the gallery

The Drought is one of the Ballard books I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, it's one of the most through explorations of apocalypse he ever wrote. Through rebellion, exploration, conformity, collaboration his self-hero struggles. He fights, he feels, he fails, he fades. But it's cruel, it hints at rescue and redemption, and there is the sickening possibility that maybe the organised types have the right of it. There's nothing easy about this book; even the ending is bewildering. Originally I borrowed this book from the library. Inside it someone had angrily marked the final sentence of the book; stupid, pointless; invalidates the rest of the book

This edition is another of the lovely Panther paperbacks, from before when they started putting the names of the artists on the cover, but it's monogrammed with an "F" which I suspect is short for Foss. Very unusually it has a cover quote, which, for all its hyperbolic charm, does the composition no favours at all.