Rushing to Paradise

Rushing to Paradise
Rivka Galchen

J. G. Ballard

Veteran campaigner Dr Barbara Rafferty’s obsessive crusade to save the albatross on the Pacific atoll of Saint-Esprit suddenly gains international support when millions of TV viewers witness the shooting of her young acolyte Neil Dempsey on a foolhardy rescue mission. From the outpouring of support Dr Barbara begins to turn the deserted island into a sanctuary – a remote paradise for eco-enthusiasts, idealists and a growing number of the world’s endangered species.But as this sinister story unfolds it becomes clear that all is not as it seems in the ecological idyll, indeed, some species are much more endangered than others.Brilliantly unsettling in classic ‘Ballardian’ style, this is a novel in which all expectations are upset and all roles reversed.

J. G. BALLARD

Rushing to Paradise

Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London W6 8JB 4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)

This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014

First published in Great Britain by Flamingo in 1994

Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1994

The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

Introduction © Rivka Galchen 2014

‘The Sage of Shepperton’ © Travis Elborough 2008

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins eBooks.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this e-book has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Cover by Stanley Donwood,

Assembled from a digitally manipulated linocut, iPhone photos and a photograph of atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, taken by Charles Levy © Corbis.

EPub Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007384891

Version 2014-09-25

From the Reviews of Rushing to Paradise: (#u2c0a768b-af9c-5433-903c-38165170b765)

‘Mesmerising and poetic … compulsive reading’

Financial Times

‘A subversive version of Lord of the Flies … Ballard’s relentless intelligence and wildly irreverent, absurdist humour collaborate in creating comically satiric sequences. A body blow to the pretensions in our century’

Irish Times

‘Rushing to Paradise, which marks a return to the ecocidal territory of his first novel, The Drowned World, and has much in common also with the atavistic violence of Hello America and High-Rise, is essentially a portrait of the imagination of disaster … His ear for the descriptive cadence is unerringly acute, and while his imitators can only struggle to render violence explosively literal, Ballard remains a profound elegist of decay’

Times Literary Supplement

‘A satisfyingly bizarre mixture of fantasy and fact … a dystopian vision of a paradise island overrun by a band of environmentalists’

Sunday Times

Contents

Title Page (#u0edbdfac-680e-5de0-8826-e950ad0cd7cd)

Copyright (#u608aae0c-0b71-51c7-9c28-bf945616198b)

From the Reviews of Rushing to Paradise

Introduction by Rivka Galchen

PART I

1: Saving the Albatross

2: Protesting Too Much

3: The Dugong

4: The Shore Raid

5: Island People

6: The View from a Camera-Tower

7: The Rainbow Pirates

8: The Gift Mountain

PART II

9: The Ecology of Paradise

10: The Attack on the Beach

11: The Breeding-Station

12: Fever in the Blood

13: Hunters and Lovers