SF Review: JG Ballard, The Wind From Nowhere (1962)

Reading The Drowned World, Ballard’s much celebrated and precient account of a world transformed by rapid global warming was one of the things that really got me reading science fiction in such concentrated amounts. Images, characters, situations, and most importantly, the examination into the subconscious psychological effects such an affecting disaster could have on an entire populace. This novel, telling the story of a gale-force wind circulating the globe, gaining steadily in speed and potency, was Ballard’s first, proceeding Drowned World by a year, and although his powers were not quite yet at their peak, you can see the seeds from which those lofty heights would grow.

This is a far more typical science fiction disaster novel than Ballard’s later work, with a narrative rooted far more in the ‘golden age’ of the 50’s than any ‘new wave’. For example, while Ballard’s later novels concentrate on one particular character who is unwillingly either caught up in or drawn towards events, here we are granted the viewpoint of several protagonists, each one involved somehow in battling the effects of disaster. Maitland, a doctor unable to fly from his home in London due to the increasing winds, seems a typical Ballard character at first, but as the wind begins it’s inevitable destruction of the English capital he is soon drafted by the army to assist victims and stragglers who have failed to take refuge. Simon Marshall commands a hastily constructed special unit attempting to coordinate communication through the storm, although hints that his allegience may lie in more mysterious places. We are even given an urbane, bluff commander called Lanyon who saves families stranded in churches and is comfortable sleeping with a virtual stranger even as their companions are slaughtered by the raw power of the wind, a type of character I would never have expected Ballard to write. With this concentration on the militaries efforts rather than on ordinary people Ballard is far more in the realms of typical science fiction, complete with ‘hero’ characters and an epic struggle against impossible force.

And yet there are times when Ballard just shifts across into another mode, into an altogether stranger place of alien emotions and psychological crises. The detailed description of London as seen through Maitland’s eyes, almost ordinary but for the slowly growing piles of fine, red dust blown from some exotic desert and collecting at the base of every wall, curb or lampost. The strange quietness of it all, bar an occasional smash of glass or muffled scream, carried away on the wind almost as soon as the sound is made. It’s a poetically resonant moment, and similar moments crop up time and again to haunt a reader’s throughts, their ambiguity refusing to let go. It’s something that would become familiar in Ballard’s later novels, but the idea of physically and mentally fragile people giving themselves up to disaster – here allowing themselves to be carried off by the wind to be dashed on the rubble of the city – is still both horrific and beguiling. Ballard allows you to feel the seduction that the disaster can offer to these souls.

The Wind From Nowhere also, more so even than Ballard’s later work, resonates in todays climate of fear. When characters shelter in darkened places, listening to the radio to hear the latest extent of the tragedy it jolts memories both of stormy power cuts from my childhood, and of watching the growing death toll from the tsunami several christmasses ago. The chaos and panic present in the impossibly difficult rescue missions to save possible survivors from the disintegrating city of London cannot fail but bring to mind images of the London bombings and of the terror that that previously implausible event caused.

Finally, despite Ballard seemingly disowning this book and banishing it from ‘previous novel’ lists in his later publications, we are given a formative glance at what could be termed his ‘manifesto for disaster’. In the final act we are shown a man who feels he must battle the wind, who must stand up to it and not be driven below ground like the rest of the world’s remaining population. He is seduced by the disaster, like Ballard’s later protagonists would be, but his efforts to battle against that disaster are his eventual downfall. It is those who take the reality of the wind and, instead of fighting it’s might, accept it and even use it to their advantage that will thrive; a group of European men collecting food and living in a monestary’s catacombs, a branch of the army setting up a 50’s style bar in an underground station; even Lanyon, our heroic officer, who steadfastly retains his character even as the wind reaches ludicrous speeds but does not battle the wind itself. What Ballard suggests is that, in times of the greatest madness, what individuals must do is accept that madness and ride it out until either it sudsides, or everything is destroyed.