Aug 06, 2015 04:02 PM
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A drowned world is a debut novel of JG Ballard, which is apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic novel of the drowned world. Ballard is an American author who has gained some serious popularity and success in recent decades, especially as a literary author for a couple of works like Crash and the Empire of the sun.
A drowned world is a science fiction book and it is not that unusual for a literary author to begin their career with this genre books.
What exactly happens in this book has nothing to do with the fact that science fiction is an inferior form of literature or a literary author it is not expected that he address certain topics, the fact is in his book Ballard takes an interesting psychological reflection and it hammers it throughout the whole book.
The reflection it draws is that in a post apocalyptic world in which the temperature zones of the world started to heat up a lot, at the planet is turning out to be inhabitable, and people are drawn towards the tropical zone because they have memories of their ancestral past, and in a certain way into the womb and according to author all people have this hidden, unconscious desire to go back into the womb where they feel safe. This weird psychological and philosophical reflection is not really presented in the book in a subtle or in a delicate way.
But it is thrown in the face of the reader a number of time constantly throughout the whole novel. The feeling I had while reading this book is that the author had some sort of nice idea which he thought would be great to explore in this novel, but it didn’t go any further than that and not get developed much.
The characters seem dull and don’t seem to have any personality and most of them don’t have a persona at all. The book is around 200 pages, which is kind of short but you will feel every single page because it is really a slow read.There is not really much going on in the book and when something is happening important for the plot or something which is totally unrelated, the author isn’t able to draw a priority between them and end up treating both the same.
At places this novel turns out to be a work of a racist, but I will not go into that. I am not at all impressed by this novel, and will suggest you to skip it.
