The Drought, 1965, J.G. Ballard. Triad Panther (1978). Cover illustration by Chris Foss (uncredited). 188 pages.
“The Draining Lake,”
being the first chapter of The Drought
aka The Burning World
At noon, when Dr. Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the entrance to the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot-son of the old woman who lived in the ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating in the water below his feet. The reflection of his swollen head swam like a deformed nimbus among the limp plumage. The caking mudbank was speckled with pieces of paper and driftwood, and to Ransom the dreamfaced figure of Quilter resembled a demented faun strewing himself with leaves as he mourned for the lost spirit of the river.
Ransom secured the bow and stern lines to the jetty, deciding that the comparison was perhaps less than apt. Although Quilter spent as much time watching the river as Ransom or anyone else, his motives would be typically
perverse. The continued fall of the river, sustained through the spring and summer drought, gave him a kind of warped pleasure, even if he and his mother had been the first to suffer. Their derelict barge–an eccentric gift from
Quilter’s protector, Richard Foster Lomax, the architect who was Ransom’s neighbor–had now taken on a thirty-degree list, and a further fall of even a foot in the level of the water would split its hull like a desiccated pumpkin.
Shielding his eyes from the sunlight, Ransom surveyed the silent banks of the river as they wound westwards to the city of Mount Royal five miles away. He had spent the previous week alone on what was left of Lake Constant, sailing the houseboat among the draining creeks and mudflats as he waited for the evacuation of the city to end. After the closure of the hospital at Mount Royal he had intended to leave for the coast, but at the last moment decided to give himself a few final days on the lake before it vanished for good. Now and then, between the humps of damp mud, he had seen the distant span of the motorbridge across the river, the windows of thousands of cars and trucks flashing like jeweled lances as they set off along the coast road to the south.
Ransom postponed his return until all movement along the bridge had ended. By this time the lake, once a clear stretch of open water thirty miles in length, had subsided into a series of small pools and channels, separated by the banks of draining mud. A few last fishing craft sailed forlornly among them, their crews standing silently in the bows.
By contrast, something about the slow transformation exhilarated Ransom. Continue reading “Mass-market Monday | J.G. Ballard’s The Drought”
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