The Wind from Nowhere

For those of you who don't know, J. G. Ballard is a major figure both inside and outside the science fiction genre, these days writing more out of it.

His first novel, The Wind from Nowhere, is one of his four catastrophe tales based around the classical elements of earth, wind, fire and water. Obviously, the book's theme is the wind.

The novel fits comfortably within the post-war British school of doomsday authors (John Wyndham, most notably), and in fact it’s a fairly run-of-the-mill example of the genre. The author is said to have distanced himself from it in later years, but it does bear some distinctively Ballardian traits.

Beginning in a no-nonsense manner, we are immediately plunged into a crisis that has been developing for a while: planes are cancelled and shipping disrupted by strong winds and heavy seas.

The protagonist, Donald Maitland, a viral geneticist, has just left his wife and is heading to a position in Canada. Unfortunately, his flight is cancelled so he’s forced to return home, where he finds his ex and her lover who have returned from a trip to the coast because of the increasingly nasty weather.

Maitland moves out, very fortuitously finding a place to stay with a friend who has connections, and so he’s perfectly placed to be at the heart of the events that follow (would that we all had such friends).

His friend reveals that the wind has been increasing by about 5 miles per hour every day, and is projected to continue. As the book progresses, the wind speed remorselessly increases and civilisation inversely decreases.

I found the atmosphere (metaphorical) of the book to be a major strong point. The oppressive howling of the wind and vibrations are always present, and you’re very aware of the frailty of man-made structures. If you're ever in the Darwin Museum in Australia, I recommend that you visit the cyclone Tracey exhibit for a chilling recording of such a wind.

Most of the characters in the book are clichés familiar to anyone who’s read the post-apocalyptic genre – scientists, soldiers and politicians. They're so sketchily written that they're hard to distinguish. The book even features an industrialist with all the characteristics of a Bond villain – megalomaniacal, devoted henchman, disposable minions, and an underground base.

The book is slim and fairly easy to read in a sitting or two. It sets a fast pace of action, with plenty of thrilling catastrophes, although Ballard doesn't show you an event unless one of his main characters is there to see it. But there’s a lot of second-hand news about the destruction of Tokyo, Venice, New York.

As I mentioned before: the further into the book you get, the more the mix of pessimism and optimism turns to pessimism and people turn on each other like trapped rats. The message of the book is about the futility of civilisation in the face of nature, ending with a climactic (climatic?) scene in the industrialist’s concrete pyramid – the last man-made structure to survive above the earth’s surface.