The Day of Creation (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

The novel’s central character is the mysterious river Mallory, created by Dr. Mallory, the narrator, one of the last tenacious inhabitants of Port-la-Nouvelle on the southern border of the vast Sahara. Dr. Mallory’s World Health Organization clinic has all but closed; he is caught in the middle of a territorial dispute between Captain Kagwa, the local police chief, and guerrilla leader General Harrare; even his attempt at well-drilling adds to his despair. One day, however, while Mallory is directing tractor work on the local airstrip, the machine uproots an oak--and water begins to flow.

Mallory cannot stop the ever-growing stream. Driven by love and hate for the river that now bears his name, he is determined to make his way upriver to strangle it at its source. The Mallory will create no African paradise; with the advent of has-been documentary filmmaker Professor Sanger and his companion Mr. Pal, Dr. Mallory realizes that the water will but usher in another outpost of twentieth century kitsch. The day of creation would be reduced to video images.

Escaping on an old car-ferry from Kagwa’s control, Mallory, accompanied now by a flighty native girl-woman called Noon, begins the two hundred-mile journey upstream; they are later joined by the mostly blind Sanger and the encyclopedic Mr. Pal (whose running commentary on the riverside growth is a kind of creation inventory). Surrounded by cameras and lenses, Mallory becomes jealous of Noon’s flirtation with herself in the television monitors and of her fascination with the murky waters. Determined to destroy the river as a rival, and yet to save it, Dr. Mallory must confront his own obsessions with life and death in a phantasmagoric world evoked by the sometimes jaundiced Ballardian pen.

If there is a resolution, it comes not within the world of action, but deep within a man’s memory and desire, where the sound of a river can yet be heard.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXIV, March 1, 1988, p. 1049.

Kirkus Reviews. LVI, March 1, 1988, p. 298.

Library Journal. CXIII, May 1, 1988, p. 88.

London Review of Books. IX, October 1, 1987, p. 18.

New Statesman. CXIV, September 11, 1987, p. 26.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIII, May 15, 1988, p. 28.

The Observer. September 13, 1987, p. 27.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIII, February 19, 1988, p. 70.

Rolling Stone. DXIII, November 19, 1987, p. 76.

Time. CXXXI, April 25, 1988, p. 99.

The Times Literary Supplement. September 11, 1987, p. 977.