J.G. Ballard is a renowned writer across many fields of
literature. From science fiction catastrophes
like The
Drowned World to the highly experimental, post-modern literary collage
comprising The
Atrocity Exhibition, the semi-autobiographical The Empire of the Sun to the controversial social commentary of Crash, urban dystopias like High-Rise
to free-form representation of the art and ideology of William Blake in The
Unlimited Dream Company—Ballard’s oeuvre covers a lot of ground. All novels, seemingly only people in the know
are aware of what a powerful short story writer Ballard was. The transition to short form not something
every great writer can do, Ballard made it look easy—the ideas and themes of
his novels deftly rendered in a dense, paucity of pages. His 1964 collection The
Terminal Beach contains some of his best.
Opening the collection is one of Ballard’s most straight-forward
pieces of fiction: “A Question of Re-entry” starts in Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness mode, but quickly gets
conspiratorial, science fiction style. A
UN agent named Connelly hires a boat captain to pilot him deep into the jungles
of South America and find a crashed space shuttle. Arriving at their first
waypoint, Connelly meets a half-crazed foreigner who lords over the village and
its native inhabitants. Something
inexplicable about the foreigner, Connelly’s search for the fallen craft ends
up turning over more than he expected. The
story lacking a lot of the psychology and symbolism Ballard is known for, the stripped
down piece nevertheless reads very Ballardian, even as it represents humanity’s
penchant for megalomania and criticizes the US space program.
A bizarrely transcendent piece, “The Gioconda of the
Twilight Moon” tells of a man with an injury that renders him blind. Retreating into his mind’s eye as he
convalesces in his childhood home, things get very dream-like, very visual,
very fast, resulting in one of Ballard’s more ‘optimistic’ stories. (The picture painted in the reader’s mind in
the final paragraph leaves strong residue.)
In another story featuring da Vinci (though more ‘directly’), “The Lost Leonardo”
tells of the painter’s (fictional) masterpiece “The Crucifixion” and its
seemingly impossible theft from the Louvre.
Ballard stringing the mystery along nicely, the ultimate resolution is
one that is either a poke at religion, or just good storytelling.
Sitting at the heart of the collection is the title
story. A powerful narrative, “The
Terminal Beach” describes one man’s descent on a Pacific island into delirium resulting
from radiation exposure in the after-effects of hydrogen bomb testing. Described from a variety of perspectives,
Ballard builds a strong degree of empathy without overtly manipulating the
reader, all the while conjuring his classic wariness at the progress of
civilization. In some ways the
quintessential Ballard, the symbolism of the man’s surrounds slowly blends with
that of his psyche to strong literary effect.
In “The Delta at Sunset”, an injured curmudgeon sits on a beach each
night, waiting for thousands of snakes to appear. Problem is, only he sees the snakes. Worse yet, help is such a long way that his
injury causes further delusions and paranoia.
“The Volcano Dances” is a strange, restricted story whose purpose is
elusive. About an expatriate living in a
Mexican village perched atop a volcano’s crater, each day he pays a devil-stick
spinning shaman standing outside his door an appeasement, apparently for the
volcano.
Ballard’s interest in the larger ideal of art is rarely far
from the surface of his fiction, and in “The Drowned Giant” the entropy of
perspective (or something resembling such a notion) is set on a pedestal and drawn
in words. When a giant man washes
ashore, townsfolk are in awe of his corpse.
But slowly, as the visage becomes quotidian and the body starts to
putrify, the awe evolves. As with a lot
of good art, the concrete yet abstract nature of the content allows it to be
interpreted and applied to a variety of ideas—the entropy of perspective just
the one I chose, more available. A touch
maudlin, “Deep End” tells the tale of one young man’s attempt to save the last
remaining dog fish after oxygen reclamation has nearly depleted the ocean. Perhaps truthful in its presentation of human
nature, Ballard has nevertheless written more subtle stories.
In what is clearly an early sketch of what would become the
novel The
Crystal World, “The Illuminated Man” tells of a world transformed by
the Hubble Effect—a crystalline carpet spreading and engulfing the Florida
coastline. Possessing similar characters
but a different premise than the novel, Ballard nevertheless remains focused on
the human reaction to fast-paced, massive, environmental change. The novel remains the more balanced effort
(thankfully distancing itself from the rather kooky Hubble Effect), the short
story nevertheless possesses the same invigorating yet strange alienness. Almost a classic setting, in “End Game” convicted
Russian dissident Constantin plays chess in a remote villa with his overseer, awaiting
execution. The date and time of his
death unannounced, he plies his overseer for the details during matches, never
able to win one due to the stress. The
day-in, day-out situation wearing on his psyche, Ballard has a suitable fate in
store for his troubled Constantin. One
of Ballard’s best known shorts, “Billenium” tells of a world populated by
dozens of billions of people, but focuses on trends in London housing,
particularly the ever-decreasing size of legal inhabitable spaces. Featuring a normal Joe, when he and a friend
discover a “massive” apartment, their hopes for living skyrocket. Time, however, and the human condition, have
a different fate in store for their dreams.
In the end, The
Terminal Beach is one Ballard’s most popular collections of short stories
for a reason. Containing some of the
best short work he ever produced, stories like “The Drowned Giant”, “The
Terminal Beach”, and “Billenium” resound beyond their pages with powerful
imagery and substantive content. And the
remainder is likewise quality. As 2theD
writes, “This isn't a collection to
rush through--it's one to slowly absorb, deconstruct, and reflect upon”,
and I agree.
The Terminal Beach
has been reprinted more than a dozen times, and story order (and sometimes
number) has often changed. The following
is the order of the twelve stories from the version of The Terminal Beach I read (fourth reprinting):
A Question of Re-Entry
The Drowned Giant
End-Game
The Illuminated Man
The Reptile Enclosure
The Delta at Sunset
The Terminal Beach
Deep End
The Volcano Dances
Billennium
The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon
The Lost Leonardo
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