12/15/the-word-for-world-is-forest-ursula-le-guin/

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

Heart of Darkness was published in three monthly instalments in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in February, March and April of 1899. (The Victorian Web has an essay describing the other articles which Heart of Darkness appeared among.) The final text was still divided into three equal sections when it was published in book form in 1902.

Heart of Darkness is a masterpiece and as such can be approached from scores of different angles, interpreted in countless ways.

In line with my earlier comments about Conrad, I think its success is partly because, in the horrific facts of the Belgian Congo which he experienced on his 1890 trip up the river, Conrad found external realities which, for once, justified the extremity of his nihilistic worldview and the exorbitance of his style.

The Congo really was a vast immensity of suffering and pain. When he uses his almost hysterical language about Almayer’s daughter abandoning him, or Willems’s native mistress seeing through him, or Hervey’s wife leaving him, Conrad’s lexicon and syntax seem overwrought, hyperbolic. In King Leopold’s Congo there really was a subject which justified the obsessive use of words like ‘horror’, ‘suffering’, ‘immense anguish’ and so on.

Frame device

In Youth Conrad invents the frame device of the group of five mature men of the world sitting around smoking after-dinner cigars while one of them, Marlow, sets off to tell a long yarn.

Having come across this device in Youth Conrad immediately reused it for House of Darkness. Precisely the same five good fellows who we met in Youth are aboard the yacht Nellie, moored in the Thames at dusk, as Marlow recounts the story of his trip up the  Congo.

So the book has two narrators: the anonymous one who describes the ‘we’, the five chaps; and then, via his narrative, we hear Marlow’s story – a story within a story.

Matching the tale to the teller, and creating subtle ironies between the actual events and the way they are told, are devices as old as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio’s Decameron, older. Thus, once Marlow finishes his story, the narrator returns for the concluding paragraphs, to describe the haunting final vision of the darkness of the Thames after sunset, when the full repercussions of Marlow’s story sink in.

The frame device:

  • guarantees a happy ending – we know that Marlow returned alive
  • guarantees a kind of sanity – periodically, when Marlow’s story rises to heights of absurdity or psychological stress, the narrator reminds us of the calm, bourgeois, urban setting the tale is being told in:

There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match flared, and Marlow’s lean face appeared, worn, hollow, with downward folds and dropped eyelids, with an aspect of concentrated attention; and as he took vigorous draws at his pipe, it seemed to retreat and advance out of the night in the regular flicker of the tiny flame.

  • above all, it replaces suspense – what happened? – with reflection – what does it mean? It legitimises the way Marlow frequently stops the tale to ponder the meaning of his experiences, or stops to tell his audience how he’s struggling to convey the feelings he experienced – something that would be harder for an omniscient narrator to do.

Plot

Marlow takes a commission from a Belgian company to captain a steamboat up the Congo to find one Mr Kurtz, a prize ivory trader. Before he’s even set foot in Africa he sees signs of the greed and folly of the European imperial mission to Africa – ta lone warship pointlessly firing cannon randomly into the jungle – and as soon as he arrives at the first station up-river he finds the building of the so-called railway a shambles where Africans are chained like slaves and worked to death.

When Marlow reaches the legendary Kurtz he finds he has sunk into horrific barbarity, savagely marauding through neighbouring country, killing natives and stealing their ivory, his campong lined by stakes on which are impaled human heads.

The young idealist Kurtz had written an eloquent pamphlet on how to bring ‘civilisation’ to the natives. Across the bottom the older, degraded Kurtz has scrawled, ‘Exterminate all the brutes.’

Kurtz is a symbol of the hypocritical cruelty and absurd folly of imperial enterprises. Marlow gets his native bearers to carry the sick and dying Kurtz onto his steamer, turns around and heads for the coast. Kurtz dies onboard and his last words – ‘The horror, the horror’ – have become classic, referenced by T.S. Eliot, the climax of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 movie adaptation, ‘Apocalypse Now‘, I’ve seen them on t-shirts.

Not British

Although Conrad doesn’t name the colonial power, he gives broad enough hints that it was Belgium. The Congo was the personal possession of King Leopold of Belgium, who modern historians nowadays place alongside Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot as one of the great modern mass murderers of all time, with an estimated 8-10 million Africans dying in the Congo as a direct result of the slavery he instituted during his reign (1885-1908).

But the point is – it isn’t British. This genocidal regime wasn’t British. Conrad was anxious about how his blistering critique of Imperialism would be received in his new home, the greatest empire the world had ever seen.

Later the same year Heart of Darkness was published, in October 1899, the Boer War broke out and whipped the country into a furore of Imperialist jingoism. Conrad knew it was impossible to criticise the British Empire, and he certainly goes out of his way in the opening pages to emphasise that he is NOT talking about the British Empire, and that the British Empire is qualitatively different from the imperial folly he attributes to Belgium.

‘On one end a large shining map, marked with all the colors of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red – good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there…’

What’s more, the opening pages contain a great and deliberate hymn to the history and integrity of the British Empire.

I wonder what obligation Conrad felt under to clarify that, although he appeared to be saying that all empires are hypocritical, rapacious follies… he in fact meant, all empires except your empire of course, chaps.

‘The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled—the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her round flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen’s Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests—and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith—the adventurers and the settlers; kings’ ships and the ships of men on ‘Change; captains, admirals, the dark “interlopers” of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned “generals” of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.’

Furthermore, at a few key moments in the story, the English auditors interrupt the story to object to Marlow’s tone and implications.

These interruptions mark the boundaries, indicating not so much to the fictional audience but to us, the readers, that even Marlow’s overflowing style and withering irony has limits, is safely contained. That Conrad knows where the borders of taste are and is policing them:

‘I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your respective tight-ropes for –  what is it? half-a-crown a tumble – ‘
‘”Try to be civil, Marlow,” growled a voice, and I knew there was at least one listener awake besides myself.
‘”I beg your pardon,” [said Marlow]

Style

Because the bulk of the narration is meant to be spoken by Marlow, an Englishman telling his story to other Englishmen, Conrad is forced to rein in his style.

Much more of the narrative deals with facts, factually conveyed, than in his earlier texts such as the lyrical Youth, the first Marlow text.

Coming fresh from reading Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands and Karain, the style of Darkness seems mercifully sober and controlled.

But coming from outside Conradworld, to most ordinary readers the style will still seem extraordinarily florid, with long descriptive passages larded with lush adjectives, and Marlow’s comments on his experiences forever tending to the same nihilism and fatalism which drenched the narratives of Almayer, Outcast, Karain, Lagoon and The Return.

There include the liberal use of triplets –

‘all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.’

The long sentences which use multiple sub-clauses to repeat and amplify the message of despair.

Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

And the endlessly creative ways he finds to express the same underlying mood of despair:

…my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform somberness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion.

…in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair.

A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.

The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence.

…a gesture that took in the forest, the creek, the mud, the river, – seemed to beckon with a dishonouring flourish before the sunlit face of the land a treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart.

The pattern itself

There are insights to be had about the role of women – about the contrast between the savage woman of the jungle and the white purity of Kurtz’s Intended who Marlow visits back in Brussels and whose innocent, naive love for Kurtz he is compelled to preserve.

There’s also a lot to write about the concept of the Voice – Marlow experiences Kurtz as predominantly a fluent, deep, authoritative voice – but then Marlow himself becomes nothing but a voice on the deck of the unlit yawl – the two are ironically yoked together.

Books can and have been written about Conrad’s racism, his fundamentally insulting opinion of Africans or ‘savages’ etc.

In all three ‘issues’ or themes or motifs (and in a host of others) Conrad deliberately creates multiple ironies, multiple systems of comparison and contrast. But however easily these patterns can be reduced to feminist or post-colonial or post-structuralist formulas, rewritten to support early 21st century political correctness, I also regard the patterning of the text as almost abstract, as an end in itself which can be enjoyed for itself.

The repetition of key words and phrases – the repetition of leading motifs – the multiple ironies i.e. the ubiquitous techniques of doubling and comparison – because they are expressed in words are susceptible of logical interpretation. But I suggest they can also be seen as abstract designs, comparable to the Japanese designs so appreciated by contemporary Aesthetes – or to the new languid style of Art Nouveau, the delicate intertwining of tracery meant to be enjoyed for its own sake and nothing more.

I think of the turn to patterning of a painter like Edward Burne-Jones who, in his final years, acquired a symbolist depth. His later paintings are full of grey-eyed women in increasingly abstract patterns or designs.

Symbolist poetry and painting was the new thing in the 1890s, paintings and poetry full of shimmering surfaces to be appreciated for their own beauty, without any straining after meaning. Like the intricate line drawings of Aubrey Beardsley where the style is much more important than the ‘subject matter’; or the ‘impressionist’ music of Claude Debussy.

Conrad hints as much in an oft-quoted passage right at the start, where the anonymous narrator is setting the scene and introducing Marlow:

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

In 1917 Conrad wrote prefaces to a new edition of his works, and wrote the following about Heart of Darkness, explicitly comparing it not to a tract, a fiction, even to a painting, but to music:

Heart of Darkness is experience, too; but it is experience pushed a little (and only a little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers. There it was no longer a matter of sincere colouring. It was like another art altogether. That sombre tone had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that, I hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck.

In my opinion, you can write whole books about Conrad and Women, Conrad and Empire, Conrad and Race, and these will be interesting investigations, but all these approaches can (should?) be subsumed by a sensitive, receptive appreciation of the multiply-layered phrasing, of the styling and patterning of motifs and rhythms, tones and colours, words and clauses, sentences and paragraphs, of his grandiloquent and haunted prose style.

To appreciate it like a work of art or the intricate patterning of an exquisite piece of music. To penetrate to a deeper appreciation of the sheer sensual pleasure of this extraordinary text.

Reviews of other fiction of the 1880s and 1890s

Joseph Conrad

George du Maurier

Henry Rider Haggard

Sherlock Holmes

Anthony Hope

E.H. Hornung

Henry James

Rudyard Kipling

Arthur Morrison

Robert Louis Stevenson

Bram Stoker

H.G. Wells

Oscar Wilde

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by Simon on September 19, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, English literature
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Posted by Simon on September 19, 2012

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/09/19/heart-of-darkness-joseph-conrad/

Youth by Joseph Conrad (1898)

Youth, the shortish short story (30 pages) Conrad completed in June 1898, sees the debut of Charles Marlow, Conrad’s alter-ego, the fictional narrator of this and his two most famous stories, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Marlow’s arrival marks a step change in the quality of Conrad’s work.

Marlow enforces discipline

Because the story is narrated by a character, not by the omniscient narrator he’d used in all his previous works, Conrad has to make a big effort to rein in the stylistic excesses I have described in previous posts. For example, Conrad’s short story The Return strikes me as being almost unbearable to read for its sustained note of manic hysteria. Conrad uses free indirect style to take us inside the mind of Alvan Hervey as his wife’s infidelity triggers what feels, trapped inside his head, like a nervous breakdown. In fact, this is just another outing for the hysterical, panic-stricken, horror-obsessed nihilism which characterises all of Conrad’s fiction up to this point.

It is with immense relief that one turns to Youth because this hysteria is reined right in and Conrad’s stylistic excesses, though still noticeable at moments, are in general held in abeyance in order to foreground the practical, no-nonsense voice of Charles Marlow.

Plot

The plot is simple. The 20-year-old Marlow is second mate on the Judea, contracted to take coal from Newcastle to Bangkok. The boat encounters a number of problems which repeatedly delay its departure from England, then it hits storms off Africa, and then the coal in the hold begins to spontaneously burn as they enter the Indian Ocean.

Eventually the crew are forced to abandon ship, and Marlow docks in the East having commanded a 14-foot ship’s boat and crew of two for the last week of the ill-fated journey.

Style

The style is blessedly restrained. Both the character of Marlow and the nature of the ‘story’ i.e. a detailed account of the maritime problems encountered by the ship – dictate a much more factual style than anything Conrad had previously written.

We had been pulling this finishing spell for eleven hours. Two pulled, and he whose turn it was to rest sat at the tiller. We had made out the red light in that bay and steered for it, guessing it must mark some small coasting port. We passed two vessels, outlandish and high-sterned, sleeping at anchor, and, approaching the light, now very dim, ran the boat’s nose against the end of a jutting wharf.

Shorter sentences. Fewer subordinate clauses. Much more factual content. A lot less tautology or redundancy. A blessed relief, though the old Conrad is still there, straining at the leash:

O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight—to me she was the endeavour, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret.

There was not a light, not a stir, not a sound. The mysterious East faced me, perfumed like a flower, silent like death, dark like a grave.

This was the East of the ancient navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and somber, living and unchanged, full of danger and promise.

But the familiar lyricism, the repetition and apposition, is justified by the fundamental idea – that this is the character Marlow’s paean to the vividness and optimism of naive and romantic youth. Well, just about justified.

Framing device

Youth starts with the identical setting made famous by Heart of Darkness, i.e. after dinner in London five mature and successful men of the world who have all experienced the sea sit and smoke cigars, chatting. The anonymous narrator is one of them; he sets this scene, describes the audience a little, and then lets Marlow begin his tale.

The frame device, the tale-within-a-tale, does several things:

  • It distances the tale. No matter what happens we know that Marlow survived and is telling it to us now. Though we are caught up in the events he narrates, we are not actually lost in a moment-by-moment helter-skelter of hysteria with a totally unpredictable outcome, as we are in the key scenes of Almayer or An Outpost
  • Marlow is telling his tale to a suave and knowing audience. This has an important effect in toning down the hysterical style of the earlier novels and stories. Although Marlow is still given lines of improbable lyricism, Conrad is conscious of them, limits them, and excuses them – Marlow himself justifies them as he speaks them – because this is a tale of high spirits and boyish optimism.
  • Marlow is English. Unlike the protagonists of Almayer and Outcast and Outpost and Karain. It is as if hysteria is characteristic of the lesser Europeans, the Dutch and Belgians. Conrad emphasises Marlow’s Englishness by making him use the upper-class slang of the day – ‘Pon my soul’, ‘The deuce of a time’. And the Englishness of narrator and audience guarantees a sang-froid, the famous stiff upper-lip, which limits and disciplines Conrad. Enforces restraint. And his prose is all the more effective for it.

For those who like patterns, it is pretty that Conrad published Youth, Heart of Darkness and The End of The Tether in one volume in 1902 (Youth, A Narrative, and other tales) – one representing youth, one representing maturity, one representing old age.

Related links

Reviews of other fiction of the 1880s and 1890s

Joseph Conrad

George du Maurier

Henry Rider Haggard

Sherlock Holmes

Anthony Hope

E.H. Hornung

Henry James

Rudyard Kipling

Arthur Morrison

Robert Louis Stevenson

Bram Stoker

H.G. Wells

Oscar Wilde

Leave a comment
by Simon on September 17, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, English literature, Literature, Short stories
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Posted by Simon on September 17, 2012

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/youth-joseph-conrad/

Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad (1898)

After his first two novels Conrad turned to shorter forms, to novellas and short stories. He followed 1897’s novella, The Nigger of the Narcissus, with five short stories collected in 1898’s Tales of Unrest, being:

The Idiots

His first short story, written March 1896.

The Lagoon

What Conrad considered his first authentic short story, written in July 1896. A white man stops at a gloomy lagoon where a solitary Malay has his hut along with his woman. The woman is dying of fever. Through the night the Malay tells the story of their doomed love, how they ran away from the king and queen who owned her as a servant girl, how they were pursued, how his brother gave his life to save them. At dawn she dies and the man is left utterly bereft.

Quintessential Conrad – a tale of utter bleakness, told in lush, decadent, tropical prose.

An Outpost of Progress

Published in two parts in Cosmopolis magazine in June and July 1897, Conrad considered this his best short story.

It is set in the Congo, drawing on his experiences there seven years earlier, and strongly linked with Heart of Darkness i.e. pretty much the same plot. Two white men are left high up the river, deep in the Dark Continent, to run a trading station. They fall to pieces physically and mentally and the end comes when a group of African slavers steal away their native staff, leaving ivory tusks in payment.

Having lost their self-respect they go quickly downhill, bicker about nothing until, after a trivial argument, one shoots the other then hangs himself.

Conrad all over. The tropical setting; the complete degradation of the protagonists; the vision of futility; the lush prose.

It is a bit mind-boggling that ‘An Outpost’ appeared just at the moment of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, June and July 1897. On 22 June there was a vast procession of colourfully-dressed colonial subjects through London to an open air service outside St Paul’s cathedral. On 23 June the Queen met some young Indian princes. On 2 July the Queen surveyed her colonial troops at Windsor. Both the June and July editions of Cosmopolis included length celebrations of the greatness and benefits of Empire (some quoted in this article). The Times published Kipling’s great poem, Recessional, on 17 July.

And over exactly this same period, Conrad was publishing this bleak nihilistic tale. You wonder how he avoided being lynched!

The Return

Completed in early 1897. In his preface Conrad says he hated writing this story. Arrogant, successful middle-aged businessman Alvan Hervey returns on the Tube to his smart West London house to find a message from his wife saying she has left him for a magazine editor. He is devastated, his world collapses, everything he has valued is torn away from under him etc.

He is just starting to feel like all the turmoil which Conrad heroes usually luxuriate in, when his wife, embarrassingly, returns. She’s changed her mind!

How does Conrad make such a slight incident (man comes home, reads note, is unhappy, wife walks back in) last 60 pages?

With great torrents of prose describing Hervey’s anguish, mental collapse, fury, despair. Despite its untypical setting (London) it is classic overripe, hysterical Conrad, redolent of Strindberg or of a strung-out existentialist play like Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, Huis Clos.

Karain: A Memory

Published in Blackwoods Magazine in November 1897.

From the safety of Blighty the narrator remembers the days when he was a gun smuggler around the Malay archipelago. The striking figure of the native chief, Karain. Fine figure of a man. Everyone loved him. Yet he seemed somehow nervous. One stormy night (lol), he swims aboard the white trader’s schooner and tells them his story, viz:

A Dutch trader steals away a woman from his tribe. He and his best friend vow to track them down and erase the shame. For years they are on the trail together, travelling all over the archipelago in pursuit. But slowly the beautiful girl’s voice and then figure come to him in dreams and visions, talking, defending herself. Finally they find the Dutchman and the girl and his friend gives Karain a rifle and tells him to shoot the white man while he slays the girl with his dagger.

But, as his dearest, oldest friend leaps from the bushes to carry out this plan, Karain is overcome by the secret memory of the voice of the girl and her secret presence. Before he knows what he has done, he has shot his friend. He has spared the vile white man’s life. He gets away. But that night the girl’s voice doesn’t come to him. His friend’s voice and shape come to him. And from that night onwards he is pursued, followed, haunted…!

Conrad excelsis: a frame narrative around a tale of betrayal, despair and haunting.

Related links

Reviews of other fiction of the 1880s and 1890s

Joseph Conrad

George du Maurier

Henry Rider Haggard

Sherlock Holmes

Anthony Hope

E.H. Hornung

Henry James

Rudyard Kipling

Arthur Morrison

Robert Louis Stevenson

Bram Stoker

H.G. Wells

Oscar Wilde

Leave a comment
by Simon on September 17, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, English literature, Literature, Short stories
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on September 17, 2012

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/tales-of-unrest-joseph-conrad/

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