Carrying on with the JG Ballard theme picked up The Drought. In a way the first reaction is to view it as the opposite of Drowned World with a collection of characters struggling to cope with no water.
The lake is running out of water, returning to mud flats and caked earth and in the midst of it is Ransom a man who like some many of Ballard’s characters seems to be lost. His wife has left him and as the world falls apart he seems to be happy spending time in solitude working out how he can reconnect with it.
Already though there is the tension that seems to be another theme of Ballard’s work where people have to make choices. Do you stay and face what is potentially a death sentence or do you follow the herd and chase the water at the coast? How Ransom answers that question is presumably going to be how the book unfolds.
More tomorrow…
