The Day of Creation
‘Classic Ballard. Mesmerising. No one writes with such haunting impact’ William BoydIn parched, war-torn central Africa, Dr Mallory watches his clinic fail and dreams of discovering a third Nile to make the Sahara bloom. During his search for water, an ancient tree stump is uprooted by a bulldozer and water wells up, spreading until it becomes an enormous river. With the once arid land now abounding in birds and beasts, the obsessed Mallory forges up-river in an old car ferry, clashing with hostile factions as he tries to find the source of his own creation.
Читать The Day of Creation онлайн беплатно
J. G. BALLARD
The Day of Creation
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London W6 8JB 4thestate.co.uk
This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014
First published in Great Britain by Victor Gollancz 1987
Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1987
The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
Introduction copyright © Joshua Cohen 2014
Interview copyright © Travis Elborough 2006
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins eBooks.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this e-book has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Cover by Stanley Donwood.
Overlaid image partly derived from combustion of ammonium dichromate, carried out by Dr Roy Lowry at Plymouth University; photographed by Anna Walker.
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 9780007290116
Version: 2014-09-25
From the reviews of The Day of Creation:
‘It could only have been imagined by a master of visionary realism…a country of the mind as vivid and viable as anything this extraordinary writer has ever produced’
Spectator
‘Ballard continues to prove that his imagination is unmatched by any contemporary British writer. His vision is relentless. Ballard’s acrid landscapes of a surreal and glittering Africa disturb as well as entrance. The obsessive desires of the hero, Dr Mallory, are equalled only by the compulsion Ballard’s creative genius has to write’
Glasgow Herald
‘Part spellbinding story, part fable for our time, Ballard’s novel is a vividly cinematic but nightmarish vision of a corrupted world. In a narrative filled with ironies, Ballard’s prose is honed and supple, often flowering into vivid lyricism. A mesmerizing tale by a master of the craft, one that resonates with dark implications for the future of humanity on this planet’
Publishers Weekly
Contents
Praise
Introduction by Joshua Cohen
1 The Desert Woman
2 The Gunmen
3 The Third Nile
4 The Shooting Party
5 Fame
6 The Oak and the Spring
7 The Impresario of Rubbish
8 The Creation Garden
9 The River Mallory
10 The Cascade
11 The House of Women
12 Noon
13 Piracy
14 Out of the Night and into the Dream
15 The Naming of New Things
16 The Helicopter Attack
17 Escape
18 The Green World
19 The Lanterns at Dusk
20 The Documentary Film
21 The Skirmish
22 Into the Lagoons
23 Journey Towards the Rain Planet
24 A Dream of Fair Women
25 The Wildfowlers
26 The Gardens of the Sahara
27 The Stolen Channel
28 Doctor Mal
29 The Blue Beaches
30 The Arcade Peep-Show
31 The Death of the Diana
32 The Poisoned Valley
33 The River Search
34 The Source
35 Memory and Desire
Interview with J. G. Ballard
About the Author
By the Same Author
About the Publisher
by Joshua Cohen
1
‘Dreams of rivers, like scenes from a forgotten film, drift through the night, in passage between memory and desire.’
Or, better, let’s set it like a poem:
Dreams of rivers,
like scenes from a forgotten film,
drift through the night,
in passage between memory and desire.
Now it reads less like a first sentence – which it is, the first sentence of J. G. Ballard’s The Day of Creation – and more like the novel’s displaced epigraph.
Now we can begin, and I’ll gush about this and leak about that and then this introduction will trickle to an end and you’ll begin the novel proper only to find that sentence again and perhaps you’ll feel – perhaps you’ll feel now that I’m exhorting you to – the prosodic ebbs and flows of water. The opening sentence of
