Rushing to Paradise

PART III

14: A New Arrival

15: Volunteers

16: A Banquet of the Fathoms

17: The End of Love

18: A Gift to a Death

19: Lilies of the Sanctuary

20: The Secret Door

The Sage of Shepperton

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Introduction by Rivka Galchen (#u2c0a768b-af9c-5433-903c-38165170b765)

‘On waking one morning, B was surprised to see that Shepperton was deserted,’ begins J. G. Ballard in one of the very last short stories he wrote, ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B.’ B’s newspaper has not been delivered, the power is out, he goes next door to complain to his neighbour and finds no neighbour there, nor any traffic on the streets, nor anyone at the train station. ‘Thinking that perhaps some terrible calamity was imminent,’ he checks the transistor radio, and finds no signal coming from the UK, no signal from the entire continent.

The scenario is one we associate with alarm, and with apocalypse. Yet Ballard’s language tells a counter-tale. The gentle ‘perhaps’, the mild m’s of ‘calamity was imminent’, even the childlike ‘B was surprised’ as a reaction to a deserted Shepperton – these may be end times, but they aren’t being met with weeping and gnashing of teeth.

B drives to check in on a friend; she is not there. He breaks into Scotland Yard, into the Houses of Parliament, still he finds no one. B sails across the Channel to France; he returns. Only at the zoo does he find some signs of life. He sets free some caged hungry birds, and months later the birds visit his lawn, where he has scattered rice and seeds for them. B remains without a single human companion. Yet the story doesn’t end on a note of loneliness, or mourning, or madness, or with a slow radiation death, or a return of civilization, or a waking from a dream. Instead, ‘Thus the year ended peacefully, and B was ready to begin his true work.’ It is a happy ending, and the penultimate one in The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard. Its first publication of wide distribution was in the month after Ballard died.

A reader familiar with the work of Ballard will know in advance that Rushing to Paradise won’t be a simple story about hurrying over to an inarguable Eden. Unexpectedness is to be expected from any truly worthwhile writer, but with Ballard we find a more unexpected unexpectedness. Though Ballard may not be known for his sunniness, neither is he predictably dark. He is a man who in his autobiography Miracles of Life wrote of his years in the Lunghua internment camp in Shanghai, ‘I enjoyed my years in Lunghua, made a huge number of friends of all ages (far more than I did in adult life) and on the whole felt buoyant and optimistic, even when the food rations fell to near zero, skin infections covered my legs, malnutrition had prolapsed my rectum, and many of the adults had lost heart.’ Rushing to Paradise has a similarly honest and radical confluence of sentiments.

The novel is mostly set on or near a French Pacific island that is home to nuclear testing and also home to the albatross, a species of bird that Dr Barbara, a charismatic environmentalist, has resolved to save. Dr Barbara’s first stroke of good luck toward her publicly pronounced goal is when her young devotee Neil, just sixteen, gets shot in the foot by the French military – this wins her a useful media bonanza. Her next bit of good fortune is a shipwreck. Sure, Dr Barbara is not up to quite what we had originally thought she was up to, and the fortune and misfortune around her prove to be other than purely arbitrary. But Dr Barbara is not a simple villain, with simple victims.

I have too much respect for a novel that can actually be plot-spoiled, so I won’t share more turns of events in these prefacing pages. Instead I will simply point out: here we are, for most of the novel, on an island with its questionable cast. This is a classic situation in literature, and also – with variations on what isolates the characters – in Ballard. In Rushing, Ballard uses the situation so marvellously that one can’t help but think of that Duke Prospero, with his dubious renouncement of his own magic, and Caliban’s unsettling pledge of obedience. Ballard invokes this comparison consciously, it seems. Is the island the place of our most primitive selves, or is it the luxurious haven of refined civilization? Is the island the place we are fleeing to, or fleeing from?

The word ‘paradise’ has cognates in Old French, Late Latin, Greek and Iranian, and it has much the same tone and meaning in each of those sources. But the word’s component parts, para- cognate with peri- for ‘around’ and -dise from varied roots meaning to build or form, suggest a deliberately bounded space, even a compound of sorts. Thus the word’s etymology suggests an anxiety about the idyll: perhaps it needs high defences, perhaps it is difficult to escape. In this novel, we see these verbal undertones in the literal Pacific island, but also in the metaphoric islands of sexual enchantment and of ideals as they morph into moral high grounds. Much of the novel is told from close perspective of the young Neil, who finds himself in various havens he has trouble exiting, including the haven of youth. By the latter half of the novel, Neil hunts and eats animals he might have once thought otherwise about, but ‘fortunately the world supply of rare and endangered mammals seemed inexhaustible.’ And yet we know that ‘seemed’ is precisely the right word.

These are the whirled contradictions that make Ballard’s pages here seem not so much to turn as to rotate and tighten like a vice. Are you excited that there’s an intelligent, scientific, female lead? Well, that feeling will be complicated. Does the lampooning of a hyperbolic photogenic-conflict-obsessed media compel? That too won’t work out in the clean way you might imagine. For effects beyond mere playfulness, Ballard has hinged this novel on the albatross, a bird whose mythology is surpassed perhaps only by the fictive phoenix. Albatrosses, however, are not just literary, they are also real. The novel’s characters both think, and don’t think too hard, about allusions to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In that poem, the man who killed the albatross, though he is blamed by his crew for the bad weather, and is forced to wear the dead albatross on his neck, is also the only member of the sailing crew who survives. We often forget this. The mariner’s burden is to tell his tale wherever he goes, so as to teach a lesson. But what lesson? His crime is what saved him. And the relation of his crime to the ship’s troubles is in many places undermined. It is the panicked sailors eager to assign blame whose lives are taken.

Ballard, we should remember, is arguably most famous for his fictive apocalypses, as in The Drowned World and The Crystal World. Rushing to Paradise could be said to be another of Ballard’s apocalypse novels, though its apocalypse is perennial and familiar, one of abuses of power and of personality cults among tottering grandness, extinctions and decays. Rushing is an apocalypse novel in much the same way as the wholly realistic Empire of the Sun, set in the World War Two internment camps of Shanghai that Ballard knew firsthand.

How does one end an apocalyptic story, a story that is, in its essence, about endings? In ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B.’ it is only the alien birds that return to B’s lawn and are there to witness the instructive tale of a man who finds a way off the island, even as he stays on. In the case of Rushing to Paradise, we might think of ourselves as the threatened albatrosses who remain in flight overhead, looking for where we might, at least briefly, land.

New York, 2014

PART I (#u2c0a768b-af9c-5433-903c-38165170b765)

1 (#ulink_b8416dac-cbc5-5143-a4ca-b312bea3e2c0)

Saving the Albatross (#ulink_b8416dac-cbc5-5143-a4ca-b312bea3e2c0)

‘Save the albatross …! Stop nuclear testing now …!’

Drenched by the spray, Dr Barbara Rafferty stood in the bows of the rubber inflatable, steadying herself against Neil’s shoulder as the craft swayed in the skittish sea. Refilling her strained but still indignant lungs, she pressed the megaphone to her lips and bellowed at the empty beaches of the atoll.

‘Say no to biological warfare …! Save the albatross and save the planet …!’

A passing wave swerved across the prow, and almost struck the megaphone from her hand. She swore at the playful foam, and listened to the echoes of her voice hunting among the rollers. As if bored with themselves, the amplified slogans had faded long before they could reach the shore.

‘Shit! Neil, wake up! What’s the matter?’

‘I’m here, Dr Barbara.’

‘That’s Saint-Esprit ahead. The albatross island!’

‘Saint-Esprit?’ Neil stared doubtfully at the deserted coastline, which seemed about to slide off the edge of the Pacific. He tried to muster a show of enthusiasm. ‘You really brought us here, doctor.’

‘I told you I would. Believe me, we’re going to stir things up …’

‘You always stir everything up …’ Neil moved her heavy knee from the small of his back and rested his head against the oil-smeared float. ‘Dr Barbara, I need to sleep.’

‘Not now! For heaven’s sake …’

Already irritated by the island, which she had described so passionately during the three-week voyage from Papeete, Dr Barbara raised two fingers in a vulgar gesture that shocked even Neil. Between the lapels of her orange weather-jacket the salt-water sores on her neck and chest glared like cigarette bums. But her body meant nothing to the forty-year-old physician, as Neil knew. For Dr Barbara the polluted water tanks of the Bichon, the antique ketch that had brought them from Papeete, their meagre rations and sodden bunks counted for nothing. Albatross fever was all. If Saint-Esprit, this nondescript atoll six hundred miles south-east of Tahiti, failed to match her expectations it would have to reshape itself into the threatened paradise for which she had campaigned so tirelessly.

‘Reef, Dr Barbara! Time for quiet … I need to hear the coral.’

Behind them was the Hawaiian helmsman, Kimo, his knees braced against the sides of the inflatable as he worked the double-bladed oar. He sat like a rodeo-rider across the outboard engine, which he had tipped forward to spare the propeller. Neil watched him jockey the craft among the running seas, feinting through the gusts of spray. For a son of the islands, Neil reflected, Kimo was surprisingly hostile to the ocean. The sometime Honolulu policeman seemed to hate every wave, sinking the sharp blades into the swelling bellies of black water like a harpooner opening a dozen wounds in the side of a drowsing whale.

Yet without Kimo they could never have carried out this protest raid on Saint-Esprit. The disused nuclear-test island was a junior and more accessible cousin of the sinister Mururoa, which Dr Barbara had wisely decided to leave alone. Captain Serrou, the Papeete fisherman, was waiting for them in the Bichon, two miles out to sea. He had refused to join the run ashore, taking Dr Barbara’s talk of chemical warfare agents and imminent nuclear explosions all too literally. Only Kimo had the nerveless skill and brute strength to steer the inflatable through the reef and find an inlet among the deceptive calms that floated a few feet above a Himalaya of teeth.

‘We’re drifting …!’ Dr Barbara clambered over Neil and tried to seize the Hawaiian’s oar. The inflatable had lost headway, bows wavering as it fell back on the rising sea. ‘Kimo – don’t give up now …!’

‘Hang on, Dr Barbara … I’ll get you to your island.’

As Dr Barbara shielded the megaphone from the spray, Neil gripped the waterproof satchel that held her tools of trade. Needless to say, Dr Barbara travelled without any medical equipment. Instead of the hypodermic syringes and vitamin ampoules that would have cleared the ulcers on their lips, or even a roll of lint to bandage a wounded albatross, there were aerosol paints, a protest banner, a machete, and a video-camera to record the highlights of their raid. The television stations in Honolulu, if not Europe and the United States, might well be intrigued by the filmed material and its emotive message.

‘She’s coming, Dr Barbara.’ Kimo bent his back and drove the craft forward, a mahout of the deeps urging on a reluctant steed. Listening to the spuming air above the coral towers, he had found an inlet through the reef, a narrow gulley which the French engineers had cut with underwater explosives. Wider and less hazardous channels crossed the southern rim of the atoll, the route taken by the naval vessels supplying the military base. But the open lagoon exposed any unwelcome visitors to the soldiers guarding the island, who would be standing on the beach ready to throw them back into the surf, as the anti-nuclear protesters landing on Mururoa had discovered. Here, on the dark north coast, they could slip ashore unseen, giving Dr Barbara time to find the threatened albatross and rally the full force of her indignation.

Oar raised, Kimo ignored a black-tipped shark that veered past them, chasing a small blue-fish. He waited for the next swell, and propelled the inflatable through the whirlpool of foam and coral debris that erupted as the trapped air burst from the gasping walls. The reef fell away, slanting across the cloudy depths like the eroded deck of an aircraft carrier. They entered the quiet inshore waters, and Kimo fired the outboard for the final six-hundred-yard dash to the beach.

‘Kimo … Kimo …’ On her knees in the bows, Dr Barbara murmured the Hawaiian’s name, reproving herself for any fears that his commitment might falter. Neil had never doubted Kimo’s resolve. During the voyage from Papeete the large, stolid man had kept to himself, sleeping and eating in an empty sail-locker, preparing for the confrontation that lay ahead. He always deferred to Dr Barbara, stoically enduring the ecological harangues with which she greeted every unfamiliar bird in the sky, and clearly regarded the sixteen-year-old Neil Dempsey as little more than her cabin boy. Kimo had sunk his savings into their air-fares from Honolulu and the charter of the Bichon, but at times, as he fiddled with the ketch’s radio, Neil suspected that he might be a French agent, posing as a defender of the albatross in order to keep watch on this eccentric expedition.

Eight days out of Papeete they passed a fleet of Japanese whalers, escorting a factory ship that left a mile-wide slick of blood and fat on the fouled sea. The spectacle so appalled Dr Barbara that Neil held her around the waist, fearing that the deranged physician would leap into the bloody waves. As they wrestled together, cheeks flushed by the reflected carmine of the sea, the pressure of Neil’s hands on her muscular buttocks seemed almost to excite Dr Barbara, distracting her until she pushed him away and shouted a stream of obscenities at the distant Japanese.

Kimo, however, had been eerily calm, soothed by the thousands of sea-birds feasting on the whale debris. During the last days of the voyage he sacrificed his own rations to feed a solitary petrel that followed the ketch, even though Dr Barbara warned him that he was becoming anaemic.