I first read JG Ballard’s The Crystal World 10 years ago on a beach in Suffolk, the glare of the sea in my eyes. I looked out to the water, and the reflection of the sun on the waves blinded me. The wind dropped, the reeds on the dunes stopped waving and everything slowed down.



The Crystal World was published in 1966 and forms part of a post-apocalyptic triptych that also includes The Drowned World and The Drought. Although it contains similar tropes to those two novels – environmental catastrophe, Freudian thanatos, inner space – The Crystal World is a much more beautiful, and more violent work.



The book opens with a doctor, Edward Sanders, standing at the bow of a steamer in the Matarre estuary in the Cameroon Republic, watching the rippling water and a strange light over the forest near the diamond mines upriver. The scene is a chiaroscuro of dark and light, the blackness of the river below the ship set against the glow in the sky. He meets an architect in white linen and a priest in black soutane. “Day and night,” another passenger remarks looking out over the river, “do they mean much any longer?”



Sanders is travelling to the forest to find his former lover, Suzanne Clair, a doctor working at a leper colony near the mines. He hires a boat, another Ballardian hero on a doomed journey, this time to a forest of motionless crystal. Suzanne waits for him in her hospital like a god outside time, a Norma Desmond surrounded by frozen relics.



The Mont Royal forest, where the mines are situated, is the epicentre of a pocket of crystallisation, the result of particles of “anti-time” colliding with particles of time (as anti-matter and matter collide and destroy each other). Soldiers and explorers venturing too far into it have started to petrify into quartz, the atoms of their flesh becoming frozen in time. This process creates displaced but identical images of the same material object in almost the same place – flat, dense versions of the same image echoing outwards, crystallised. At the port downstream in Matarre, Sanders watches the body of a dead man with a crystal arm being washed downriver, rainbows glowing in his emerald eyes.



Sanders discovers that the waters of the Matarre reverse the effect of the crystallisation, washing the body clean. But as he finds out to his cost, the crystals are not a veneer encasing a body – they are the body. The cleansing effect of the river is not restorative, it is scouring. The doctor finds an army captain lying on the bank of the Matarre, half-crystallised but still breathing. He positions him on a log to float downstream, so he can be rescued back at the port. The captain reappears several chapters later in the forest, having dragged himself out of the water – one-armed, one-eyed, and with half a face, scraped to bits by the river. “Take me back!” he screams at Sanders. The doctor runs, and the captain’s corpse lumbers back into the forest.



Cause and effect is never a simple process in a JG Ballard novel; instead he gives us us prose that shimmers like a painting – the empty swimming pool and the crashed plane in Empire of the Sun, or the flooded swamp of London in The Drowned World. The Crystal World is an anti-journey, populated with slowed-down people and petrified animals – crocodiles choking on diamonds, blind snakes with glass eyes, men lurching through the undergrowth with feet becoming explosions of quartz, sticking to the floor. I read the book and sat on that beach crunching grains of sand between my toes. The sun on the water flashed in my eyes, and everything stopped.