Rushing to Paradise

Rushing to Paradise sees Ballard return to the kind of ecological psycho-novel of his early career (The Drowned World, The Crystal World) but this is of a much darker tone. A disgraced British doctor, Barbara Rafferty, turned eco-warrior recruits a motley band (Neil, a teenager infatuated with dreams of nuclear testing; Kimo, an Hawaiian ex-policeman; David Carline, an American businessman) to “save the albatross” on the atoll island of Saint-Esprit in the Pacific, as the French prepare to resume nuclear testing there.

But what begins as a noble cause soon descends into obsession and madness as Rafferty's psychosis infects the volunteers and the very island itself. The world-wide publicity allows Rafferty to set up a sanctuary on Saint-Esprit, not just for the albatross but for a range of endangered species. New volunteers arrive and Rafferty lords it over them all, her vision of what the island is changing as her psychosis deepens.

Ballards own obsessions (nuclear bombs, enclosed communities, the effects of isolation) that were laid bare in his autobiographical novel Empire of The Sun, are here reconstituted to greater effect than in previous novel The Day of Creation. There it all felt tired and by the numbers. Here the tone and characters are sharper and darker, the madness all too real. As the sanctuary falls apart under the weight of Rafferty's delusions, the actions of the volunteers become wilder, more primitive, as if they are reverting to a primeval archetype.

It's a variation on Lord of The Flies, and Ballard's last throw of these particular dice. He'd move on to other types of enclosed communities in a trio of novels in the late 90s, but this novel is well worth your time.