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.
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