Obsessed with a river

Press, 23 January 1988, Page 25

Obsessed with a river

The Day of Creation. By J. G. Ballard. Gollancz, 1987, 254 pp. $34.95. There have been some marvellous novels about grand obsessions, singleminded furies that drive a person onwards into splendid excesses. Golding’s "The Spire,” Carey’s “The Horse’s Mouth,” or Melville’s “Moby Dick” come to mind. Sometimes, the obsession is with a place or a journey, usually in the mind-sapping frozen wastes, or the light-headed dehydration of a desert, or the feverridden infectious hot-houses of tropical swamps. This theme has been followed so frequently that to succeed again it must have the compelling atmosphere of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” In J. G. Baliard’s “The Day of Creation,” Mallory, a doctor in Central Africa, becomes obsessed with a river which he apparently creates by a strange accident. Moving through the trashy detritus which characterises the places where the primitive world brushes up against civilisation, Mallory travels up the river to find its source.

He is surrounded by semi-military warring factions and half accompanied by a range of people who could have come from a Dickensian novel about the circus of the absurd. They all, including Mallory, become ill, fevered and malnourished, and slip in and out of the reality represented by heat, flies, sores, and an attitude to life as casual as that of the drunken driver. Mallory is no Ahab and his river is no great white whale. “The Day of Creation” is as well-written as Ballard’s other work, but it is somehow without point. Before Mallory has gone very far, it becomes obvious that one doesn’t actually care whether or not he makes it, or why he wants to, or even whether or not he survives. This lack of engagement has the effect of making Ballard’s usual flirtation with semi-mystical romanticism an irritant. In the end, the book is about an obsession, but lacks the grandeur of delusion to make it successful. —Ken Strongman.