32
Santa Monica, California. August 1988. 2 a.m. 36°C. Even by the ocean the air lies motionless, subdued by the heat. The cloying scent of night-blooming jasmine is everywhere. In the faux-Spanish courtyard of a twenties-style villa, the tiles of a dried-out fountain crawl in a pattern of orange and black as ladybugs in their thousands struggle and clamber, drunk on heat and perfume.
THE FRENCH NEVER TOOK SCIENCE FICTION SERIOUSLY, LEAST OF all in one of its most popular forms, the novel of world destruction.
Not so British writers, who for more than a century have relished laying waste to the world, starting with England’s green and pleasant land itself. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H. G. Wells set dinosaurs and Martian war machines roaming, respectively, in The Lost World and The War of the Worlds. In Richard Jefferies’s After London, or Wild England, a cataclysmic blizzard leaves the home counties choked by impenetrable woodland. John Christopher’s The Death of Grass took the opposite tack, disposing of mankind by killing the grains we eat.
John Wyndham, walking with his wife along a country lane at night, saw blackberry canes whipping in the wind and was inspired to invent a race of ambulant homicidal plants in The Day of the Triffids. Subsequently, in The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos, he unleashed submarine monsters and gangs of malevolent superchildren.
But nobody so comprehensively laid waste to Britain as J. G. Ballard. In The Wind from Nowhere, a gale destroys every sign of human habitation above ground, only to die away inexplicably as the last building crumbles. He followed with The Drowned World, in which global warming returns England (and presumably also France) to the era of the dinosaurs. He imagines London as a swamp, the vegetation and fauna of which are reverting to the Triassic through some unspecified biological process. Mankind has retreated to the Arctic. A few stragglers camp out on the top floor of London’s Ritz Hotel but are kept awake by the bark of giant lizards echoing down Piccadilly.
His other books were even more anarchic. The Drought imagines a layer of pollution covering the oceans, putting an end to evaporation, clouds, rain, and—inevitably—mankind. In The Crystal World, a virus attacks the rain forests, turning them to crystal, then does the same to humans.
Barbarella and the interstellar florist.
Forest, Jean-Claude. Barbarella and the Interstellar Florist. In Le Terrain Vague, 1964.
Neither Ballard nor his predecessors found an answering voice across the channel. French visionaries saw nothing sinister in nature. Climate, nature, the land and its products were to be embraced, celebrated, loved. Jules Verne, the nation’s most famous writer of scientific fantasy, could not have been more benign. No worlds were destroyed in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, or Around the World in Eighty Days. When in the 1960s France did briefly enter the international fantasy scene, the vehicle of its success was equally lightweight—a comic strip that chronicled the mostly sexual adventures of a forty-first-century heroine, Barbarella.
Like Verne’s tales of fantastic voyages, Barbarella has a flavor of the traveler’s tale and bedtime story, nothing that grown-ups need take seriously. In the first of her adventures, Barbarella hitches a ride across the universe on a spaceship filled with flowers. “Is there a place for me among the roses and wild amaranths?” she inquires of the handsome pilot. A true son of Fabre d’Églantine, he responds courteously, “A seat of honor, beautiful orchid.”
Though this national indifference to universal ruin intrigued and puzzled the Francophile James Ballard, the fact that disasters and dystopias should fail to flourish on French soil was no more than the Republican calendar would lead us to expect. A nation that could remake the year in the image of nature—however unsuccessfully—would be the last to enjoy seeing it destroyed. Even Sade, the nihilist’s nihilist, only flirted with the concept. “To attack the sun,” he mused, “to deprive the universe of it, or to use it to set the world ablaze—these would be crimes indeed!”
Once a year, Ballard spent a few weeks on holiday along the Mediterranean. Occasionally he set stories there, fables that hinted at unexpressed urges toward chaos among exiles crowding the Côte d’Azur and Costa Brava. Super-Cannes and Cocaine Nights are sleek fantasies of the near future. Half Helmut Newton, half Bill Gates, they take place in gated holiday compounds or research establishments where frustrated technocrats or bored Eurotrash vent their frustrations on the weak, who become sacrifices to their existential frenzy. (The stories have a hidden agenda: in 1964 on a family holiday near Alicante, Ballard’s wife, Mary, died within a few hours, victim of a runaway infection and inadequate local medical facilities.)
Ballard also set a series of stories in Vermilion Sands, a generic down-at-heel Mediterranean resort of the future. Its craftspeople, bar owners, and part-time writers spend the off-season sculpting the clouds in flimsy lightweight aircraft or operating poetry machines that spew verse on ribbons of tape that tangle around the empty buildings “like some vivid cerise bougainvillea.”
In one story of the series, “Prima Belladonna,” a botanist raises “choro-flora” plants that sing. They include “soprano mimosas, azalea trios, mixed coloratura herbaceous from the Santiago Garden Choir,” and a giant “Khan-Arachnid orchid” that is half diva, half Venus flytrap. The story is subtly subversive, since Jim Ballard disliked music and owned neither radio nor record player.
Vermilion Sands captures that Mediterranean sense of world destruction which the French shun. When the world ends for France, it will, Ballard suggests, expire in the same manner as his imaginary resort, gently but inexorably declining from an excess of those archetypal Gallic afflictions, cafard and ennui: as T. S. Eliot suggested, “not with a bang but a whimper.”
The anarchic impulse articulated by Sade was inherited by André Breton and the surrealists, who revered the marquis and wistfully envied his recklessness. “The purest surrealist act,” announced Breton, “is walking into a crowd with a loaded gun and firing into it randomly.” Not that anyone in the group ever did anything so ill-mannered. Breton’s father, after all, had been a policeman. Their outrages were limited to disrupting theatrical events staged by their rivals or abusing priests or nuns in the street.
To Ballard, France was inseparable from surrealism. In common with many Britons, he saw it as an exotic Continental courtesan with whom he could indulge fantasies that no British partner would countenance. Above his desk he pinned a Max Ernst collage of a nude woman, her head replaced with that of a predatory bird.
Once Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of Empire of the Sun made him rich, Ballard commissioned an artist to repaint two canvases by the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux that were believed to have been destroyed during World War II. His favorite, The Mirror, showed a woman clothed in a formal gown, seated before a mirror that reflects her naked. Ballard never hung the painting. For a time he kept it leaning on the wall next to his desk, ready for that moment when, he once confided, he anticipated it opening like a portal, inviting him to step in.
He talked often about moving to France. “I go to the Côte d’Azur every summer,” he said, “and, if I could afford it, would happily live there for the rest of my life.” Since his personal fortune at that time exceeded £4 million, it was not money that prevented him. Did he fear that France would free his imagination, and with it his hunger for destruction? Could he see himself as part of an expat mob roaming the streets of Cannes, hunting victims to murder? These were questions only the woman in The Mirror could answer.