Lovein a cold climate

JG Ballard’s The Crystal World

‘Here everything is transfigured and illuminated, joined together in the last marriage of space and time.’
—JG Ballard

Relationships in Ballard are frequently fractured. This fracturing reached its height in The Atrocity Exhibition, an exercise in abstraction that was driven by inner fragmentation. It became a metaphorical lynchpin in the late ‘crime novels’ where you could feel the crack in the mirror creep off the page and infect your licked fingers… The early ‘disaster’ stories carry that same sense of brokenness. And yet… The Crystal World, a novel about time leaking away from the planet, contains images of staggering beauty, pathos and hope. As the death crystals spread it becomes clear, perhaps through some psychic transference, that they offer an exit wrapped in the clasp of an eternal, holographic present.

Life-partners, in a last attempt at preservation, retreat into the eternal forest, and each other…