The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Goodbye to All That

The end of the British Empire was not a sudden event, more a slow burn over decades. For many around the world, its progress was masked by the rather more terrifying facts of the Cold War and its potential for the destruction of life on Earth. Nonetheless the disintegration of the Empire was not without its loss, in the opinion of some, to global culture. But how to express such a sentiment without jingoistic intimations of sour grapes? A fiction about the effects of global warming and the retreat of civilisation might do the trick. The British Empire is the eponymous Drowned World or I’m an evangelical Republican.

In 1962 global warming would have been considered an entirely natural, and non-political, phenomenon, not one brought on by industrial development but a condition brought about by ‘circumstances.’ Ballard was not scientifically prescient; he was establishing a vaguely plausible process by which the world order was undergoing rapid transformation.

So global warming serves nicely as a subtle metaphor for the twilight of the accidental realm on which the sun had not set for two centuries or so - the British Empire. Just as accidentally it was being destroyed - progressively from the South - and bit by bit returned to its ‘primitive’ state. London, the nerve-centre of this global government, is literally submerged along with the rest of the ‘developed world’, that is to say the Northern hemisphere. There is more here than an account of change. There is a judgment that what is happening is unfortunate, retrograde, and purely destructive.

The characters that Ballard presents are the ‘types’ of imperial decline. Riggs is the stalwart old colonial hand who still dresses for dinner and knows the responsibilities imposed by duty. Kerans on the other hand, along with many others, is seduced by the allure of the jungle, its heat, and its vegetative fecundity - not to mention its rather looser moral code. Beatrice is (literally) the entire indigenous population - beautiful but somewhat resentful and slightly mad. Kerans is in love with Beatrice but both know that they really can’t live together happily: “their only true meeting ground would be in their dreams.”

The climate itself is causing an evolutionary regression which is irresistible except by those with real cultural backbone. It is not only the flora and fauna which are adapting to new conditions. The most primitive parts of the human nervous system, the reptilian brain, have been activated by these same conditions. To survive it is necessary for human beings to ‘go native,’ that is to climb back down the evolutionary ladder. The only alternative is to rapidly retreat to the healthier environment of the Mother Country. This is located in the relatively cool North of course, where cohesive government and advanced technology are still in control.

The retreat of imperial government officials like Riggs creates a power vacuum which is quickly filled by commercial pirates who are interested in profiting from the new ecosystem of now-defenceless territories. The freebooter Strangman is the leader of gang of black treasure-hunters, portrayed in barely concealed racist language as without either aesthetic taste or good manners (the racism made rather more explicit by references to the oxymoronic “black sun” which is the ultimate source of the global malaise). They loot and vandalise entirely without appreciation of the value of what they acquire and desecrate. Clearly they already occupy that inferior evolutionary niche to which the white ‘remainers’ are attracted in their dreams.

Strangman pursues Beatrice with an sort of vulgarity equalled in his plundering, showering her with jewels and booze. Kerans‘s response is not one of affectionate jealousy but alienated suicide, a desire to dissolve himself in the Triassic miasma in which he finds himself rather than confront the fate of his beloved - a post-colonial head-in-the-sand response par excellence. Strangman meanwhile restores a sort of quasi-order by draining part of the encroaching swamp. Just enough really to complete his stripping any remaining assets. This reveals a travesty of the old civilisation, the decaying remnants of submerged, long-defunct institutions are now useless ruins. “I'm afraid the magic has gone,” Kerans admits to Beatrice. Indeed it had, but for Beatrice the magic had died many years before.

But violence is still necessary, apparently as a sort of residual obligation of civilisation. Bodkin, the aloof intellectual (no doubt a Lefty), tries to destroy the Strangman regime by blowing it up. He’s ineffectual, of course, and himself ends up dead. Tempted by wealth and opulence, Beatrice is saved by Kerans on the brink of being ravaged by Strangman. Kerans‘s pluck and inherent sense of righteousness have overcome his retrograde evolution, at least temporarily.

With the aplomb of a Flashman, he eludes the evil black mob long enough to see the arrival of Riggs and his trusted Sergeant Major, McCready, at the head of an armed force (my vision is of Richard Attenborough as RSM Lauderdale in the 1964 film Guns at Batasi) . They have returned to intervene in the uncivilised chaos. It was their duty, indeed their burden, as Mr. Kipling said.

But ultimately, Kerans no longer fits either with the local culture of Beatrice or with the civilisation Riggs represents.* He is an outcaste, a man without a country. He has devolved into an inferior species, less than human, who lives “in the South” with the other relics of Empire. He is a lesson to us all about what we will become if we forget our roots in a ‘civilised’ society. The triumph of the South is an unqualified disaster for the planet. Farewell Britannia.

*Ballard describes Kerans as having a “lean ebony body.” I doubt this refers to a healthy suntan. He is setting the character up for his consignment to inevitable racial inferiority.

Postscript: Because I found it strange that few reviewers took Ballard’s apparent racism seriously, I put a comment on a number of reviews: “I think you may have missed the import of this story which is profoundly racist at its core.”

While many responded positively, there were also many who found my remark insulting, sometimes profoundly so, even after my protestations and apologies. For example, as one respondent writes: “Oh you weren't trying to be insulting when you said to me. I think you may have missed the import of this story ? I would hate to see what you would say to a veteran reader such as myself if you were REALLY trying to insult me... Manners is something people seem to forget when they are online under an assumed name.”

So live and learn. Human beings are far more variable than one expects. The tendrils of racism are transparently thin but incredibly strong. Our ability to rationalise them seems infinite. Most commentators aver Ballard’s purported emulation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as the literary reason for the ‘savage’ tone of The Drowned World. I don’t buy it. The book is about much more than the incidental use of dialect. And its relation to Conrad’s work is in any case questionable. It is self-evidently a statement of a world-view that is inherently grounded in racial superiority (and/or some really bad pseudo-sci-fi).

It’s one thing to recognise the potential for alternative interpretations of a piece of literature in the abstract. But sometimes what gets revealed through interpretation is almost mystically misdirected to avoid the obvious. And that revelation of the reviewer is often merely one of unjust prejudice. The Drowned World is a case in point. It doesn’t simply depict the incidental mores of the time. It is a lament for the loss of white supremacy in the world. Treating such casual racism casually, especially when it is exhibited so publicly, is reprehensible.

View all my reviews