has already been described as ‘the river’s last presiding Ariel’. Miranda, of course, is Miranda – though in this incarnation she’s clearly been unable to resist Quilter’s Caliban semiotics. But other appropriations abound: false Noahs, failed Crucifixions, flickering reiterations of Ulysses and Madame Sosostris and Tiresias the blind prophet. The river’s tent is broken. The waste land is in itself a shifting signifier, as much a mirage as a site of mirages. Both Quilter and Philip Jordan take a turn as the Ancient Mariner, and there are many, many albatrosses. In their endless recombination these symbols lose their significance; and as meaning itself thins out, so geography begins to lose its meaning too. As a boy, Ballard tells us in Empire of the Sun (one of his less official autobiographies), he was intrigued by the bidding conventions of the game of bridge, ‘a code within a code’. This paranoid-critical sense of one algorithm packed into another haunts his fiction. Everything – the shape of a salt dune, the arrangement of some elongated shadow at the photographer’s magic hour, the turn of a woman’s head, the intersection of two walls – seems to be decodable. Yet every image is so saturated with significance that, paradoxically, nothing can be made of it.
The drought at the heart of The Drought is cultural. Culture is withering. In the guise of rainfall, old social and political meanings run down to the sea and are decreasingly renewed. Where the land seemed fertile, its inhabitants can now admit that it is exhausted. ‘It seems’, Ransom says at one point, ‘that we have a knack of turning everything we touch into sand and dust. We’ve even sown the sea with its own salt.’ This exhaustion – despite the Jungian, the essentially spiritual metaphor – is less important than you would think. Loss, in Ballard, is as much a canard as an albatross or burning swan; it is just something that must occur so that the dream forward into the new can begin.
Like so many science-fiction writers, Ballard and Wyndham were describing not the future but the present. If Wyndham’s assumption was that we had a duty to what we had lost, and must therefore painstakingly rebuild it (‘So we must regard the task ahead as ours alone,’ begins the final paragraph of The Day of the Triffids), Ballard’s was that no loss had occurred – we had only changed. We are, day by day, always already a new form of life. Prospero’s island – set in its sea of uncertain chemistries and unintended consequences – is as much a domain of opportunity as horror. The Drought makes a compelling drama out of the thrills and spills of eco-catastrophe, but it was the end of its author’s unstable, contrarian relationship with the disaster story. His publisher refused to publish it on the grounds that it wasn’t ‘proper science fiction’. By 1965, he had already begun to look in other directions. In The Drought we see him pacing hungrily around his own work, looking for ways to let it out of the zoo and into a reconfigured landscape, where it can cannibalise itself freely.
A 1970 issue of New Worlds, the magazine which, under the editorship of John Carnell then Michael Moorcock, had encouraged and supported Ballard from the beginning, ran a cover that asked rhetorically: ‘WHAT IS THE EXACT NATURE OF THE CATASTROPHE?’ A post-Ballardian generation was emerging. Ballard himself had finished the last of his quartet of catastrophes, The Crystal World, and moved on. In Crash, Concrete Island and The Atrocity Exhibition, his style increasingly confident and codified, he would begin to make and use new tools, new grammar, new algorithms, new metaphysical instruments to dream himself further into the world’s possibilities.
Broseley, 2014
At noon, when Dr Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the entrance to the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot son of the old woman who lived in the ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating in the water below his feet. The reflection of his swollen head swam like a deformed nimbus among the limp plumage. The caking mud-bank was speckled with pieces of paper and driftwood, and to Ransom the dream-faced figure of Quilter resembled a demented faun strewing himself with leaves as he mourned for the lost spirit of the river.
Ransom secured the bow and stern lines to the jetty, deciding that the comparison was less than apt. Although Quilter spent as much time watching the river as Ransom and everyone else, his motives would be typically perverse. The continued fall of the river, sustained through the spring and summer drought, gave him a kind of warped pleasure, even if he and his mother had been the first to suffer. Their derelict barge – an eccentric gift from Quilter's protector, Richard Foster Lomax, the architect who was Ransom's neighbour – had now taken on a thirty-degree list, and a further fall of even a few inches in the level of the water would split its hull like a desiccated pumpkin.
Shielding his eyes from the sunlight, Ransom surveyed the silent banks of the river as they wound westwards to the city of Mount Royal five miles away. For a week he had been out on the lake, sailing the houseboat among the draining creeks and mud-flats as he waited for the evacuation of the city to end. After the closure of the hospital at Mount Royal he intended to leave for the coast, but at the last moment decided to spend a few final days on the lake before it vanished for good. Now and then, between the humps of damp mud emerging from the centre of the lake, he had seen the distant span of the motor-bridge across the river, the windows of thousands of cars and trucks flashing like jewelled lances as they set off along the coast road for the south; but for most of the period he had been alone. Suspended like the houseboat above the dissolving glass of the water, time had seemed becalmed.
Ransom postponed his return until all movement along the bridge had ended. By then the lake, once a stretch of open water thirty miles in length, had subsided into a series of small pools and channels, separated by the banks of draining mud. A few last fishing craft sailed among them, their crews standing shoulder to shoulder in the bows. The drab-suited men from the settlement, thin faces hidden under their black caps, had gazed at Ransom's houseboat with the numbed expressions of a group of lost whaling men too exhausted by some private tragedy to rope in this stranded catch.
By contrast, the slow transformation of the lake exhilarated Ransom. As the wide sheets of water contracted, first into shallow lagoons and then into a maze of creeks, the wet dunes of the lake bed seemed to emerge from another dimension. On the last morning he woke to find the houseboat beached at the end of a small cove. The slopes of mud, covered with the bodies of dead birds and fish, stretched above him like the shores of a dream.
As he approached the entrance to the river, steering the houseboat among the stranded yachts and fishing boats, the lakeside town of Hamilton was deserted. Along the fishermen's quays the boat-houses were empty, and the white forms of the drying fish hung in the shadows from the lines of hooks. Refuse fires smouldered in the waterfront gardens, their smoke drifting past the open windows that swung in the warm air. Nothing moved in the streets. Ransom had assumed that a few people would remain behind, waiting until the main exodus to the coast was over, but Quilter's presence, like his ambiguous smile, in some way was an obscure omen, one of the many irrational signs that had revealed the real progress of the drought during the confusion of the past months
A hundred yards to his right, beyond the concrete pillars of the motor-bridge, the wooden piles of the fuel depot were visible above the cracked mud. The floating pier had touched bottom, and the fishing boats usually moored against it had moved off into the centre of the channel. Normally, in late summer, the river would have been three hundred feet wide, but it was now barely half this – a shallow creek winding its slow way along the flat gutter of the banks.
Next to the fuel depot was the yacht basin, with the Quilters' barge moored against its bows. After signing the vessel over to them at the depot, Lomax had added a single gallon of diesel oil in a quixotic gesture of generosity, barely enough fuel
