J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World: My Curated Simile Collection

The brisk tenor and the perfect sentences of the free reading of J.G. Ballard’s first novel, The Drowned World (1962), found me ripe for hypnosis: Its post-apocalyptic lagoons; its mad insects and teeming, oversized reptiles ascendant on the food chain once more; and how the resurgence of primordial environments rewrites the psychology of protagonist Dr. Kerans, his peers at the testing station and the military detachment sent to safeguard the operation.

The scope and particulars of this haunting and sublime upheaval stick in Ballard’s extraordinary passages of scene-setting and its constituent sentences: Rhythmically varied; coolly precise in their application of architectural, biological, geological, and psychological terminology; haunted with restrained poetry and dread lucidity — many of the best capped by striking and effective similes.

What follows is a collection of those sentences I harvested after getting hold of my own paperback copy, each with a bit of context about the scene. I felt compelled to collect them and am confident these samples justify the effort.

🚨 Some Plot Spoilers🚨

In Chapter 1, the narrator finds the main character, Dr. Kerans, who has taken over a room in a partially submerged luxury hotel as his own apartment: “The Ritz’s reputation, he gladly agreed, was richly deserved—the bathroom, for example, with its black marble basins and gold-plated taps and mirrors, was like the side-chapel of a cathedral.”

We are soon shown one of many unforgettable snapshots of the bases’ lagoon and the ever-present, ineluctable main force of the book: the sun. “Golden waves glimmered up into the boiling air, and the ring of massive plants around them seemed to dance in the heat gradients like a voodoo jungle.”

Not long after this, Kerans takes a boat ride with base commander Colonel Riggs and a few of his men, looking down through the water at London streets: “Free of vegetation, apart from a few drifting clumps of Sargasso weed, the streets and shops had been preserved almost intact, like a reflection in a lake that has somehow lost its original.”

Then this line, observing the same sunken streetscape: “Their charm and beauty lay precisely in their emptiness, in the strange junction of two extremes of nature, like a discarded crown overgrown with wild orchids.”

At the end of this ride, we get our first glimpse of Dr. Bodkins, Kerans’ elderly lab assistant: “Across the lagoon he could see the portly bare-chested figure of Dr. Bodkin on the starboard bridge of the testing station, the Paisley cummerbund around his waist and the green celluloid shade shielding his eyes making him look like a riverboat gambler on his morning off.”

Riggs and Keran then visit the fortified residence of Beatrice Dahl, an heiress who lounges in a preserved luxury unit of her own nearby. Riggs and Keran find her poolside in the penthouse: “Beatrice Dahl lay back on one of the deck-chairs, her long oiled body gleaming in the shadows like a sleeping python.”

I learned by watching interviews that surrealist painters were a big influence on Ballard, so Kerans lingers on a few pieces of modern art in Dahl’s penthouse that foreshadow the deep forces about to have their way with the cast: “On another wall one of Max Ernst’s self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles screamed silently to itself, like the sump of some insane unconscious.”

Then a bit of the view: “Now and then, in the glass curtain-walling of the surrounding buildings, they would see countless reflections of the sun move across the surface in huge sheets of fire, like the blazing faceted eyes of gigantic insects.”

Later, a scene in the floating laboratory shows the scientists’ creeping disinterest in their work, foreshadowing a much deeper break with what’s left of civilization: “They entered the cool darkness of the laboratory and sat down at their desks below the semicircle of fading programme schedules which reached to the ceiling behind the dais, looking down over the clutter of benches and fume cupboards like a dusty mural.”

Also from the lab: “Many of the cardboard screens had sprung off their drawing pins, and hung forwards into the air like the peeling hull-plates of a derelict ship, moored against its terminal pier and covered with gnomic and meaningless graffiti.”

Ballard then shows us the lagoon outside at midday: “Steeped in the vast heat, the lagoon lay motionlessly, palls of steam humped over the water like elephantine spectres.”

Without knowing why, Kerans later steals a compass from the storeroom of the floating military base: “Caging the compass, he rotated it towards himself, without realising it sank into a momentary reverie in which his entire consciousness remained focused on the serpentine terminal touched by the pointer, on the confused, uncertain but curiously potent image summed up by the concept ‘South’, with all its dormant magic and mesmeric power, diffusing outward from the brass bowl held in his hands like the heady vapours of some spectral grail.”

Another arresting sketch of the lagoon at night: Overhead the sky was vivid and marbled, the black bowl of the lagoon, by contrast, infinitely deep and motionless, like an immense well of amber.

An officer in Riggs’ command vanishes just before the expedition is to return to Camp Byrd in Greenland. The following five quotes offer views from a search helicopter and the peak-heat search on foot: “Everywhere the silt encroached, shoring itself in huge banks against a railway viaduct or crescent of offices, oozing through a submerged arcade like the fetid contents of some latter-day Cloaca Maxima.”

“He watched a succession of wavelets lapping at the sloping roof, wishing he could leave the Colonel and walk straight down into the water, dissolve himself and the ever present phantoms which attended him like sentinel birds in the cool bower of its magical calm, in the luminous, dragon-green, serpent-haunted sea.”

“Kerans’ amusement at this notion was distracted by his discovery among the clutter of debris on the opposite bank of a small cemetery sloping down into the water, its leaning headstones advancing to their crowns like a party of bathers.”

“The yellow air of the noon high seemed to press down like a giant translucent counterpane on the leafy spread, a thousand motes of light spitting like diamonds whenever a bough moved and deflected the sun’s rays.”

“For nights afterward, in his dreams Kerans had seen Riggs dressed as William Tell, striding about in a huge Dalinian landscape, planting immense dripping sundials like daggers in the fused sand.”

Back at the base, Kerans is transfixed by what the fleeing soldier may have been running toward: “There he passed a quiet afternoon, nursing a light fever in his bunk, thinking of Hardman and his strange southward odyssey, and of the silt banks glowing like luminous gold in the meridian sun, both forbidding and inviting, like the lost but forever beckoning and unattainable shores of the amnionic paradise.”

Ballard repaints the lagoon, this time seen in Keran’s dreams: “Reflecting these intermittent flares, the deep bowl of the water shone in a diffused opalescent blur, the discharged light of myriads of phosphorescing animalicula, congregating in dense shoals like a succession of submerged haloes.”

Kerans awakes: "He woke in the suffocating metal box of his cabin, his head splitting like a burst marrow, too exhausted to open his eyes.”

Two dense and evocative turns of phrase plot Keran’s emerging response to the environment’s influence: “Timing them, he realized that the frequency was that of his own heartbeats, but in some insane way the sounds were magnified so that they remained just above the auditory threshold, reverberating dimly off the metal walls and ceiling like the whispering murmur of some blind pelagic current against the hull plates of a submarine.

“His unconscious was rapidly becoming a well-stocked pantheon of tutelary phobias and obsessions, homing on to his already over-burdened psyche like lost telepaths.”

Left to their own devices after they evade Riggs’ attempt to take them north, Kerans, Bodkins and Dahl each start to drift inward: “On the few occasions when Kerans called, she would be sitting on the patio or before a mirror in her bedroom, automatically applying endless layers of patina, like a blind painter forever retouching a portrait he can barely remember for fear that otherwise he will forget it completely.”

The villain, Strangman, arrives. Before things sour between him and the lagoon’s stay-behinds, Kerans, Bodkins, and Dahl visit his boat and witness his crew diving to explore a sunken planetarium: “Even the men swimming below the surface were transformed by the water, their bodies as they swerved and pivoted turned into gleaming chimeras, like exploding pulses of ideation in a neuronic jungle.”

In a fascinating scene, Kerans ends up donning a heavy diving suit in an attempt to appease Strangman during a tense moment. These two sentences are from his turn in the suit, walking through the sunken planetarium’s interior: “In front of him was the cabinet which had once held the instrument console, but the unit had been removed, and the producer’s swing-back seat faced out unobstructed like an insulated throne of some germ-obsessed potentate.

“Dimly illuminated by the small helmet lamp, the dark vault with its blurred walls cloaked with silt rose up above him like a huge velvet-upholstered womb in a surrealist nightmare.”

When things inevitably turn to open hostility, Kerans is subdued, bound to a mock throne, and left in the sun by Strangman and his men; Strangman asks “How do you do it?” when he finds the rapidly acclimating Kerans somehow alive on the second day under the sun’s “white carpet”: “It was this remark which sustained him through the second day, when the white carpet at noon lay over the square in incandescent layers a few inches apart, like the planes of parallel universes crystallized out of the continuum by the immense heat.”

Kerans hangs on to see another evening: “Overhead the sky was an immense funnel of sapphire and purple fantasticated whorls of coral cloud marking the descent of the sun like baroque vapor trails.”

Kerans escapes after being left for dead and finds a captive Dahl in Strangman’s quarters: “The chests at her feet were loaded with a mass of jewelled trash — diamanté anklets, gilt clasps, tiaras and chains of zircon, rhinestone necklaces and pendants, huge ear-rings of cultured pearl, overflowing from one chest to another and spilling onto the salvers placed on the floor like vessels to catch a quicksilver rainfall.”

Kerans breaks south at last, captive to the deep “archeo-psychic” pull of the reemergent jungle: “Overhead the sky was dull and cloudless, a bland impassive blue, more the interior ceiling of some deep irrevocable psychosis than the storm-filled celestial sphere he had known during the previous days.”

Kerans forges deeper south, finding the remains of a church at dusk: “Reaching the altar, he rested his arms on the chest-high marble, and watched the contracting disc of the sun, its surface stirring rhythmically like the slag on a bowl of molten metal.”

There you are; some of my favorite sentences and similes from J.G. Ballard’s debut novel, The Drowned World. Thank you for listening.