Andrew Blackman

I read “Crash” a while back. Everything that happened in the book from beginning to end was completely unbelievable, but still I quite liked it. It was somehow compelling, like the car crashes it described. The characters were unreal, human emotions and motivations were absent, the plot meandered through more and more ridiculous territory, and yet, still, I quite liked it. The vision of the world was so stunningly weird and recognisable at the same time.

Rushing to Paradise is similar to Crash in that nothing in it is remotely believable. But, unlike Crash, it is not remotely compelling. Perhaps it is simply the premise that I disagree with. The dystopic vision of a soul-dead society obsessed with sex and cars and death was something I could buy into. The snide vision of environmentalists and feminists as naive and/or psychotic man-hating lunatics is not so appealing.

There’s also the familiar and, to me, endlessly annoying “Lord of the Flies” assumption – take people out of a rule-based environment for a few months and they’ll become mad, murderous, paint-wearing, totem-worshipping savages. It’s a highly retrogressive (very un-Ballardian) view, which naturally leads us to the conclusion that we need a good strong government to save us from ourselves. I’m afraid I just don’t buy it. Maybe I’m naive myself, but I honestly believe that if you put a random group of people on a desert island, they’ll come up with a reasonably sensible way of surviving as a group until they get rescued. It’s what humans have done very successfully for thousands of years. Most of the savagery, as I see it, has come from governments.

So maybe that’s why I didn’t like this book. My own political prejudices clouding my judgement. The environmentalists, for example, are endlessly counterproductive, from the moment their boat becomes beached on a coral reef and emits a “huge oil slick” to the time when they start eating the endangered animals they’ve come to the island to protect. Halfway through, evidently feeling he has skewered the greens effectively, Ballard veers abruptly towards feminists. All the men start mysteriously dying, the women shave their heads, and the only man left on the island is kept alive purely to impregnate the women. Shaven-headed women taking over and reducing men to the role of sperm-producing entities to be discarded when no longer useful – it’s the ultimate male fear. And it’s utterly absurd.

I’m sure, though, that it’s not just politics that made me hate this. The writing in this book was definitely more pedestrian than in Crash. Crash felt hallucinatory, somehow; this was dull. Here, Ballard seems more aware of the absurdity of the concept, and tries to paper over it with over-long psychological explanations of the character’s motives (why does Neil, a non-environmentalist, nuclear-obsessed “youth”, go on the environmentalist expedition? Oh yeah, we are reminded endlessly, it’s because Dr Barbara, the leader who becomes a psychotic man-killing lunatic, is a replacement parent figure, etc. etc.). No real redeeming features on this one – just didn’t work for me.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews

The original idea of this blog was to provide somewhere for me to record the books and articles I read. I forget things so easily: I know I’ve read “Catcher in the Rye”, for instance. I see it on my bookshelf sometimes, and the spine has creases. It’s definitely been read. But I can’t remember a single thing about it. Not one event, character, idea, sentence. Nothing. So my idea with this blog was to write things down. Then in five years’ time, when I’m trying to remember if I’ve read “Doctor Criminale” by Malcolm Bradbury, I’ll be able to look back and jog my memory. I have been busy lately and have got very behind, so I’m going to try to catch up with reviews of some books I’ve read lately… especially because as my own book gets closer to publication, this blog may well become slowly transformed into a vehicle for shameless self-promotion. So, “Doctor Criminale” by Malcolm Bradbury:

The cover described the book as a “bracing comedy of ideas.” That’s what hooked me. I’ve always struggled with the idea of how to deal with ideas in fiction in a convincing, readable way. I thought this book might provide an answer. It didn’t. The parts of it that dealt with ideas were few, and not the best. Most of it was a mildly amusing satire on academics and the pompous conferences they attend. Even these parts made me cringe in places: satire, when not fresh, can so easily become caricature. Thus the German delegates are all serious, the Italians are flamboyant and a bit ridiculous, the Africans are always laughing and wearing colourful clothes, etc. And the women all want to have sex with the main character, a literary journalist who shows no sign of being particularly charming or irresistible in any way. Perhaps, if you’re writing a “bracing comedy of ideas”, you think you have to throw in a little hanky-panky to keep the readers’ interest up through all the discussions of Heidegger. But to me it felt a little sleazy, and detracted from the credibility of the story.

I guess I shouldn’t read so much into book blurbs. “With grace and wit its author deconstructs fifty years of European thought and history” was another promise that caught my eye. But, again, he didn’t. The part I did find successful was the point that thinkers must make compromises with history, and the perspective on postmodernism as being a kind of cop-out – having seen the thinkers of the past fall into the trap of following the wrong ideas (communism/fascism), postmodernists don’t support anything at all. Ironic detachment and scepticism don’t help the world at all. Better to have an idea, even if flawed, a la Criminale, than not to have any ideas at all. Better to construct something wrong than merely to deconstruct and not offer anything new.

The writing style was fine, if a little wordy for my liking. I hate when characters are sitting on a train reviewing the story so far and speculating at length about the motives of other characters. It feels as if I am being prodded: “look, look, you probably missed it, but this is what you should be thinking about at this point!” I think if the story is well told, the reader can be trusted to realise what the important questions are. Another slight irritation was the author’s tendency to shoehorn Oscar Wilde type bons mots into the narrative, e.g. “Writers are sometimes inclined to let their work do the talking; photographers have to let their talking do much of the work.” Or: “There are no travellers now, only tourists. A traveller comes to see a reality that is there already. A tourist comes only to see a reality invented for him, in which he conspires.” A lot of these little flourishes were quite clever, really. But they irritated me because they broke the narrative spell: they made me forget about the characters for a few seconds, look up from the page and remember that I was reading a book by a man called Malcolm Bradbury who was trying quite hard to sound clever.

Andrew Blackman Book reviews