THE CRYSTAL WORLD - J. G. BALLARD

Last book of the world, I think it’s an even 75 this year, with most coming from my time in Togo, where reading during leisure time was much easier. I decided to read this book now because it’s quite short, to get another one in just before the new year (I’m hoping to focus more on longer stuff next year), and because I’ve never read any J. G. Ballard novels before. I remember reading a short story of his in college about people forced to stay awake 24/7 as part of some experiment, who then go insane, and I remember liking the story but never picked up anything else of his, despite his stellar reputation. This book was only okay. It is about a swampy forest in Cameroon Africa crystallizing along with everyone and everything in it. Into this milieu we follow a doctor who is trying to reach a leprosy clinic in the jungle who gets involved with various YTs, a diamond miner, a priest, an architect, ect. We slowly learn more strange things, like the fact that jewels liquify the crystals for some reason, or that the crystals seem to preserve, perhaps eternally, whatever they encase, or that this process is also happening in the Everglades and the Soviet Union, and we never find out why. The crystal stuff is really excellent and the best part of the novel, Ballard’s descriptions of the crystallized jungle is consistently deeply evocative and striking. It was really easy to visualize these strange and other-worldly scenes. Likewise, I appreciate that while some characters tried to philosophize or speculate as to what the crystallization was happening, Ballard resisted the urge to answer these questions or turn the process into a clear metaphor for something else. That being said, sadly the stuff around the crystallization, namely the interactions between the characters, was boring and forgettable. All of the main characters are YTs in post-colonial Africa, and while there were many secondary African characters, I believe only one of them was named (and even then, only in the last 3rd of the book). But even the YT characters were pretty cookie-cutter and forgettable. None of them or their desires or plotlines ever affected me or made me feel anything besides a desire to get back to descriptions about the forest. There is a compelling motif where many of the characters (including many African characters, though we never are allowed to know there feelings on the matter) are drawn to the idea of purposefully going into the forest to be crystalized but the characters themselves never made me care about their individual fates. Either way, the images of a crystallized forest, my favorite probably being a partially-petrified snake with crystal eyes tho there are dozens to choose from, will stay with me for a while. 1960 Crystals.