J.G. Ballard

‘We live inside an enormous novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.’
J.G. Ballard, 1973

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When I first heard news that the British author J.G. Ballard had passed away a month ago I was filled with that inevitable melancholy that comes when somebody you admire dies. Ballard didn’t die under any tragic circumstances but I was sad when hit with the realisation that I will never get to read anything new by him. Also, although it was always incredibly unlikely that I would ever get to meet him I know that I now really never will.

Like most of my favourite authors I discovered Ballard via the cinema, which is not something I am ashamed of as cinema is my passion and while not at the MWF I am either seeing films or reviewing them for The Big Issue, my blog Cinema Autopsy or the film program I co-host on JOY 94.9.

I had seen Stephen Spielberg’s adaptation of Ballard’s first autobiographical inspired novel Empire of the Sun when it was originally shown of television but I was way too young at the time to appreciate it. It wasn’t until 1996 when I saw David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash that I became completely mesmerised. The central idea that a group of people had become so detached and dulled by modern life, that the only way for them to experience sexual pleasure was to create scenarios involving road trauma, was creating a bit of an outrage at the time. Many people found the film repugnant, boring or meaningless but I was fascinated with its strange metaphor for modern alienation and became an instant fan of Ballard’s. I natural sought out the original novel and found that the film adaptation didn’t even come close to recreating the disturbing pornographic tone of the book. It was an extraordinary read but I felt so sordid reading it!

Ballard’s other books aren’t quite so confrontational but many of them do explore the notion that our middle-class, consumerist, technology-obsessed lifestyle is neutralising our ability to feel anything so to compensate we resort to acts of violence and extreme sexual perversion in order to inject excitement into life again. Ballard’s favourite paradox seems to be that the more we try to be civilised, the more we reduce ourselves to barbarism.

My 5 favourite Ballard books

I not so much of a fan of Ballard’s earlier “science-fiction” writing but from the 1970s onwards he began directly exploring his preoccupation with modernity:

The Atrocity Exhibition (1969)

Ballard was a strong admirer of William Burroughs and The Atrocity Exhibition is a fantastic companion novel to Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. Both books are truly experimental and randomly dipping in and out of their pages produces as much meaning as reading them cover to cover. Disturbing and challenging, The Atrocity Exhibition introduces many of the core concepts that Ballard would later explore in conventional narrative fiction. It also inspired a song of the same name by my favourite band Joy Division!

High Rise (1975)
The residents of a self contained apartment block form tribal groups and fight for control of the building. Curiously this came out in the same year as David Cronenberg’s early horror film Shivers, which is also set in a self contained apartment that self destructs from internal causes (in Cronenberg’s cause a sexually violent parasite in the culprit as opposed to Ballard’s existential attitude toward human nature!)

The Kindness of Women (1991)
Like Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women is autobiographically inspired and covers key moments in Ballard’s life in a fictionalised way. For example, Ballard’s actually wife did die unexpectedly at a young age but the circumstances of her actual death and very different to the scenario Ballard creates in The Kindness of Women. I possibly won’t ever read Ballard’s actual autobiography (Miracles of Life, 2008) because I feel that while The Kindness of Women does not contain the literal truth, it does possess a potent emotional truth.

Cocaine Nights (1996)
Of Ballard’s most recent novels many people prefer Super-Cannes (2000) and both novels explore the dystopian idea of an ultra rich community living in luxury indulging in acts of violence to ease their boredom. But I remember being completely stunned by the way Cocaine Nights concluded in a way that I would have rubbished as stupid and unrealistic had it not been for the terrifying way that Ballard takes you through the thought process of the protagonist to make such a conclusion absolutely plausible.

A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (1996)

This collection of Ballard’s non-fiction essays and reviews contains some of his best work. His crisp, to-the-point and highly perceptive style of writing allows him to communicate some amazing ideas within a very small word count. As a budding film critic myself, I find his style inspiring and intimidating!

Thomas
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