When I first met J G Ballard, not long after reviewing Iain Sinclair’s book Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-Mortem on J G Ballard’s “Trajectory of Fate” in the New Statesman ten years ago, the first thing that struck me about him was his palpable decency, generosity and good humour. That does not mean his conversation was in any way bland – quite the contrary, it always left me stirred and enriched. After each meeting with him my view of the world around me was more Ballardian – a tribute not only to the force of his personality, but even more to the exactitude of his vision. Having lived through extreme situations, Ballard was able to portray the extremity of late 20th-century life in a way no other writer has done. What was so impressive in the man was that this disturbing clairvoyance coexisted with a powerful affirmation of life.
These two sides of Ballard, I came to think, were not unrelated. His depictions of desolate cityscapes have often been seen as encoded autobiography – cipher versions of his early life in Shanghai and the time in the Japanese prison camp that followed. It is true that after experiencing the sudden disappearance of conventional existence he was never able to take the pretensions of civilised humanity terribly seriously, but, as a result, his work is often exultantly lyrical and often contains a streak of macabre comedy.
Besides the brilliant galleries of surreal images, there is a deadpan commentary on the recurrent disappearance of organised society and the socialised self that runs through Hello America (1981) – one of Ballard’s more neglected books. This imagines a post-climate-change Los Angeles, with a tribe of garrulous monkeys sitting in the old beach furniture around the stagnant pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel, “gibbering and quarrelling with each other like a crowd of producers”, while elegant birds stand on the ends of diving boards, “waiting for some talent scout to film them as they stared nonchalantly at the overgrown gardens of the abandoned mansions”.
It is hard to read these and similar passages without thinking that they are based on Ballard’s experiences in Shanghai. Yet if Shanghai formed Ballard’s view of the world, it is no less true that Ballard’s vision of the city was his own. He used his experiences there to show how the collapse of normalcy can open our eyes, disclosing a world that is not only quite different from the semi-fictional one that we live in, but, in some ways, more satisfying. In another of his under-appreciated books, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979), he reimagines the quiet London suburb of Shepperton, in Surrey, where he lived until moving to be with his partner Claire Walsh in the last months of his illness, magically transformed into a tropical paradise where the townspeople can fly and where the dead return from the grave. Here as throughout his writings, the transformative energy of the imagination is at work, turning brute reality into something joyful and lovely.
Although he began his career writing science fiction, Ballard always maintained that his subject was the present rather than the future. His work first reached a wide public after the appearance of Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Empire of the Sun (1984), a novel some have seen as the peak of his career. It is a rich and many-layered book, but it would be perverse to rank it above the rest of his work. With its fragmented experimental style and intrepid exploration of some of the darkest zones of experience, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) may be his most original and subversive book: that nearly the whole of its US print run was destroyed after the publisher chanced to glance through a copy supports this judgement. The better-known Crash (1973) is a kind of addendum, a cool study in affectless frenzy that Cronenberg’s adaptation faithfully captures. The notoriety that ensued enabled Ballard’s dystopian portrayals of urban alienation in Concrete Island (1974) and High Rise (1975) to be better appreciated. Cocaine Nights (1996) and Super-Cannes (2000) showed him taking up the crime thriller, only to subvert it as he had earlier subverted science fiction.
For me Ballard’s best and most characteristic work is in his early novels and short stories, and his memoir Miracles of Life (2008). He writes somewhere that there are many perfect short stories but few, if any, perfect novels, and yet some of his best short stories are in fact perfect short novels. The stories in Vermilion Sands (1971) take place in an idealised Palm Springs where the disciplines of work have been left behind and time slips by in the company of sonic sculptures and singing plants. His first major novel, The Drowned World (1962), features a prototypical Ballard character seeking re-entry into the archaic cosmos that existed before memory. In Memories of the Space Age (1988), an exquisite distillation of his central themes, it becomes clear that escape from personal time is the quest on which he was engaged in much of his writing. It is not by accident that Ballard wanted to be a painter, or that the painters he most admired, such as Delvaux and de Chirico, were masters of a radiant kind of still life.
It is in his last book that the two sides of Ballard seem to me to come together. Miracles of Life shows him retrieving the memories that shaped his fiction, and going on to record the happiness he found in his family. The casual cruelty he witnessed in Shanghai, and the tragic early death of his wife Mary in 1964, revealed a world devoid of human meaning. The challenge Ballard faced was to show how fulfilment could be found in such conditions. His writings were the result, a lifelong experiment in imaginative alchemy, the transmutation of senseless dross into visions of beauty.
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