Rushing to Paradise
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- $4.900
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- $4.900
Descripción editorial
J.G. Ballard – author of Crash and Empire of the Sun – explores the extremes of ecology and feminism in this highly acclaimed modern fable.
Dr Barbara Rafferty is a fearless conservationist, determined to save a rare albatross from extinction. Her crusade gains widespread coverage when earnest young environmentalist Neil Dempsey is shot during an ill-fated attempt to rescue the bird from its Pacific island habitat, Saint-Esprit.
Support for the conservationists grows and well-wishers flock to the island, bringing with them specimens of other endangered creatures to be protected by Dr Barbara and her crew. The island seems a new Eden.
But is the intense Dr Barbara as altruistic as she appears? Why are the islanders committing acts of self-sabotage? And what’s keeping Neil alive while the other men sicken?
A classic exploration of the extremes of human behaviour from J.G Ballard, this is a brilliantly unsettling novel in which all preconceptions are overthrown.
Reviews
‘Ballard is a magician of the contemporary scene and a literary saboteur. Rushing to Paradise is a Wellsian drama of extremity and isolation…No one else writes with such enchanted clarity or strange power’ Guardian
‘Pure Ballard. I read it with rapt fascination…Wonderful’ William Boyd
‘Robinson Crusoe in reverse. Teasing and sardonic…Ballard at his best’ Independent on Sunday
About the author
J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai. After internment in a civilian prison camp, his family returned to England in 1946. His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His controversial novel Crash was made into a film by David Cronenberg. His autobiography Miracles of Life was published in 2008, and a collection of interviews with the author, Extreme Metaphors, will be published in 2012. J.G. Ballard passed away in 2009.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In one of Picador's first hardcover titles, Ballard (Crash) offers another of his tautly imagined experiments with 20th-century pathology. Here he traces an environmental crusade from its media-driven invasion of a South Seas atomic test site to its establishment of an endangered species' sanctuary, to its metamorphosis into an atavistic cult. Ballard's futuristic characters are nearly always less individual personalities than mutating preoccupations, and this cast of environmental utopians who quixotically strand themselves to save an albatross colony is no exception. Sixteen-year-old Neil Dempsey, who is drawn into the expedition by the charismatic, inscrutable ``Dr. Barbara'' (Rafferty), is joined by a Hawaiian who dreams of an independent island kingdom, a Boston Brahmin missionary, an animal-rightist airline stewardess and a band of German eco-hippies. Amid Ballard's hallucinatory evocation of the island's native flora, imported endangered fauna and abandoned military and scientific installations, Dr. Barbara proves ready to sacrifice anything or anyone for her unstable cause, whether to the international media, the island jungle or her artificial paradise. Although the naive and uncertain Neil proves a comparatively weak narrative lens for Dr. Barbara and her spiraling projects, Ballard's story moves tensely along, an apocalyptic cautionary tale for the millennium.
