As with several of his works The Crystal World is one of J G Ballard's novels that can be read in a number of ways, and Ballard can be quoted to defend every one of those positions, although he is often thought to hold only one of them.

In January 1975 J G Ballard said "The geophysical changes which take place in The_Drought, The_Drowned_World and The Crystal World are all positive and good changes - they are what the books are about. The changes lead us to our real psychological goals" ^*1 and he then went onto clarify this - "The heroes, for psychological reasons of their own, embrace the particular transformation. These are stories of huge psychic transformations - I'm talking retrospectively now - and I use this external transformation of the landscape to reflect and marry with the internal transformation, the psychological transformation, of the characters. This is what the subject-matter of these books is: they're transformation stories rather than disaster stories"^*2.

Later on, in October 1982, Ballard seemed to present a different view of The Crystal World: "One of my earlier novels, The Crystal World, was about a crystallizing world. A lot of people who knew I had taken acid thought I had written the book on the basis of that. I wrote the book in '64, I think, but I didn't take LSD until 1967 or '68. The curious thing is that the book does convincingly in my experience, describe what an LSD vision is like; particularly the effects of light and time"^*3.

In some ways this second statement appears to contradict the first: that is, if drug taking would produce the circumstances (ie that can be produced materially) there is no need to infer the existence of an abstract, psychological imperative. Ballard is saying that the book is a product of imagination which is a simulation of a drug induced state (but that drug induced state describes a material world - "light and time") but he also said that the books are about "our real psychological goals". "Psychological goals", though, are not obviously real in the sense that "light and time" are - the psychological goals can be explained in other ways.

Throughout the first half of the novel and beyond the psychological element is stressed - Edward Sanders, the doctor travelling to his friends at a leprosy station in the Cameroon Republic, is constantly considering his hidden motives or finding that some action must have an ulterior motive, or saying that someone else must have undisclosed motives. From the third page onwards the word "motive" is used repeatedly:- "Sanders was well aware of imputing his own ambigious motives for coming to Port Matarre to those around him"^*4 (page 13) - as are words such as "reasons" which first occurs two pages later - "Ventress ignored (Sanders), keeping to himself whatever reasons he had for coming to Port Matarre" (page 15). All the time these are qualified to indicate they are unknown, ambiguous or dubious:- "The desire to travel incognito, with all its advantages, might well reveal itself in some unexpected way" (page 14) Sanders thinks as he packs his passport. Like many Ballardian protagonists, Sanders is a professional man, blind to self-knowledge, a man who has in effect wasted his life because he has not thought about it, although he has thought about his not-thinking.

Later, this will have ramifications as Sanders will attempt to lead everyone and everything out of the living world into the crystal world, where time has eneded and nothing more can happen, and thought will cease. The "psychological goal" is a placelessness and timelessness of no psychology because all minds will have ended as all time seeps out of the universe. So, paradoxically perhaps, the psychological goal is a physical state.

This goal is reinforced throughout the novel - ambigous motives are repeated though the novel. Pages 25, 36, 55, 92 and 127 all contain examples of this. While this may just be due to the narrative viewpoint being that of Sanders, other elements also stress it. Sanders asserts that he has unknown reasons and ambiguous motives: for example, early in the novel after Ventress has smuggled his gun through customes in Sanders' luggage - "The smuggling of the pistol unknown to himself seemed to symbolize, in sexual terms as well, all his hidden motives for coming to Port Matarre in quest of Suzanne Clair. That Ventress, with his skeletal face and white suit should have exposed his awareness of these still concealed motives was all the more irritating" (page 25).

Sanders does not maintain these opinions only of himself, looking at the missionary Father Balthus: "Dr Sanders said: 'I don't know what the good Father's motives are, but I'm certain his bishop wouldn't approve of them'" (page 36) and Sanders considers the riverboat captain who takes him upriver in the same way (page 55).

It is not only Sanders who ascribes motives to others; Ventress - a character who knows what is going on and, and keeps dropping hints to Sanders about the nature of time - in exasperation says to Sanders "Doctor! You persist in finding the most trivial reasons - obviously you have no idea of your real motives" (page 92). Sanders seems to be confirmed as a trustworthy source of opinion.

On the other hand, Ballard has provided an alternative reading of this repitition of key words. Ballard was asked: "One of the notable things about your style is a certain repitition of words and phrases" and replied: "That's very true, but I was using language, certain words and phrases, to a fixed and obvious end. The medical and pseudo-medical jargon that I use a lot is all deliberate(. T)hese are particular notes that I can strike, which I hope, signify something to the reader. It's all part of a second language, if you like, that is carried along by the surface of the narrative, a series of signposts with codes or whatever you want to call them"^*5.

If psychological considerations - "motive" and causation - is "the surface of the narrative" what is there below the surface, in the body of the text?

In the crystalline forest Dr Sanders seems to arrive at a metaphysical answer, and so do the other characters; soon after Falther Balthus had "smiled ambigously" (page 160) he says "'Once I was a true apostate - I knew God existed but could not believe in him' ... "Father Balthus took Sanders' arm. 'In this forest we see the final celebration of the Eucharist of Christ's body. Here everything is transfigured and illuminated, joined together in the last marriage of space and time'" (page 162)

Later, though, back in town, Sanders' acceptance of the Crystal World seems to mark his separation from the world of humanity: when his colleage, Dr Max Clair, tells him that the clinic founded by the Clairs is increasingly busy, Sanders first offers a Wildean paradox: "Bring a doctor to a place like Port Matarre and you immediately create a major health problem" (page 172) and then refuses to help, offering instead this justification: ""I don't think the simple distinction between life and death has much meaning now. Rather than try to cure those patients you should put them into a launch and send them upriver to Mont Royal" (page 173).

Early on, Ventress had anticipated this in an epigrammatic way: "What our timorous fellow passengers fail to realise, Doctor, is that outside your colony there is merely another larger one" (page 16) but, of course, the achievement has been reversed. As Sanders attempted to go upriver he was stopped by an army officer who compares the crystallization to leprosy (page 64); if that comparison is meant to be in anyway true, then the solution becomes not a universal cure but a universal contagion - the crystallization is compared to a cancer (page 66) and a virus (page 84). Eventually when Sanders meets Suzanne Clair again he discovers that she has finally contracted the disease (page 126) and "his first feelings of anger" "gave way to a sense of relief, as if this particular disaster were one for which both of them were psychologically well prepared".

David Pringle has seen The Crystal World as a religious novel, and concludes: "In this most mystical novel, Ballard has used the symbol of the crystalline forest as a science fictional objective correlative to our sense of oneness with the universe. He has created his Heaven or City of God" ^*6 but as Sanders' response to the lepers indicates, this is a City of God open only to individuals, almost on a racial basis.

There have been criticisms of Ballard as a racialist, imperialist; however, other readings are possible, and one important consideration remains that if the changing universe drives Sanders' changed behaviour, that does not justify that behaviour. Sanders becomes the subject of the novel, not its moral purpose. The discrepancy between the role of the abstract psychological goals and the material world causes events but does not defend them.

Like most of Ballard's work, his reading of it is not the only reading possible, and even after the elements discussed here have been considered, there remain many others - for instance, the use of black/white symbolism; or the many detective story elements; the treatment of race; the significance of names and echoes - which remain to be discussed elsewhere. It is the interplay and clash of these incongruities that gives the novel its depth.

In his later Science_Fiction: The_100_Best_Novels David Pringle wrote that this novel "is in fact a metaphysical thriller about the human impulse to seek a world beyond time, and about the need to negate oneself in order to enter such a world" ^*7. That is a good description. The only thing it omits to say is that the novel is big enough to show the costs of that impulse as well as its rewards.

1. J.G. Ballard The First Twenty Years edited by James Goddard and David Pringle Brans Head Books 1976 page 24

2. op. cit page 25

3. Re/Search number 8/9 J.G. Ballard issue page 25

4. The Crystal World by J G Ballard Panther 1968 (originally published 1966)

5. J.G. Ballard The First Twenty Years page 15

6. The Fourfold Symbolism of J.G. Ballard in J.G. Ballard The First Twenty Years page 56

7. Science Fiction The 100 Best Novels by David Pringle Xanadu 1985 page 118