I found this book buried in a mass of disorganized books haphazardly piled onto old metal display shelves. It was in a damp decaying side room of an old thrift store (closed a few years ago now) and a few of the books that I picked through were wet with black mold. I was attracted to the jacket art, or what was left of it, and picked it up for a couple of bucks.
Initially, I liked this book when I started reading it. The text seemed to move at a brisk pace towards something but it floundered about mid-story. The plot seemed simple enough, the forest was crystallizing for some unknown reason and the protagonist’s friends and ex-lover remain trapped at the epicenter. However, it begins to get convoluted as the only action in the story concerns an unrelated love triangle; a B-plot that I did not care for. The source of the action is teased to be about diamond companies sending in agents to seek out and destroy the competition as the natives are harvesting gems from the forest but this turns out to be a red herring. If this idea were explored in the story then it would have vastly improved the result.
There also seemed to be an attempt at building a theme into the story that did not mesh well. The motif of black and white being opposites and halves of the same whole seemed like the author was trying to force it into a theme. However, this amounted to nothing really in the story. The story also bears similarity with Lovecraft’s [b:The Colour Out of Space|10129880|The Colour Out of Space|H.P. Lovecraft|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1294272134l/10129880._SX50_.jpg|93678626] and [b:Annihilation|17934530|Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)|Jeff VanderMeer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403941587l/17934530._SX50_.jpg|24946895] by Jeff Vandermeer, so the idea at this point is not so unique especially after the movie adaptations of the previous. I did like the main premise, however.
I really cannot recommend this book though the writing is strong and attention-grabbing. The story and its plot are underwhelming. All of the action comes from a B-Plot that the protagonist has no real role in and the core premise is just guessed at and becomes the backdrop for the B-Plot action and a prosaic love triangle between the protagonist, his lost lover, and the French woman he met after arriving in port. ( )

Wonderfully elegant and strange and vivid. A typically Ballardian protagonist, an emotionally obscure doctor, gets mixed up with a small cast of fellow-foreigners in a central African country (Cameroon, we're told, but I think actually Gabon, right on the equator) which is undergoing crystallization. The same process is underway elsewhere in the world and seems to be connected with heavenly bodies: galaxies, stars, the moon. The crystal brings a kind of geometric order to space, replicating itself with countless baroque reconfigurations, coating plants, crocodiles, people in polychrome crusts, but also seems to be freezing or desiccating time:

The beauty of the spectacle had turned the keys of memory, and a thousand images of childhood, forgotten for nearly forty years, filled his mind, recalling that paradisal world when everything seemed illuminated by that prismatic light described so exactly by Wordsworth in his recollections of childhood.

The characters seem to double each other and the prose replicates itself, too, words like "sheathed", "prismatic", "jewel" revolving through the novel. But the brightness and beauty of Ballard's vision mean it doesn't become dull. Ecstatic paragraphs like this abound:

The sky was clear and motionless, the sunlight striking uninterruptedly upon this magnetic shore, but now and then a stir of wind crossed the water and the scene erupted into cascades of colour that rippled away into the air around them. Then the coruscation subsided, and the images of the individual trees reappeared, each sheathed in its armour of light, foliage glowing as if loaded with deliquescing jewels.

(the "wind on the water" calling Genesis to mind), or this:

They were soon within the body of the forest, and had entered an enchanted world. The crystal trees around them were hung with glass-like trellises of moss. The air was markedly cooler, as if everything was sheathed in ice, but a ceaseless play of light poured through the canopy overhead.

...with those hissing glass-like trellises of moss whistling off the page like a lurid, lucid dream.

Clearly a major influence on Vandermeer's Annihilation, and in fact Alex Garland, giving names to the unnamed characters of that novel for his brilliant film adaptation, borrowed at least three from The Crystal World. The same themes are here, of uncheckable cancerlike growth, of metamorphosis, of the unknowable other and how we approach it, seek to know it, fight it, flee it or embrace it. Just crazy good shit and straight to the top of my Ballard ranking. ( )

I've been uploading many, many bk covers for GoodReads because so many of the editions I have don't show. That means spending an inordinate amt of time scanning, etc. In this case, there was a slightly different edition already existing but, what the H, I uploaded a scan of the whole jacket opened up because it's a Max Ernst painting. This is yet-another of the eco-disaster novels - probably the last one. An animator named Alan Price made a short movie inspired by this. See it if you can. ( )

What do I think of this novel? I already got a glimpse of it amidst several of the first half of the complete short stories of Ballard, so I knew what to expect before sinking my teeth in it. Time flowers leads to these crystals. The Illuminated Man himself was drawn into the theme of the Crystal World. There's a lot of great imagery going on, and surprisingly, it isn't just the descriptions of the the world being consumed by a time-reversed (or rather, collided time with anti-time) semi-liquid crystals that shine with their own internal light. There's a dialog about religion and survivalism, an undercurrent of revenge and guilt, acceptance and futility.

People do say it's a sci-fi equivalent of Heart of Darkness, but I think it's more than that.

I like to digest some of the deeper currents in the work. Discover how it truly applies to the crystallizing world. After all, the tortured priest discovered that God is inside everything that has been transformed. The world is becoming eternal and obviously much more gorgeous than it had ever been.

The very images are showing us that things are not dark, but the exact opposite. Yes, the world is dying, somewhat, or at least becoming something that normal people cannot touch without becoming a part of it, but it is definitely not clear that those who'd succumbed are now unhappy or dead.

This isn't just a thoroughly exacting tribute. I think it's more of a refutation. ( )

This book totally crashes the already-ridiculous-for-me GR 5-star-rating system because honestly this is an awful, awful book, ridiculously awful, and I loved it completely. This writing. Wow. there are weird unlikely dependent clauses all over the place, and there are so many bizarre—actually what I meant to write just then is “freakishly bizarre”—descriptions of characters and of their behaviors. There is the story itself—for some inexplicable reason the world is going to pot in a very beautiful way, in this particular apocalypse, where organic growing things are becoming crystalline structures. When people start to turn spiky, they kind of like it. It doesn't hurt and they get to merge with everything else in a kind of eternal not-death.

To top it off there is a bit of a Heart of Darkness feel to this novel, including of course a big dark river, and an odd jungle, and most unfortunate references to “natives” behaving in suspiciously uncivilized ways.

So what can I say. Why did I love it. For its absolute excess, for the purple shade of prose, for the way people arrive on ships called “steamers” and for the way they smoke: incessantly, elegantly, and with more gesture and meaning given to each puff than the cigarettes in the movie “Now, Voyager,’ here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-CrTY8G1ug

Also the audacity of it, and the way Ballard vivifies a very weird world indeed. ( )