JG Ballard, Our Greatest Living Novelist is No Longer
When I read JG Ballard, I go into a particular kind of trance. The effect of his books isn’t comparable to those of any other writer. His prose, right from the beginning, has a mesmerising pace, rhythm and decorum all its own. Even more remarkably, Ballard has established his own set of visionary locations. Plenty of other writers now fictionally venture into multistorey carparks, airport hospital wards, decaying hotels, but they do so in the knowledge that they’re trespassing on Ballard’s territory. He was here first; he was the pioneer – back when these places were seen as totally unliterary. What could possibly happen on a motorway embankment that was of interest?
The world’s finest living novelist died today. Most fans were expecting this, as he announced he had advanced prostate cancer over a year ago. Still, there’s something distressing in learning his yet to be published book, a memoir, Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life will be his last.
If you don’t know his work apart from Empire of the Sun, start with Millenium People and work back in time. Or, if you’re a fan of Crash, start with The Atrocity Exhibition and move forward toward his more conventional narratives. Whether an experimental novel or traditional literary one, the themes were all the same. And it’s almost impossible to describe his themes briefly without calling them “Ballardian.”
A pretty characteristic Ballardian moment comes up early on in Concrete Island. The protagonist has crashed off the highway and on to the land below. He is thinking about his son he was supposed to pick up from school, “Ironically, in this warm spring weather the line of crippled war veterans would be sitting in the wheel chairs by the park gates as if exhibiting to the boy the variety of injuries which his father might have suffered.” The motorists, if they even see him, continually mistake him for a homeless person and are therefore unwilling to assist him. He is left stranded on the “concrete island,” and depends on the totaled car for survival –even seizing the water reservoir of windshield wipers for something to drink.
Squint/Opera images inspired by The Drowned World
Another great one is The Drowned World. The title is pretty self-explanatory, but it plays out with a sensitivity to the natural world typically absent in science fiction. When the city of London is finally drained, the characters aren’t pleased, in fact they’re horrified. They can’t believe people actually lived in these structures and streets so far removed from nature. London “looked like a sewer.”
It helps to know a little about JG Ballard, to appreciate his particular sort of darkness. He grew up in Shanghai during the war, and spent part of his childhood tiptoeing through dead bodies in the streets. He was even sent to an internment camp. Rick McGrath has a very comprehensive look at this period in his life. Later, he moved to England, married and had children in Shepperton, his home until his death. His wife died unexpectedly, living him a single suburban father at the age of 32. Trauma and mortality is in every sentence of his books, presented scientifically, without any treacly navel-gazing.
Ballard’s lifelong work station(note the typewriter.) The Delvaux was commissioned from a photograph (the original was destroyed during the Blitz in 1940.)
There is a distrust of technology and human nature in Ballard’s novels, a sense of the absurdity of shopping malls and an intuitive understanding how architecture, especially in its most banal forms, affects our emotions. Ballard shunned email and Internet, it was irrelevant to his obsessions. His concern was space, the body, travel, the dark underbelly of a suburban tract housing development.
Apart from maybe Beckett, no other modern writer crossed as many cultural mediums in his scope of influence. Artists, architects, philosophers, and musicians took to his books immediately, but strangely — for reasons I still can’t understand — he is still largely ignored by the “book world” outside of the UK. His fanbase speaks for itself. Ian Curtis, hugely influenced. David Cronenberg, of course. Jean Baudrillard, Susan Sontag. Filmmakers Mary Harron and Vincenzo Natali. Just about every artist I meet has Super-Cannes on his shelf. Here’s a fascinating post and another from Ballardian on “Autopsy of the New Millennium,” an art show in Barcelona last summer entirely dedicated to dedicated to the life and work of JG Ballard. New wave (and its brief c. 2003 revivial) was largely inspired by some of his wilder sci-fi novels. Gary Numan, The Normal, Anne Clark and John Foxx very clearly articulated his concepts in their music.
JG Ballard ideas are so vivid, they almost have to be played by an instrument or drawn to discuss. If you are at intrigued, take a look at Simon Sellars’ fantastic website Ballardian and listen to some of his fascinating interviews. And more to come here, (when I have the chance,) to discuss what I consider his most important novels: High Rise, Super Cannes, The Atrocity Exhibition, and Millenium People. But a final note, it’s really a shame how long American publishers have ignored Ballard. Just look at Google Trends: US search strings for his name come 5th, after UK, Ireland, Australia, and Canada. And Spielberg made a movie from one of his books!
Update: wonderful point made by Ekstasis: “…The death of a futurist is always a strange thing, losing access to all the possibilities they saw, to their perspective on our collective future. Limited access is still possible, of course, through the arcane procedures of interpretation. This is cold comfort, though. Interpretation can, necessarily, only yeild ideas colored by our own perceptions, our associations, ham-strung by our particular paradigms. Surely, as always, the world will go on, but now with more limited options, whole avenues closed off to us because we lack the vision. We’re lucky to have had him as long as we did.”
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