Reviewed by CP in 1987. This article may be downloaded, but may not be uploaded or printed elsewhere.

One of the smaller pleasures of a J. G. Ballard novel is the way in which the chapters are named, a surreal blend of fanciful Freud and boys' action/adventure stuff. For example, five consecutive chapters in The Day of Creation are called Piracy, Out of the Night and into the Dream, The Naming of New Things, The Helicopter Attack and Escape. Readers who discovered Ballard's work through his 1984 novel Empire of the Sun might have been slightly disconcerted there by the same kind of thing (The Refrigerator in the Sky and The Bandits), but Ballard veterans usually turn to the contents page first for a quick preview of the happy and fruitful madness to come.

Few of his new readers would have known it at the time, but Empire of the Sun was the anomaly in Mr Ballard's career. Because it had autobiographical content it seemed to reveal to his longer-term audience the source of practically everything else the author had written, but the earlier novel was of a familiar type, and was enjoyed by more people, probably, than had read all his other books put together. Empire of the Sun was a World War 2 novel, perhaps the last great one to be written by a participant in the war. But it was not like his other novels (which I preferred): Crash, High Rise, and so on. The new novel returns to this main stream of Ballard's work.

It has no plot in the conventional sense, but then Ballard novels rarely do. Plenty of events, though ... in fact, the pace of things happening hardly slackens from beginning to end. The story opens with the narrator being clubbed with a rifle barrel and from this moment the action is thick and fast, acted out by a cast of oddly-named Ballardian henchmen: two separate bandit groups (one of them led by a General Harare), a television documentary filmmaker (Sanger) and his associate (Mr Pal), a Japanese photographer (Miss Matsuoka), a boatload of whores (led by a widow named Mrs Warrender), a child-woman called Noon who communicates by tapping her teeth. The narrator is a doctor called Mallory who works for WHO, but the central character (arguably) is a river called Mallory, which comes into miraculous existence, witnessed by the doctor, named after the doctor by the TV man (the National Geographical Society register it as such), and purchased by the doctor from the police captain for a thousand of WHO's dollars ... The doctor now sets off up-river in a stolen car ferry, pursued by bandits (the police captain's car is strapped to the deck). I hope all this makes sense so far.

All of Ballard's best novels contain an obsessive quest. In this one the doctor is searching for the source of the new river, but for reasons which are not altogether clear. Certainly not to the reader and perhaps not even to himself: sometimes Doctor Mallory wishes to revive the weakening flow of water so that the desert may be irrigated, at other times he seeks to strangle it at source. Both impulses merge. The two competing guerrilla groups are in hot pursuit, the whores trail behind, the filmmaker provides a topographical commentary, the child-woman takes refuge inside the police captain's Mercedes, endlessly playing tapes of Marxist travelogues ... and from time to time a helicopter zooms in to attack. Everyone is ill, wounded, dying or insane. Every physical object, no matter whose it is or what it is being used for, is decrepit. The new river, after a few days in existence, is littered with beer coolers, air conditioners and condos.

But for all this superficial detail, and for all the explanations and incidents and the ceaseless narrative tone of the writing, the novel is virtually static in form. The real journey described in the book is an inward one. This is not Heart of Darkness at all ... Aguirre, Wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo would be closer. Werner Herzog once described himself as someone who shouldn't be allowed to make films, presumably because he endangered other people's lives; novelists endanger only themselves, but perhaps J. G. Ballard feels the same way about himself.

He is a unique writer with a distinctive vision unmatched by any other living novelist, and in The Day of Creation Ballard is at the height of his powers. Like those of surrealist paintings, the images are not only appalling, and sometimes beautiful, but their juxtapositions are frequently comic and are drawn with great technical skill. The book is original throughout, and induces a feeling of crazed credulity. It will undoubtedly sell as well as Empire of the Sun but it is not at all the same kind of thing. To those of us who have been feeling psychically endangered by Mr Ballard's writing since the early 1960s, this feels like a triumphant return to form.