J. G. BALLARD
Rushing to Paradise
Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London W6 8JB 4thestate.co.uk
This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014
First published in Great Britain by Flamingo in 1994
Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1994
The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988
Introduction © Rivka Galchen 2014
‘The Sage of Shepperton’ © Travis Elborough 2008
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Cover by Stanley Donwood,
Assembled from a digitally manipulated linocut, iPhone photos and a photograph of atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, taken by Charles Levy © Corbis.
EPub Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007384891
Version 2014-09-25
From the Reviews of Rushing to Paradise:
‘Mesmerising and poetic … compulsive reading’
Financial Times
‘A subversive version of Lord of the Flies … Ballard’s relentless intelligence and wildly irreverent, absurdist humour collaborate in creating comically satiric sequences. A body blow to the pretensions in our century’
Irish Times
‘Rushing to Paradise, which marks a return to the ecocidal territory of his first novel, The Drowned World, and has much in common also with the atavistic violence of Hello America and High-Rise, is essentially a portrait of the imagination of disaster … His ear for the descriptive cadence is unerringly acute, and while his imitators can only struggle to render violence explosively literal, Ballard remains a profound elegist of decay’
Times Literary Supplement
‘A satisfyingly bizarre mixture of fantasy and fact … a dystopian vision of a paradise island overrun by a band of environmentalists’
Sunday Times
Contents
From the Reviews of Rushing to Paradise
Introduction by Rivka Galchen
PART I
1: Saving the Albatross
2: Protesting Too Much
3: The Dugong
4: The Shore Raid
5: Island People
6: The View from a Camera-Tower
7: The Rainbow Pirates
8: The Gift Mountain
PART II
9: The Ecology of Paradise
10: The Attack on the Beach
11: The Breeding-Station
12: Fever in the Blood
13: Hunters and Lovers
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
‘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