Rushing to Paradise. J. G. Ballard
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one in The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard. Its first publication of wide distribution was in the month after Ballard died.
A reader familiar with the work of Ballard will know in advance that Rushing to Paradise won’t be a simple story about hurrying over to an inarguable Eden. Unexpectedness is to be expected from any truly worthwhile writer, but with Ballard we find a more unexpected unexpectedness. Though Ballard may not be known for his sunniness, neither is he predictably dark. He is a man who in his autobiography Miracles of Life wrote of his years in the Lunghua internment camp in Shanghai, ‘I enjoyed my years in Lunghua, made a huge number of friends of all ages (far more than I did in adult life) and on the whole felt buoyant and optimistic, even when the food rations fell to near zero, skin infections covered my legs, malnutrition had prolapsed my rectum, and many of the adults had lost heart.’ Rushing to Paradise has a similarly honest and radical confluence of sentiments.
The novel is mostly set on or near a French Pacific island that is home to nuclear testing and also home to the albatross, a species of bird that Dr Barbara, a charismatic environmentalist, has resolved to save. Dr Barbara’s first stroke of good luck toward her publicly pronounced goal is when her young devotee Neil, just sixteen, gets shot in the foot by the French military – this wins her a useful media bonanza. Her next bit of good fortune is a shipwreck. Sure, Dr Barbara is not up to quite what we had originally thought she was up to, and the fortune and misfortune around her prove to be other than purely arbitrary. But Dr Barbara is not a simple villain, with simple victims.
I have too much respect for a novel that can actually be plot-spoiled, so I won’t share more turns of events in these prefacing pages. Instead I will simply point out: here we are, for most of the novel, on an island with its questionable cast. This is a classic situation in literature, and also – with variations on what isolates the characters – in Ballard. In Rushing, Ballard uses the situation so marvellously that one can’t help but think of that Duke Prospero, with his dubious renouncement of his own magic, and Caliban’s unsettling pledge of obedience. Ballard invokes this comparison consciously, it seems. Is the island the place of our most primitive selves, or is it the luxurious haven of refined civilization? Is the island the place we are fleeing to, or fleeing from?
The word ‘paradise’ has cognates in Old French, Late Latin, Greek and Iranian, and it has much the same tone and meaning in each of those sources. But the word’s component parts, para- cognate with peri- for ‘around’ and -dise from varied roots meaning to build or form, suggest a deliberately bounded space, even a compound of sorts. Thus the word’s etymology suggests an anxiety about the idyll: perhaps it needs high defences, perhaps it is difficult to escape. In this novel, we see these verbal undertones in the literal Pacific island, but also in the metaphoric islands of sexual enchantment and of ideals as they morph into moral high grounds. Much of the novel is told from close perspective of the young Neil, who finds himself in various havens he has trouble exiting, including the haven of youth. By the latter half of the novel, Neil hunts and eats animals he might have once thought otherwise about, but ‘fortunately the world supply of rare and endangered mammals seemed inexhaustible.’ And yet we know that ‘seemed’ is precisely the right word.
These are the whirled contradictions that make Ballard’s pages here seem not so much to turn as to rotate and tighten like a vice. Are you excited that there’s an intelligent, scientific, female lead? Well, that feeling will be complicated. Does the lampooning of a hyperbolic photogenic-conflict-obsessed media compel? That too won’t work out in the clean way you might imagine. For effects beyond mere playfulness, Ballard has hinged this novel on the albatross, a bird whose mythology is surpassed perhaps only by the fictive phoenix. Albatrosses, however, are not just literary, they are also real. The novel’s characters both think, and don’t think too hard, about allusions to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In that poem, the man who killed the albatross, though he is blamed by his crew for the bad weather, and is forced to wear the dead albatross on his neck, is also the only member of the sailing crew who survives. We often forget this. The mariner’s burden is to tell his tale wherever he goes, so as to teach a lesson. But what lesson? His crime is what saved him. And the relation of his crime to the ship’s troubles is in many places undermined. It is the panicked sailors eager to assign blame whose lives are taken.
Ballard, we should remember, is arguably most famous for his fictive apocalypses, as in The Drowned World and The Crystal World. Rushing to Paradise could be said to be another of Ballard’s apocalypse novels, though its apocalypse is perennial and familiar, one of abuses of power and of personality cults among tottering grandness, extinctions and decays. Rushing is an apocalypse novel in much the same way as the wholly realistic Empire of the Sun, set in the World War Two internment camps of Shanghai that Ballard knew firsthand.
How does one end an apocalyptic story, a story that is, in its essence, about endings? In ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B.’ it is only the alien birds that return to B’s lawn and are there to witness the instructive tale of a man who finds a way off the island, even as he stays on. In the case of Rushing to Paradise, we might think of ourselves as the threatened albatrosses who remain in flight overhead, looking for where we might, at least briefly, land.
New York, 2014
‘Save the albatross …! Stop nuclear testing now …!’
Drenched by the spray, Dr Barbara Rafferty stood in the bows of the rubber inflatable, steadying herself against Neil’s shoulder as the craft swayed in the skittish sea. Refilling her strained but still indignant lungs, she pressed the megaphone to her lips and bellowed at the empty beaches of the atoll.
‘Say no to biological warfare …! Save the albatross and save the planet …!’
A passing wave swerved across the prow, and almost struck the megaphone from her hand. She swore at the playful foam, and listened to the echoes of her voice hunting among the rollers. As if bored with themselves, the amplified slogans had faded long before they could reach the shore.
‘Shit! Neil, wake up! What’s the matter?’
‘I’m here, Dr Barbara.’
‘That’s Saint-Esprit ahead. The albatross island!’
‘Saint-Esprit?’ Neil stared doubtfully at the deserted coastline, which seemed about to slide off the edge of the Pacific. He tried to muster a show of enthusiasm. ‘You really brought us here, doctor.’
‘I told you I would. Believe me, we’re going to stir things up …’
‘You always stir everything up …’ Neil moved her heavy knee from the small of his back and rested his head against the oil-smeared float. ‘Dr Barbara, I need to sleep.’
‘Not now! For heaven’s sake …’
Already irritated by the island, which she had described so passionately during the three-week voyage from Papeete, Dr Barbara raised two fingers in a vulgar gesture that shocked even Neil. Between the lapels of her orange weather-jacket the salt-water sores on her neck and chest glared like cigarette bums. But her body meant nothing to the forty-year-old physician, as Neil knew. For Dr Barbara the polluted water tanks of the Bichon, the antique ketch that had brought them from Papeete, their meagre rations and sodden bunks counted for nothing. Albatross fever was all. If Saint-Esprit, this nondescript atoll six hundred miles south-east of Tahiti, failed to match her expectations it would have to reshape itself into the threatened paradise for which she had campaigned so tirelessly.
‘Reef, Dr Barbara! Time for quiet … I need to hear the coral.’
Behind them was the Hawaiian helmsman, Kimo, his knees braced