Prima Belladonna
I have expertly decided to include the first two stories into this post and in my next I'll include the next two, or even third story, Track 12 as it's quite short and not deserving of much praise or attention, at least for a Ballard story. Prima Belladonna (PB) seems to have been one of Ballard's first published short stories and as such it won't share the same cutting finesse or transfigured modernity as his later installments but it paves the scene and mood for later stories that also take place in the Vermilion Sands resort town, home to many strange and disastrous happenings.
One of the principle ways to discover the meaning behind the term Ballardian is not to look at one or two of his stories but his whole arsenal of work. So far I have read four of his novels; The Drowned World, High Rise, Concrete Island and Crash, this short collection I have read encompasses the entire Urban Disaster trilogy and one from the Ecological Disaster trilogy (The Drowned World). Tales from Vermilion Sands would fall in to the bracket of themes and settings such as from Cocaine Nights, so this convoluted roundup of the different sagas spawning from the Ballardian universe makes it clear that the author has a few general themes and landscapes running throughout many of his books.
This can often inflict the reader with Deja Vu on a grand scale, like hasn't the world been taken over by vegetation before? Yes but this time it's happening in America only... so we encounter subtle differences like this. However when reviewing or analyzing something, we all like to compare it with something else and Ballard's style of reintroducing themes and ideas can cause the reader to more quickly settle in with these ideas and to accept them. Maybe because I have already become familiar with Ballard's take on urban chaos that stories such as Concentration City and Billennium would appeal to me more, this is the reoccurring beauty of his work.
PB starts with introducing us to a 'mutant' looking yet beautiful woman called Jane and this introduction also signals the start of a reoccurring line of distant femme fatals entering Ballard's short stories, usually they seem to bring nothing but bad luck for the residents of Vermilion Sands. She hastily starts courting Steve, the owner of a local singing flower shop, as she happens to be an entertainment singer and is fascinated by the exotic cultivated plants and carnivorous oddities belting out classical symphonies. The artistic theme of this story seems to be music and if nothing else you can finish the story and arrogantly boast to your friends how the melodies of Mandel are far superior to those of Tchaikovsky, who is only for beginners and 'tourists'.
The major conflict of the story comes when Jane challenges Steve's prized singing flower, something called a Khan-Arachnid to a singing contest of sorts, this causes the viscous flower to triple in size and tower over Jane and attempt to eat her but Steve steps in to save her, kind of, being the type for chivalry and all that. Ballard makes it more or less clear that he doesn't care for his characters, he prefers to mold his characters around the story and we have these people only as a means to an end. Steve's name is mentioned maybe once or twice in the whole piece and this is common with the protagonists of Ballard's short stories.
So what can I say about the messages that these characters stand for, perhaps Jane was fighting to take back music, she wanted music to belong to the human world and not the plants or was she just a sacrificial succubus playing out men's sexual desires for a woman with self destructive needs. Steve emerges from the whole ordeal with little scars, emotional or physical, and seemed to have shed his admiration for Jane just as quickly as he found it, he gives some advise to other men who happen to have a singing flower shop that she could pop in to visit them but he leaves them with the warning that she can cheat. He is referring to a game he used to play with her but there is also the connotation that she would cheat on the love of a man with the love of her hobby, singing. So while Jane's urges and sexual merits were powerful, her urges towards music scared Steve and left him feeling cheated.
Escapement
I guess I must now talk about Escapement, this is a run of the mill science fiction story about time travel and time loops. I enjoyed it more than PB simply because the idea was well implemented and the same gripping tension and shortening of time stayed with the story right to the final sentence. Basically a man is watching TV with his wife and notices the same programs are repeating themselves, he is stuck in a time loop going from 9 p.m to 9.15 p.m but gradually this time span shortens yet this man is the only man in the entire world to know about this time anomaly. The excitement come in how this man (I don't want to look up this name nor would knowing it strictly matter anyway) trying to figure how what to do in order to fix this anomaly and how he can make the most of it, at one point he muses that he has infinite alcohol woohoo, but that he will never be able to feel drunkenness inside this time loop awww.
He refers to his time loop as a merry-go-round, he rings his friends to find out what it going on but they are carrying on as normal and he tried to convince his wife, all to no avail. In the end the time loops shrinks to nothing for our hero and he reverts to normally perceived time yet he then hears his wife mention that the same program is repeating itself and he knows she is now experiencing what he just went through and says to her, "This is the merry-go-round. And you're driving", which is an amazing closing sentence and caused me to shout out in delirium but it still raises so many questions. Is the husband also now stuck in this time loop with his wife or is the wife only experiencing it while the husband's memory reverts back every fifteen minutes? Are we living the same fifteen minutes over and over until the divine direction we are heading in has become satisfactory? Why does this time loop happen, is it so they can realize the correct path to live in or is it just a cruel game designed to sharpen the mind? I'm sure many different time travel stories also raise these mind boggling questions and that is what makes Escapement a fascinating read. To tie things up I will mention that Ballard gives the name of the play that the husband and wife are watching as 'My Sons, My Sons', so much repetition, so much repetition.
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