What I would therefore like to do is to extend an invitation to any reader to submit appraisals of up to 1000 words on any Ballard title. If you’re interested, please drop me a line saying which book you’d like to work on.

Let’s make this bibliography a vibrant and dynamic guide to JGB’s complete works.

Here is some much-anticipated and very exciting news.

The exhibition JG Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium, celebrating the work and enduring influence of J.G. Ballard, opens tomorrow at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. It will feature stage sets and audiovisual installations inspired by Ballard, a library of Ballard’s writings, and works by Ballardian-inspired artists, filmmakers, sound artists and more.

It runs from 22 July to 2 November 2008 and coincides in October with Kosmopolis, Barcelona’s annual international literary festival at the CCCB. For 2008 Kosmopolis will feature two sessions devoted to Ballard, thereby integrating itself within the exhibition. The first session looks at Ballard’s influence on Hispanic writers and the second focuses on his influence in the English-speaking world. Participants in these sessions will include Paco Porrúa, Marcial Souto, Marta Peirano, Toby Litt, Bruce Sterling, Agustín Fernández Mallo, V. Vale … and, gulp, myself (as a late addition, so my name is not yet on the website in case you’re wondering if I’m making it all up). I feel privileged to be among such esteemed company, and I hope I can do ballardian.com — and of course Mr Ballard himself — justice among this selection of sheer heavyweights!

There has been a little more crosssover with this site and the exhibition. I was more than happy to help the organisers with some of the research needed to set ‘Autopsy of the New Millennium’ up. This site’s focus on Ballardian-inspired visual art, for example, led to some of the artists I’ve featured (including Michelle Lord) being invited to exhibit their work at the CCCB, and the contestants in our 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies will also have their 1-minute films screened throughout the exhibition’s run. In addition, the CCCB are running another Ballardian Home Movie competition, the Catalan version, inspired by ours, and once the exhibition is over I will be hosting those movies over here. Finally, I wrote the catalogue notes for the Home Movie screenings and also curated and wrote the catalogue notes for a selection of Ballardian sound art and music to be played in various cubicles throughout the exhibition.

To celebrate the opening of this wonderful event, I will be devoting most of this week and sporadic posts throughout the next few weeks to a selection of articles to do with the autopsy being performed on the new millennium at the CCCB. This will include an interview with the exhibition curators, a fabulous essay on Ballard’s significance written by the Conference Commissioner, Jordi Costa, a video made by the CCCB to commemorate the event, an interview with Solveig Nordlund, the director of Aparelho Voador a Baixa Altitude (Low-Flying Aircraft; 2002), the little-seen Swedish/Portuguese Ballard feature adaptation that will be screening at the exhibition, roving reports from our man on the ground, Rick McGrath (whose massive collection of rare and valuable Ballard first editions will also be on display), and perhaps the catalogues I wrote for the sound art selection accompanied by a mixtape/muxtape of selected tracks.

Of course, also visit the official exhibition blog for much more information as the exhibition goes on.

From the CCCB:

This exhibition offers an itinerary through Ballard’s creative universe: his times and obsessions, his dissection of the secret keys of the contemporary, the traces of his own life in his fictional body of work, his artistic and literary referents, and his precise, disenchanted intuitions of a future life governed by the concepts of aseptic dystopia and disaster.

Ballard’s work represents an open-ended body of work that still has many revelations in store for his readers and the capacity to throw light on the course of our future. An author with an enormous influence on later generations of creators in all disciplines, from fantasy cinema to industrial music, Ballard is the author, among many other works, of The Empire of the Sun and Crash, adapted for the cinema by Spielberg and David Cronenberg, respectively.

The sections of the exhibition are:

• “What I believe”
• From Shanghai to Shepperton
• Landscapes of Dream
• Inner space
• Disaster area
• Technology and pornography
• Asepsis and neo-barbarism
• Epilogue
• Bibliographical area
• Ballardian art

…:: FURTHER INFO:

+ J.G. Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballard at Kosmopolis
+ Official exhibition blog

From amazon.co.uk:

Synopsis

‘Miracles of Life’ opens and closes in Shanghai, the city where J.G.Ballard was born, and where he spent the most of the Second World War interned with his family in a Japanese concentration camp. In the intervening chapters Ballard creates a memoir that is both an enthralling narrative and a detailed examination of the events which would profoundly influence his work. Beginning with his early childhood spent exploring the vibrant surroundings of pre-war Shanghai, Ballard charts the course of his remarkable life from the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of the Lunghua Camp to his return to a Britain physically and psychologically crippled by war. He explores his subsequent involvement in the dramatic social changes of the 1960s, and the adjustments to life following the premature death of his wife. In prose displaying his characteristic precision and eye for detail, Ballard recounts the experiences which would fundamentally shape his writing, while simultaneously providing an striking social analysis of the fragmented post-war Britain that lies behind so many of his novels. ‘Miracles of Life’ is an utterly captivating account of an extraordinary writer’s extraordinary life.

From the Back Cover
‘I was born in Shanghai General Hospital on 15 November 1930, after a difficult delivery that my mother, who was slightly built and slim-hipped, liked to describe to me in later years, as if this revealed something about the larger thoughtlessness of the world’

For almost half a century, J G Ballard has been one of the country’s most important writers. In this revelatory autobiography, bookended by time spent in Shanghai – the city of his childhood and internment in a WWII prison camp, and setting of his novel Empire of the Sun – he charts the course of his remarkable life.

Beginning with his early childhood spent exploring the vibrant surroundings of ‘that magical place’, Miracles of Life takes us from the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of Lunghua Camp to his arrival in a Britain physically and psychologically crippled by war. He recounts his first attempts at fiction while stationed in a frozen airbase in Canada, his part in the social and artistic revolutions of the 60s and his lfe as a single father after the premature death of his wife.

In prose of characteristic precision and wit, Ballard recalls the experiences that would fundamentally shape his writing, while simultaneously providing a striking analysis of the fragmented post-war Britain that lies behind so many of his novels. Miracles of Life is a captivating account of the extraordinary life of an extraordinary writer.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

Novels

• The Wind from Nowhere (1961)
• The Drowned World (1962)
• The Burning World (1964) (aka The Drought)
• The Crystal World (1966)
• The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) (aka Love and Napalm: Export USA)
• Crash (1973)
• Concrete Island (1974)
• High-Rise (1975)
• The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
• Hello America (1981)
• Empire of the Sun (1984)
• The Day of Creation (1987)
• Running Wild (1988)
• The Kindness of Women (1991)
• Rushing to Paradise (1994)
• Cocaine Nights (1996)
• Super-Cannes (2000)
• Millennium People (2003)
• Kingdom Come (2006)

Short Stories
I’m only covering the major collections, here.
• The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) (aka Love and Napalm: Export USA) (1972)
• Vermilion Sands (1971)
• J.G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories (2001)

Non-fiction
• A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996)
• Miracles of Life (2008)

..:: MORE
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

• Secondary bibliography (off site; compiled by Umberto Rossi).

• The Wind from Nowhere (1961)
• The Drowned World (1962)
• The Burning World (1964) (aka The Drought)
• The Crystal World (1966)
• The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) (aka Love and Napalm: Export USA)
• Crash (1973)
• Concrete Island (1974)
• High-Rise (1975)
• The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
• Hello America (1981)
• Empire of the Sun (1984)
• The Day of Creation (1987)
• Running Wild (1988)
• The Kindness of Women (1991)
• Rushing to Paradise (1994)
• Cocaine Nights (1996)
• Super-Cannes (2000)
• Millennium People (2003)
• Kingdom Come (2006)

..:: MORE
• Short Stories & Non-Fiction
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

• Secondary bibliography (off site; compiled by Umberto Rossi).

J.G. BALLARD
Short Stories & Non-Fiction

• The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) (aka Love and Napalm: Export USA) (1972)
• Vermilion Sands (1971)
• A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996)
• J.G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories (2001)

..:: MORE
• Novels
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

• Secondary bibliography (off site; compiled by Umberto Rossi).

OPENING LINE:
“The dust came first.”

From the Penguin edition, 1976:

The wind came from nowhere … a super-hurricane that blasted round the globe at hundreds of miles per hour burying whole communities beneath piles of rubble, destroying all organized life and driving those it did not kill to seek safety in tunnels and sewers – where they turned against each other in their desperate struggle to survive …”

The Wind From Nowhere (1961) is JG Ballard’s first novel, not that you’d know it from official JGB bibliographies, where it’s never mentioned, or in interviews, where Ballard continues to assert that The Drowned World was his first book.

The wind from nowhere has gone back to nowhere.

In a 1975 interview with David Pringle, Ballard says: “I don’t see my fiction as being disaster-oriented, certainly not most of my SF – apart from The Wind from Nowhere which is just a piece of hackwork. The others, which are reasonably serious, are not disaster stories.”

The book does contain some ‘empty symbolism’, and the characters sometimes articulate overlong expositions, all a bit jarring from an author who was to bloom into the master of sparse, laser-sharp, all-killer-no-filler writing.

Still, it *is* Ballard; all the classic archetypes are in place, if a little sketchily (except for the ‘Vaughan’ figure) — the bitch-as-catalyst, especially — and it does have what must be the first truly classic JGB quote, one that ranks with the pearls collected in Vale’s RE/Search book, a quote that both presages future events and qualifies current ones.

A JGB ‘soundbite’ as Mr Pringle calls them… On p112 of my Penguin edition, Ballard writes: “Remember, it’s not enough to make history ­– you’ve got to arrange for someone to record it for you.”

Here’s an excerpt from an article by Ben Jeapes, one of the very few essays on the web regarding this ‘idiot offspring’ of JGB’s:

The seeds of what have since become traditional Ballard themes are all there, of course. Civilisation collapses, a handful of weirdos … no, not weirdos. These are real, everyday people. They either try and do something about keeping society going or they lie low and wait for it to go away — both sensible, believable actions.”

Here’s another review excerpt, from Strange Words:

That undefinable atmosphere that marks Ballard’s best work is here, around the edges, pushing away at our perceptions. While not partaking of the extreme ideas of The Crystal World, the obsession of The Day of Creation, or the fatal ennui of The Drowned World, there is that strange taste at the back of the mouth that is Ballard.
…
You don’t need a weatherman to know that a Ballard wind is blowing. In some ways, a lesser Ballard effort. But one can almost sense Ballard ringing out the old, making way for the strange and terrible world he would soon construct.”

..:: ELSEWHERE ON BALLARDIAN (selected posts)
+ The Wind from Nowhere is now a wind from somewhere
+ ‘Enigmatic Engineering’ in The Wind from Nowhere
+ ‘My name is Maitland, Donald Maitland…’

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“Soon it would be too hot.”

From Amazon UK:

In the 21st century, fluctuations in solar radiation have caused the ice-caps to melt and the seas to rise. Global temperatures have climbed, and civilization has retreated to the Arctic and Antarctic circles. London is a city now inundated by a primeval swamp, to which an expedition travels to record the flora and fauna of this new Triassic Age. This early novel by the author of CRASH and EMPIRE OF THE SUN is at once a fast paced narrative, a stunning evocation of a flooded, tropical London of the near future and a speculative foray into the workings of the unconscious mind.”

On the back of my 1974 Penguin edition, there’s no blurb, simply this:

Ballard is one of the brightest new stars in post-war fiction. This tale of strange and terrible adventures in a world of steaming jungles has an oppressive power reminiscent of Conrad (Kingsley Amis).”

The Drowned World’s relevance endures, as Umberto Rossi demonstrates with his comparison of urban landscapes in Drowned and Hello America:

J.G. Ballard has dealt at least twice with the apocalyptic image of the Dead City. This somewhat disturbing landscape is the background of his novels The Drowned World and Hello America. The two mark different points on the axis of time—namely, 1962 and 1979, respectively—cutting a segment on the line of Ballard’s evolution as a writer, but also defining a period of literary history during which many significant events took place, both inside and outside SF. Between 1962 and 1979 Ballard wrote important works such as The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, and The Crystal World; SF literature “came of age” thanks to P.K. Dick, K.W. Jeter, Thomas Disch, Ursula Le Guin, and Brian Aldiss; and, as for North American literature, the postmodernist wave reached its zenith.”

On the other side of the coin, Justina Robinson takes Ballard to task for those old bugbears: characters as cyphers, and stylisation over emotion…

…stylisation continues throughout all the personal action in the book; a kind of old code, which to my modern eyes seems almost quaintly peculiar… A final criticism would be that the characters are all too much like ciphers acting out symbolic roles, and not sufficiently humanised to ring entirely true. Their remove from the reader and from each other, finally makes the entire story seem as though it’s been viewed through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.”

Although she does end with this:

As a whole…this book deserves its place on the masterworks’ shelf and in the history of SF and literature. It shows, even from thirty-seven years ago, that artistic and literary aspirations could be brought together with SF ideas in a seamless whole…it’s worth reading for the sheer pleasure that the scenes of opulence and decay can provide, and in the wonder of the drowned world images that Ballard was able to completely master.”

..:: ELSEWHERE ON BALLARDIAN (selected posts)
+ BBC Radio 7 adapts Drowned World
+ Flooded London
+ Munich Round-Up: An Interview with JG Ballard
+ Jon Cattapan’s Drowned World

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“At noon, when Dr Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the entrance to the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot son of the old woman who lived in the ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating in the water below his feet.”

Ballard’s third novel was originally published in the US in 1964 as The Burning World, but is now more commonly known as The Drought, the name it was given for its initial UK publication in 1965. Strange Words has an intriguing summation of the book’s themes:

The Burning World is the tale of the long season. More specifically, it is a story of the timeless moment between the seasons, between end and the beginning of the cycle. It is the season of Shiva, whose eye opens and destroys the world in fire. And then it all begins again …

The Ballardian chronomania of The Burning World is the end of time. People rush like lemmings to a sea that can supply them no succor, and have their individuality destroyed in an endless string of small, desperate communities which are riven by blood feuds over the stuff of survival. They trap what small bits of the tidal flux that they can, to distill water and catch whatever meager food swims with it. Ransom, the ambiguous protagonist, sees the beach people as dehumanized things, as if cloned by a “cancerous division of time”, in a purgatory of beach limbo, desperate shantytowns where people are waiting around to die.”

The blurb on my 1968 Penguin edition is typeset like a poem and features the immortal line ‘Idiots reign’. Someone was taking themselves a bit too seriously, here…

Rain is a thing of the
past. Radio-active
waste has stopped the
sea evaporating.

The sun beats down on
the parching earth, and on the parching
spirit of man. A warped new humankind
is bred out of the dead land – bitter,
murderous, its values turned upside down.

Idiots reign. Water
replaces currency and becomes the source
of a bleak new evil…

If it ever happened,
it could be very like this.”

..:: ELSEWHERE ON BALLARDIAN (selected posts)
+ The Drought: Water Vigilantes
+ Munich Round-Up: Interview with J.G. Ballard

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“Above all, the darkness of the river was what impressed Dr. Sanders as he looked out for the first time across the open mouth of the Matarre estuary.”

Ballard’s fourth novel. My 1993 Flamingo version has quotes on the back:

Through a ‘leaking’ of time and a supersaturation of matter, a forest area in West Africa is gradually becoming crystallised: leaves flash like gemstones, crocodiles with a second armour thrash in the stiffening streams, men who don’t keep moving are frosted over, encrusted, and fused to the ground … Brilliantly imagined, dark, brooding, convincing and powerful.”
New Statesman.

A haunting vision of diseased beauty … Ballard sustains it with extraordinary density. The purpose of the action is to show the characters gradually succumbing to the environment; and such if the force of the imagery – a blind python with enormous jewelled eyes, a prty of lepers dancing into the virtrified forest – that one can share their view of it as an ancestral paradise.”Observer.

Strange Words again:

The Crystal World is a very challenging book. Clearly, the Ballardian obsession with time is a central issue, as is the perverse love for disease found in some of his tales. This strange Heart of Darkness is set in a landscape without time, where it is possible for Sanders to “free the questions of motive and identity that were bound up with his sense of time and the past”. Indeed, the woman he has come to save is a former lover, now ravaged with leprosy. In a colonial end-of-the-road town, next to a river like a snake, etc., Ballard contrasts time with a strange and beautiful anti-time.
…
This is a book to be read many times. The madness in Ballard’s visions is disturbing, but puts the light to a darker side of sanity in his meditations on time and existence. His is a search for, if not the silver lining in the cloud of Apocalypse, at least the light of knowledge, and a view of the end as a doorway to New Things and Times. Things happen, then come to a hinge of crisis, a paroxysm of madness, and the world, destroyed in fire, rises again. And again.”

..:: ELSEWHERE ON BALLARDIAN (selected posts)
+ Ann Lislegaard: ‘Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard)’
+ ‘All about stars and time…’
+ Jean Seberg, part 2
+ ‘Der Visionär des Phantastischen’: An Interview with J.G. Ballard

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“Apocalypse. A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition — to which the patients themselves were not invited — was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.”

For many, The Atrocity Exhibition is J.G. Ballard’s most important work. It reads like an instruction manual in how to disrupt mass media and recontextualise technology, as the ‘T’ figure reconfigures the media landscape ‘in a way that makes sense’ — an aesthetic that’s proved to be hugely influential, perhaps more so on artists and musicians than writers.

Is Atrocity a novel or a collection of short stories? Ballard published the Atrocity pieces as standalone stories over a period of four years, while always claiming that he was working towards the big picture: an experimental novel.

Two versions are available: the Flamingo edition, and the large-format RE/Search edition. Both feature annotations from Ballard, although RE/Search’s version is recommended for the gynaecological illustrations from Phoebe Gloeckner.

As Ballardian reader Mike Holliday points out:

The 1990 Re/Search edition added an Appendix with four additional pieces. These comprised three of Ballard’s ‘surgical fictions’ from the 1970s: ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’ (1970), ‘Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty’ (1970), and ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Rhinoplasty’ (1976); along with (rather incongruously) a story from the late 1980s, ‘The Secret History of World War 3′.

There was a U.K. large format paperback edition by Harper Collins/Flamingo in 1993; of the additional stories included by RE/Search, only Princess Margaret’s Facelift and Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty were incorporated in this U.K. edition. Subsequent U.K. editions are identical in this respect (though I don’t think I’ve looked at the very latest one).”

From Amazon:

First published in 1970 and widely regarded as a prophetic masterpiece, this is a groundbreaking experimental novel by the acclaimed author of “Crash” and “Super-Cannes”, who has supplied explanatory notes for this new edition. The irrational, all-pervading violence of the modern world is the subject of this extraordinary tour de force. The central character’s dreams are haunted by images of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, dead astronauts and car-crash victims as he traverses the screaming wastes of nervous breakdown. Seeking his sanity, he casts himself in a number of roles: H-bomber pilot, presidential assassin, crash victim, pscyhopath. Finally, through the black, perverse magic of violence he transcends his psychic turmoils to find the key to a bizarre new sexuality.”

I recommend the inimitable Mark Fisher (aka k-punk) for his analysis of Atrocity — dense and theory-driven, but undeniably intelligent and provocative:

In a sense, the phrase “atrocity exhibition” is a strictly literal description of this media landscape as it emerged in the early 1960s, populated by images of Vietnam, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The novel deals with the violence that haemorrhaged in the 1969 in which it was published: Manson, Altamont, War across the USA. But, for Ballard, the events of 1969 are merely the culmination of a decade whose guiding logic has been one of violence; a mediatized violence, where “mediatization” is a profoundly ambiguous term which doesn’t necessarily imply a disintensification. As they begin to achieve the instantaneous speed Virilio thinks characteristic of postmodern communication, media (paradoxically) immediatize trauma, making it instantly available even as they prepackage it into what will become increasingly preprogrammed stimulus-response circuitries.”

Mark Fisher. ‘Flatline Constructs — The Atrocity Exhibition’.

..:: CONTENTS
+ ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ (1966)
+ ‘The University of Death’ (1968)
+ ‘The Assassination Weapon’ (1966)
+ ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ (1966)
+ ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1967)
+ ‘The Great American Nude’ (1968)
+ ‘The Summer Cannibals’ (1969)
+ ‘Tolerances of the Human Face’ (1969)
+ ‘You and Me and the Continuum’ (1966)
+ ‘Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’ (1966)
+ ‘Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.’ (1968)
+ ‘Crash!’ (1969)
+ ‘The Generations of America’ (1968)
+ ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968)
+ ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’ (1966)

Appendix
+ ‘Princess Margaret’s Facelift’ (1970)
+ ‘Mae West’s Reduction Mammoplasty’ (1970)
+ ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Rhinoplasty’ (1976)
+ ‘The Secret History of World War III’ (1988)

..:: LINKS
+ Excerpt: Chapter 1 — ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’
+ Excerpt: Chapter 5 — ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’
+ Excerpt: Chapter 12 — ‘Crash!’

..:: ELSEWHERE ON BALLARDIAN (selected posts)
+ Grand Theft Auto IV: Ballardian atrocities
+ ‘Confronting ourselves’: Ballard and Circular Time
+ ‘An exhibition of atrocities’: J.G. Ballard on Mondo film
+ ‘The fusion of science and pornography’ (WARNING! Exceptionally unsafe for work)
+ ‘Der Visionär des Phantastischen’: An Interview with J.G. Ballard
+ ‘It would be a mistake to write about the future’: J.G. Ballard in Conversation with Jörg Krichbaum and Rein A. Zondergeld
+ The Ballardian Primer: Car Parks
+ Love among the mannequins
+ J.G. Ballard: The Corridor Interview
+ Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard
+ Atrocity II
+ ‘Magisterial, Precise, Unsettling’: Simon Reynolds on the Ballard Connection
+ The Brangelina Exhibition
+ Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel’s State of Emergency
+ ‘When in doubt, quote Ballard’: An interview with Iain Sinclair
+ “Thirsty Man at the Spigot”: An Interview with Jonathan Weiss
+ Another Atrocity: A ‘New’ Work by J.G. Ballard
+ Jonathan Weiss: The Atrocity Exhibition
+ The ‘DNA of the Present’ in the Fossil Record of the Cold War Through the Imagery of JG Ballard, Related Sources and Documents in Various Media
+ William Burroughs: Preface to The Atrocity Exhibition
+ Author’s Note: The Atrocity Exhibition

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“All summer the cloud-sculptors would come from Vermilion Sands and sail their painted gliders above the coral towers that rose like white pagodas beside the highway to Lagoon West.” (from ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’).

I’m not covering every one of JGB’s short-story collections in this bibliography — with the release of the Complete Short Stories volumes, they’ve mostly been made redundant. However, there are a few compilations worthy of mention and Vermilion Sands is one of them. It’s a thematic collection, with all stories centred around Ballard’s futuristic Vermilion Sands resort, which, according to my 1975 Panther edition, is a “weird and exotic landscape of the mind where violent and nightmarish dramas of the future are heightened by the bizarre, overlit emotions of its twisted denizens”.

Totally familiar Ballardian psycho-drama…and if you’ve come to Ballard through his late-period novels, then Vermilion Sands is highly recommended. Its themes of “Europe lying on its back in the sun” and of “work as the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work” are fully realised in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes respectively.

The Panther cover is also worthy of mention: it features a tattooed Amazon in scanty dress holding a spear gun, her bum at face level with a midget in a wet suit also holding a spear gun. It’s about as wide of the mark as the recent article in the Guardian that bizarrely reported on “Wine-Bot, a ‘robo-sommelier’ that belongs in the pages of a JG Ballard novel”.

A few quotes also make it to the back cover:

Vermilion Sands is a desert resort from ahead; the episodes are the grains of the place … I recommend a visit with this book, where the aching landscaoe of the idea contains wit and irony to shde us from the anguished sun’.”

The Times

“J.G. Ballard is … one of the most accomplished creators of evocative landscapes in modern fiction … he achieves this effect partly by painting his desert in the manner of Dali, a mixture of appalling clarity and the exotic.”

Times Literary Supplement

CONTENTS
+ ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ (1967)
+ ‘Prima Belladonna’ (1956)
+ ‘The Screen Game’ (1963)
+ ‘The Singing Statues’ (1962)
+ ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’ (1967)
+ ‘Venus Smiles’ (1957; rewritten 1967)
+ ‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’ (1970)
+ ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ (1961)
+ ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ (1962)

Read Ballard’s preface to Vermilion Sands:

Where is Vermilion Sands? I suppose its spiritual home lies somewhere between Arizona and Ipanema Beach, but in recent years I have been delighted to see it popping up elsewhere — above all, in sections of the 3,000-mile-long linear city that stretches from Gibraltar to Glyfada Beach along the northern shores of the Mediterranean, and where each summer Europe lies on its back in the sun. That posture, of course, is the hallmark of Vermilion Sands and, I hope, of the future — not merely that no-one has to work, but that work is the ultimate play, and play the ultimate work.”

J.G. Ballard. Preface to Vermilion Sands, 1975.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.”

If The Drowned World was the book which cemented Ballard’s literary reputation (in Britain, at least), then Crash was almost certainly the one which made him a non-entity in America’s eyes. Following on from publisher Nelson Doubleday’s outrage at an earlier Ballard story, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, Crash ensured JGB remained on the periphery of the US sci-fi scene.

In any case, it is doubtful whether this is ‘science fiction’, in the traditional sense. It tells the story of the narrator, ‘James Ballard’, the ‘hoodlum scientist’ Vaughan, and a supporting cast of curiously one-dimensional characters, as they follow their peculiar obsessions along the hyperreal motorways of England. Tuned in to police radios, they descend on the scenes of car crashes, depositing their semen and vaginal mucous on torn flesh and twisted metal. Ultimately, Vaughan desires ‘a union of semen and engine coolant’, splattered in world-wide ‘autogeddon’.

Crash epitomises Ballard’s ‘death of affect’ theories — it is Inner Space in perpetual motion. The media landscape, with its aestheticising of violence, is the novel’s main character. The car, the first and still most recognisable symbol of mass production, provides the eternal metaphor.

Crash was Ballard’s first novel in seven years (The Crystal World from 1966 was the last). Of course he’d been busy writing short stories during that time, and because of that concentrated span many people regard Ballard’s strength as being in the shorter format, even though he’s written novels exclusively for the last 20-odd years.

Crash was the real deal, though, a savage, cool, clinical sex-and-technology masterpiece. Here, Ballard got everything absolutely right: the attitude, the language, the vision, the metaphor (death of affect; media landscapes; dehumanisation), all colliding in a prescient headspin that still has the power to enhrall 32 years on.

I’d argue that Crash saw the first appearance of Ballard’s fully blown ‘catalyst figure’, Vaughan himself, an archetype which Ballard seems to refine in every one of his latter-day novels: the dark, mysterious urban professional liberating the middle-classes by feeding their deepest, darkest psychopathological fantasies.

I have the 1995 Vintage version, with the following blurb:

The cult status of CRASH has intensified since its original publication in 1973, making it a classic of underground literature. In this hallucinatory novel, the car provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a ‘TV scientist’ turned ‘nightmare angel of the highways’, experiments with erotic atrocities among crash victims, each more sinister than the last: ultimately, he craves a union of blood, semen and engine coolant in a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor.”

There’s a quote from Malcolm Bradbury of the New York Times Book Review on the back cover:

A writer of enormous inventive powers, J.G. Ballard has, like Calvino, a remarkable gift for filling the empty, deprived spaces of modern life with invisible cities and the wonder worlds of the imagination.”

Crash is, of course, a staple text in university critical-theory courses; in the 1990s, it was very highly prized indeed. Baudrillard wrote an essay about it, academics overanalysed Ba(udri)llard, and JGB himself accused them all of being “trapped inside their dismal jargon”. Read Nicholas Ruddick’s summary of the aftershock here:

As he gazes at the contemporary scene, Baudrillard notices the same cultural symptoms that Ballard does—affectlessness, apparently meaningless circulation, the sense of impending catastrophe. It is no wonder that Ballard celebrates Baudrillard’s brilliant reading of American culture in America (1986). But whereas Baudrillard celebrates—even if ironically—the “marvelously affectless succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts” on American roads (America 5), or America’s orgiastic and ecstatic indifference as a “radical modernity” attained (96-97), for Ballard there remains the project of exposing the real (unconscious) desire beneath the debauch of fiction. Baudrillard the hyperrealist is at his best consciously a poet of the surface of things. In this he is a postmodernist par excellence, and this is, it seems to me, why Ballard, for whom such surfaces are equally fascinating but also terrifying for what they conceal, is so ambivalent toward him. It is surely this ambivalence that causes Ballard to attack, in his “Response to the Invitation to Respond” to Baudrillard’s essays, not Baudrillard, but postmodernism itself.”

Nicholas Ruddick. ‘Ballard/Crash/Baudrillard’.

..:: LINKS
+ Read Ballard’s 1995 introduction to Crash.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“Soon after three o’clock on the afternoon of April 22nd 1973, a 35-year-old architect named Robert Maitland was driving down the high-speed exit lane of the Westway interchange in central London”.

This short novel represents the second installment in JGB’s ‘urban disaster’ trilogy (Crash was the first; High-Rise was to follow).

Architect Robert Maitland crashes his Jaguar one afternoon, marooning himself on “a small traffic island, some two hundred yards long and triangular in shape, that lay in the waste ground between three converging motorway routes”. Injured and hidden from the passing motorists, Maitland withdraws into his own skull.

As Ballard states in his introduction to the book:

Modern technology, as I tried to show in Crash… offers an endless field day to any deviant strains in our personalities. Marooned…on a traffic island, we can tyrannise ourselves, test our strengths and weaknesses, perhaps come to terms with aspects of our characters to which we have always closed our eyes.”

Accordingly, Concrete Island appears to be the most ‘human’ of the trilogy: the characters are more rounded than the ciphers depicted within Crash, as Maitland has been ejected from that particular terrain. The Psychological State Apparatus — the motorway — is no longer there to guide him, and Maitland is confronted with the best and worst aspects of his inner being represented by the woman and the simpleton he meets on the island, and the island itself. (The ‘borrowing’ from Robinson Crusoe is apparent – Ballard fully acknowledges it).

Seemingly purged of the doubts and insecurities brought on by [post] modern living, Maitland readies himself and the reader for the next challenge, glimpsed subliminally by our hero:

It was now ten o’clock, and the first lights were going out in the high-rise apartments.”

Some quotes from the back cover of the 1994 Vintage edition:

Ballard writes with taut and precise economy, and the moral of his brilliantly original fable is plain: the interstices of our concrete jungle are filled with neglected people, and one day these people could be ourselves.”

Sunday Times

“Ballard’s violent exact prose carries you along irresistibly. You believe him, you accept his vision, and it is a fearful one.”

Sunday Telegraph

“The challenge of man thrown onto his own resources is always a sound dramatic theme, and J.G. Ballard in CONCRETE ISLAND explores it brilliantly. This allegory of modern life is both compelling and profound.”

Daily Telegraph

L.J. Hurst has written a detailed analysis of the novel:

Peter Brigg explicitly states that Concrete_Island and High-Rise have “omniscient narrators”. It is the disproving of this, and the proof of that disproof which help to raise the importance of the novel in the Ballard canon: it may be one of Ballard’s most successful experiments in narration. In discussions of Ballard’s narrative experiments – the advertisements he placed in magazines, the show of crashed cars at the ICA, the condensed novels which first appeared in The_Terminal_Beach are then held to have exploded in The_Atrocity_Exhibition, so that much later works like “The Index” and “The Sixty Second Zoom” are no more than fragments. However, it is quite clear that Ballard has made other explorations of narrative, and Concrete_Island is one of his newfound and new won lands in that exploration. While David Pringle sees the third person narrator of High-Rise as Ballard himself (Pringle page 50), the third person narrator of Concrete_Island is one of the characters – Robert Maitland – and Maitland shapes everything in the book.

The depth of textual study required to demonstrate the truth of this claim is some indication of how cleverly Ballard hid the fact that this is not an objective, realist novel. Whether this was Ballard’s intention is neither here nor there, it simply helps to reinforce the truth of that dictum of D.H. Lawrence – “Never trust the teller, trust the tale”. The creation is greater than the creator.”

L.J. Hurst. ‘Through the Crash Barrier: J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island’.

..:: LINKS
• Read Ballard’s 1994 introduction to Concrete Island.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”

From the opening scene of Laing tucking into his canine dinner — the spoils of urban warfare — to the final ascent of the high-rise, this is a brilliantly original work that has affected anarchists, surrealists and psychologists alike.

The quotes on the back of my 1993 Flamingo edition tell the story:

J.G. Ballard wants to argue that high-rise flats incite maniacal aggression and perversion in ordinary people. High-Rise is about a 40-storey apartment block, and how from innocent beginnings it reduces people to murder, incest and above all a passionate love for chaos … a gripping read, particularly if you like your thrills chilly, bloody and with claims to social relevance.”

Time Out

“Harsh and ingenious … High-Rise is an intense and vivid bestiary, which lingers unsettlingly in the mind.”

Martin Amis, New Statesman

A modern fable — a commentary on the hideous possibilities of advanced technology and the rat-like nature of trapped human beings. The writing s cool, the observation exact, the idea bold and well-developed; everything seems to demand attention and analysis”.

Financial Times

Rick McGrath has onlined an in-depth dissection of the novel:

A night patrol creeps along a dark hallway past a barricade of desks; a flash of white birds leap into the air like a fluttering flag of surrender; a dog lies drowned in the middle of a community pool… welcome to High-Rise, J.G. Ballard’s deeply subversive study of a society in transformation.

J.G. Ballard has often told interviewers that his characters all seek a kind of highly personal psychic salvation, and that they will, if necessary, create their own self-defining mythologies and pursue them to their furthest logical ends, no matter how illogical it seems, or what the cost. In High-Rise, Ballard has created an isolated environment for the close study of the deconstruction of an ultra-modern apartment block into a new, devolved society based on the premise that you are what your cave is. Readers looking for obsessive, outlandish social mayhem will not be disappointed: High-Rise has 40 stories of shock corridor ahead.

The premise is fascinating: just after the last property in a 1,000-suite high-rise is occupied, the first little signs of social change begin to become public. A party is in progress. A wine bottle crashes and smashes all over a resident’s balcony. Soon crazed, drunken, mob-mentality parties are breaking out all over the building, and now we’re deeply into the action, led in shocked wonder as Ballard brilliantly describes the metamorphosis of group psychopathological desire into a new kind of urban social model.”

Rick McGrath. ‘Deconstructing High-Rise’.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“In the first place, why did I steal the aircraft?”

The Unlimited Dream Company is “one of the titles featured in Anthony Burgess’ Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939″.

It’s also one of Ballard’s most surprising and underrated works, and deeply personal, too, given that it takes place in his home town of Shepperton. Substitute the narrator, Blake, for Ballard, then consider Malcolm Bradbury’s insightful review:

For the citizens of Shepperton, Blake performs strange wonders, spinning abundance and exuding sexual energy, drawing them away from their work and into a new world of polymorphous perversity.

From the Triad/Panther edition, 1985:

From the moment Blake crashes his stolen aircraft into the Thames, the unlimited dream company takes over and the town of Shepperton is transformed into an apocalyptic kingdom of desire and stunning imagination ruled over by Blake’s messianic figure. Tropical flora and fauna appear; pan-sexual celebrations occur regularly; and in a final climax of liberation, the townspeople learn to fly.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
‘There’s gold, Wayne, gold dust everywhere! Wake up! The streets of America are paved with gold!’.

From the Carroll & Grad 1981 edition:

A century after America’s financial collapse and the climactic upheavals of the 1990s, Wayne stows away on SS Apollo, bound for the New World on a voyage of rediscovery. He and the crew encounter hazards at every turn and ghosts from the past as they travel West. In Las Vegas, roaming bands of Mexican teenagers welcome them to the citadel of late 20th century glitter. Their charismatic leader — a William Burroughs look-alike addressed reverently as President Charles Manson — invites Wayne into hs cybernetic stronghold. But suddenly the erratic president takes fright at Wayne’s alien presence and threatens to play deadly war games with an arsenal of leftover Titan warheads. Now it’s not just the Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe holograms that are at risk…

According to Ballardian contributor Umberto Rossi:

As we read Hello America we trek along a historical horizon, led by what we should call a historical-mythical imagery. The recession is not a retrogressive movement of evolutionary time, but a hallucinatory replica of American history. If The Drowned World celebrates the divorce of humans from their historical civilisation, Hello America offers a lucid and ironic anatomy of the American Myth (but we could call it the American Dream), a myth with a historical genesis and a historical unfolding. Every dead city visited by the research team led by Captain Steiner is the embodiment of a chapter of the American legend. At the same time, it is a transmutation of events and stages in US history.

Las Vegas is the ultimate telematic metropolis and Manson is its emblematic citizen until the end. It is no accident that his army is made up of teenagers. The model citizen of Videogame City is the eternal teenager, who can contact the world only through its image, through TV screens and computer networks. In the age of the information industry and data networks, the accomplishment of technical evolution, the process that Heidegger calls imposition [Gestell] of technics — the possibility of a total control, a total representability of the world — is the playability of the world. The world becomes a game. In this horizon of electronic simulation, any difference between true and false, between real and fictional, between presence and representation, becomes obsolete.”

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“Wars came early to Shanghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.”

There’s not much left to say about the autobiographical Empire, perhaps Ballard’s most popular book and the work that catapulted him into some semblance of mainstream recognition. Since it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and filmed by Steven Spielberg, it seems that every journalist who has interviewed Ballard must ask him about his childhood in Shanghai.

From the Grafton 1985 edition:

“He is separated from his parents in a world at war. He must find a strength greater than all the events that surround him… In Empire of the Sun J.G. Ballard has produced a mesmerizing, hypnotically compelling novel of war, of starvation and survival, of internment camps and death marches, which blends searing honesty with an almost hallucinatory vision of a world thrown utterly out of joint. Rooted as it is in the author’s own disturbing experience of war in our time, it is one of a handful of novels by which the Twentieth Century will be not only remembered but judged.”

Searing .. brilliant … an incredible literary achievement and almost intolerably moving.”
Anthony Burgess

“The best British novel about the Second World War.”
The Guardian

Read Ballard’s account of the book’s collision with Spielberg:

During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence. But how could I raise this Titanic of memories? Brought up from the sea bed, the golden memory hoard could turn out to be dross. Besides, there are things that the novel can’t easily handle. I could manage my changing relations with my parents, my 13-year-old’s infatuation with the war, and the sudden irruption into our lives of American air power. But how do you convey the casual surrealism of war, the deep silence of abandoned villages and paddy fields, the strange normality of a dead Japanese soldier lying by the road like an unwanted piece of luggage?

I waited 40 years before giving it a go, one of the longest periods a professional writer has put off describing the most formative events in his life. Twenty years to forget, and then 20 years to remember. There was always the possibility that my memories of the war concealed a deeper stratum of unease that I preferred not to face. But at least my three children had grown up, and as I wrote the book I would never have to think of them sharing the war with my younger self.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘Look Back at Empire’.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“Dreams of rivers, like scenes from a forgotten film, drift through the night, in passage between memory and desire.”

Another misunderstood book in the Ballardian canon, although Samuel R. Delany, in his 1998 review, gives it a red-hot go. Still, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was reviewing Kingdom Come, so similar are the critical tools he uses to those of present-day reviewers sticking the boot into KC. Guess we haven’t come very far, after all:

“In the unnamed Central African republic of the English writer J. G. Ballard’s new novel, two political factions are vying for power: on one side are the guerrillas of General Harare, once a dental student, now afflicted with boils and bad teeth. On the other is the police chief Captain Kagwa, nominally more friendly to the resident whites but with his own obsessive priorities, first of which is his ancient Mercedes and second the television crew that arrives at the town of Port-la-Nouvelle to document his suppression of the Harare insurgents.
…
Mallory, an Englishman who has come to this African country to run a clinic for the World Health Organization, has dreamed of bringing water to the arid land, from which Lake Kotto has receded only two years before. To that end he’s been drilling the lake bed. With the execution temporarily averted, Kagwa assigns the doctor to guide a crew of bulldozers repairing the Port-la-Nouvelle airstrip. As a machine unearths the stump of a huge forest oak, the roots pull free and water oozes into the hole – water that rises, spreads, till it becomes a river stretching to the north like ”a third Nile” with its source somewhere in the southern mountains.
…
Certainly from close-up, in paragraph after paragraph, Mr. Ballard constructs a moody and well-modeled landscape with as fine a writerly intelligence as we might hope for. But almost as frequently, when the actions of his characters come under his writerly eye, his account becomes thin, his dialogue wooden. The long view gives his book a rich allegorical air, a sense of quest and a steady rise in action – helicopter raids, blown-up dams, mysterious sexual trysts and clashes with Captain Kagwa – to suggest a near-classic adventure. But when we move in to look at the people, the relations between them, or the simple succession of events, things get very cloudy.”

Samuel R. Delany. ‘Saved by the TV Crew’.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“25 August, 1988. Where to start?”

This novella is just 87 pages long. Ballard calls it a ‘whydunit’ (rather than a ‘whodunit’), and it’s as uncanny as that implies. The shadow of Columbine hangs over this work (or, rather, vice versa).

The murders happened shortly after 8 o’clock on the morning of 25 June, 1988. Media speculation was rife on the so-called ‘Pangbourne Massacre’, but no-one knew why 32 adult residents of an exclusive housing development had been brutally slain and their children sbducted. In the face of total bafflement and continuing public outrage, the police called in Dr Richard Greville, the Met’s Deputy Psychiatric Adviser. But as Greville sifts the evidence and decides to follow new lines of enquiry he is drawn to a conclusion as appalling as the crime itself…

From the Arrow 1989 edition.

A chilling moral fable for our time.”
William French, Globe & Mail

“The writing is elegant, taut and economical; the story is gripping.”
Sunday Times

“An austere brilliance of style and composition.”
Sydney Morning Herald

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“Every afternoon in Shanghai during the summer of 1937 I rode down to the Bund to see if the war had begun.”

I have a real soft spot for The Kindness of Women, an autobiographical work that’s loosely described as a sequel to Empire of the Sun. Here, Ballard is honest, self-deprecating and wildly vivid in laying out the tracks of his adult life. While it’s actually a fictional ‘reimagining’ of Ballard’s life rather than a straight recounting (which is what all autobiographies essentially are, if only they’d care to admit it), Kindness is essential for anyone looking to delve into the motivations behind works such as Crash and the 70s Ballard that has been so mythologised.

And it’s very funny, too, full of keenly applied and intentional humour, like this description of being serviced by a prostitute (p. 250): “Like a fisherwoman at an angling hole, patiently waiting for a bite, she moved about on her heels, the tip of my penis between her labia.”

I can see Ballard’s wry smile behind the typewriter every time I read this, his passive, avuncular expression tinged with mildly titillated bemusement at the abstraction sex has become.

Some quotes from the Grafton edition:

Ballard is the most modern of writers; his art engages with the artefacts and obsessions of the second half of this century in a manner and with an intensity unmatched by any other writer I can think of. The book is full of memserising writing, classic examples of the Ballard Style, paragraphs and pages that disturb and enthrall… A force is operating in this astonishing book which is hard to resist.”

William Boyd, Daily Telegraph

“It has a brutal spine — plenty of hardware and violence and graphic and clinical sex scenes. But it is also, in its own chilly way, enormously tender and likeable with huge vision and ambition.”

Sunday Times

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
” ‘Save the albatross! Stop nuclear testing now!’ “.

From the 1994 Picador edition:

Led by a charismatic and slightly unhinged woman, a group of environmentalists wins control over a small atoll in the Pacific and sets up a utopian community. Breeding other threatened species and among themselves, these homesteaders slowly transform an Eden of their own into a much darker place. A savage send up of environmentalism, feminism, and extremism of all sorts, Rushing to Paradise is also a brave new exploration of that strange territory J.G. Ballard has illuminated over the course of his career: the twentieth century.”

A much-maligned work, Rushing to Paradise nevertheless has its adherents. Marcus Moure wrote an impassioned review for Spike Magazine, calling it a “cross between Greenpeace-gone-black and Golding’s Lord of the Flies … Ballard’s most powerful novel in years, a terrifying, all-too-real “what if.” Which is exactly what Ballard does best, what-iffing Armageddon-like possibilities in this paradise we call Earth.”

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“Crossing frontiers is my profession.”

From the 1996 Flamingo edition:

“To an outsider, the retired British residents of the Spanish coastal resort of Estrella de Mar belong to an idyllic community, enjoying a lifestyle of constant cultural and sporting activity — based around the thriving Club Nautico. But the image is shattered when five people die in a mysterious housefire during a party attended by members of the club, and the club’s manager, Frank Prentice, is arrested for murder.

Arriving on the scene, his brother Charles is shocked to find that, though not even the police believe him capable of the crime, Frank is determined to plead guilty. If he is to understand his brother’s attitude, Charles senses that he must first unravel the mysteries of Estrella de Mar. For beneath the civilised surface lies a secret world of crime, drugs and illicit sex, orchestrated by a charismatic Pied Piper figure, whose dark influence is spreading with alarming speed.”

“A writer capable of the most amazing narrative feats — but not quite house-broken.”
John Sutherland, Sunday Times

Many saw Cocaine Nights as a return to form after Rushing to Paradise, and it is a smart book. It marked a new, streamlined phase in Ballard’s career, the start of a supposed quadrology (followed by Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come) that took the format of the detective story, and — in Iain Sinclair’s words — “sits and pretends to be a mainstream literary novel. It comes out looking like a literary novel — Cocaine Nights has almost the form of an Agatha Christie novel, it’s comfortable — except that they’re doing stranger things. There’s a much darker kick in it.”

..:: LINKS
+ J.G. Ballard Live In London (features a discussion of Cocaine Nights)

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money”. (from ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’).

From the 1996 Harper Collins edition:

The first-ever collection of J.G. Ballard’s articles and reviews, published over the last thirty years. In a long and highly-acclaimed career, J.G. Ballard has established himself as one of Britian’s most distinctive and admired writers, the author of such influential novels as Crash, The Drowned World, High-Rise, Empire of the Sun and, most recently, Rushing to Paradise. Throughout his career he has also been a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers. Now, for the first time, he has gathered together the finest of these pieces and grouped them under themes such as film, lives, the visual world, writers, science, autobiography and science fiction.

Marlon Brando, Nancy Reagan, Elvis Presley, Deng Xiaoping, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, William Burroughs and Graham Greene are just some of the people who feature in the ninety articles, together with many of the themes familiar to readers of Ballard’s fiction, includign Shanghai, television, surrealism, cars, motorways and the atom bomb.

The result is an astonishingly varied and fascinating collection — a provocative and entertaining review of the modern world, as seen through the eyes of one of this country’s most original writers.”

I happen to think that some of Ballard’s best writing can be found in the non-fiction realm; in fact, there was a time, when I first chanced upon his work, that I was convinced he was a superior journalist than a novelist. Although it’s not in this collection, I especially savour Ballard’s phrasing in his lovely meditation on Helmut Newton:

A company of beautiful women moves through the palatial corridors or gazes into the opaque depths of ornate mirrors, waiting for a last act that will never unfold. Even those women who are naked seem scarcely aware of themselves, as if their sexuality is defused by the strange bedrooms where they wait for the rich and powerful men stepping from their limousines in the courtyards below.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Lucid Dreamer’.

The Edge features a typically acerbic review of User’s Guide, by Gerald Houghton:

In 1977 Ballard wrote one of his most experimental and most brilliant short stories, ‘The Index’. Did the attached book ever actually exist? Was it all a figment of some deranged imagination? All that remains of this autobiography is a collection of names and page numbers; tantalising nudges and winks, like a road-map with the motorways rubbed out. It’s a game we can play with A User’s Guide To The Millenium: Hitler nuzzles up to Mae West, Dali to Nancy Reagan, Derek Jarman with Walt Disney, Lee Harvey Oswald and the young Jim interred in the Japanese camp. What, if anything, do all these and the rest have to do with this rather unpresupposing British author?

Ballard is never less than urbane, but his best dinner party manners mask real teeth. Thus he adores the Surrealists, Henry Miller, Joyce and Genet, but is dismissive towards others (Warhol), occasionally outright scathing (Nancy Reagan). The Ballard in these pages is clearly in awe of Burroughs’ reupholstering of narrative form, while describing himself as an old-fashioned storyteller. (It’s fulsome praise that should be tempered with a reading of his superb interview with Will Self in Self’s recent Junk Mail.) He is mystifyingly rhapsodic over Dali, surely the most overrated artist of the century. (What, one wonders, would Ballard make of the comment that Dali is the ‘kind of artist you think is brilliant when you’re 15′? Are you listening Damien Hirst?).”

..:: CONTENTS

1. FILM
Casablanca, Brando and Mae West, Star Wars and Blue Velvet…

• ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’ (1990)
• ‘Magical Days at Rick’s’ (1993)
• ‘Hollywood Sex Idols’ (1991)
• ‘Push-button Death’ (1991)
• ‘Hobbits in Space?’ (1977)
• ‘A User’s Guide to the Millennium’ (1987)
• ‘Courting the Cobra’ (1993)
• ‘The Samurai of the Epic’ (1991)
• ‘La Jetee’ (1996)
• ‘Blue Velvet’ (1993)

2. LIVES
Nancy Reagan, Elvis, Howard Hughes and Hirohito…

• ‘The Chain-saw Biographer’ (1991)
• ‘Survival Instincts’ (1992)
• ‘Fallen Idol’ (1991)
• ‘The Killing Time’ (1979)
• ‘Mob Psychology’ (1991)
• ‘Closed Doors’ (1977)
• ‘Last of the Great Royals’ (1989)
• ‘Sinister Spider’ (1992)
• ‘Lipstick and High Heels’ (1993)

More contents to come.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“The first person I met at Eden-Olympia was a psychiatrist, and in many ways it seems only too apt that my guide to this ‘intelligent’ city in the hills above Cannes should have been a specialist in mental disorders.”

From the 2002 Picador edition:

“Eden-Olympia is more than just a multinational business park, it is a virtual city-state in itself. built for the most elite high-tech industries. Isolated and secure, the residents lack nothing. Yet one day a doctor at the clinic goes on a suicidal shooting spree. Dr. Jane Sinclair is hired as his replacement, and her husband, Paul, uncovers the dangerous psychological vents that maintain Eden-Olympia’s smoothly running surface.”

“Each page, and this is a page-turner, might have the mind’s knees knocking, the mind’s flesh horripilating. Super-Cannes … confirms J.G. Ballard’s substantial place in contemporary fiction”.
The Washington Times

“Ballard is our poet laureate of Modernism’s dead zones… [Super-Cannes] achieves a brilliant, thorny ambiguity — the kind that lodges splinterlike in your imagination, and refuses to come loose”.
LA Weekly

Indeed, Super-Cannes is a knockout, a corruscating, brilliant examination of a “new kind of human being”, capped by one of the darkest Ballardian endings of all. This book has a superior charge to it, and is filled with the most potent imagery found in a JGB novel for a good long while. In fact, it’s so hyperaware of the affective nature of built space, it could almost be used as a textbook in architecture courses:

Reversing from a cul-de-sac at Cagnes-sur-Mer, I cracked a rear brake light against a badly sited lamp standard.”

J.G. Ballard. Super-Cannes (p.119).

Chris Nakashima-Brown delivers a coolly observed review of the novel:

Sorry, no spaceships. Once again, Ballard explores Earth as the alien planet. A speculative fiction of inner space, where the mind creates reality. The tabula rasa of the new city allows its inhabitants to invent their own bloody therapy games, exporting their post-bourgeois pathologies to the Mediterranean lumpenproles outside the castle. The protagonist finds himself drawn in, alternately as jaded participant and righteous counter-vigilante, right up to the ambiguous denouement.”

Chris Nakashima-Brown. ‘Catastrophically Cozy: J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes’.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“A small revolution was taking place, so modest and well behaved that almost no one had noticed.”

From the 2003 Flamingo edition:

Violent rebellion comes to London’s middle classes in the extraordinary new novel from the author of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.

When a bomb goes off at Heathrow it looks like another random act of violence to psychologist David Markham. But then he discovers that his ex-wife Laura is among the victims. Acting on police suspicions, he starts to investigate London’s fringe protest movements, falling in with a shadowy group based in the comfortable Thames-side estate of Chelsea Marina. Led by a charismatic doctor, the group aims to rouse the docile middle classes to anger and violence, to freem them from both the self-imposed burdens of civic responsibility and the trappings of a consumer society — private schools, foreign nannies, health insurance and overpriced housing. Markham, seeking the truth behind Laura’s death, is swept up in a campaign that spirals rapidly out of control. Every certainty in his life is questioned as the cornerstones of middle England become targets and growing panic grips the capital…

Compelling, disturbing and typically acute, Millennium People is J.G. Ballard’s most remarkable novel yet. Its shockingly plausible vision of a society in collapse is proof that this most original and influential of authors is at the peak of his powers.”

Millennium People is witty, life-affirming, sharp as a blade — and highly topical, continuing to resonate into the 21st century. K-punk captured the tenor precisely:

Gould is an elegant and eloquent salesman of the Deleuze-Guattari ‘line of abolition’, the Fascist drive to destruction which is ultimately a drive towards self-destruction. Ballard, who, to his credit has always refused to endorse facile moralizing, would no doubt object to that characterization, since to in any way condemn or censure Gould would be to confirm the very securocratic values he seeks to undermine.

However, the most compelling aspect of Millennium People, politically speaking, is not the in many ways familiar asignifying violence, but its PUNK THEORY OF CLASS REVOLT.”

k-punk. ‘What are the politics of boredom?’

This is hard-core. From now on ordering an olive ciabatta is a political act.”

J.G. Ballard. Millennium People.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.” (from ‘Prima Belladonna’).

From the 2001 Flamingo edition (originally one volume; reprinted in two volumes in 2006):

For the first time in one volume, the complete collected short stories by the author of Empire of the Sun and Super-Cannes — regarded by many as Britain’s No.1 living fiction writer.

J.G. Ballard is firmly established as one of Britain’s most highly regarded and most influential novelists. Throughout his remarkable career, he has won equal praise for his ground-breaking short stories, which he first started writing during his days as a medical student at Cambridge. In fact, it was winning a short-story competition that gave him the impetus to become a full-time writer.

His first published works, ‘Prima Belladonna’ and ‘Escapement’ appeared in Science Fantasy and New Worlds in 1956. Ever since, he has been a prolific producer of stories, which have been published in numerous magazines and several separate collections, including The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever, Vermilion Sands, Low-Flying Aircraft, The Venus Hunters, Myths of the Near Future and War Fever.

Now, for the first time, all of J.G. Ballard’s published stories — including four that have not previously appeared in a collection — have been gathered together and arranged in the order of original publication, providing an unprecedented opportunity tp review the career of one of Britain’s greatest writers”.

Plus the obligatory endorsement:

Ballard is one of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilirating imagination — and a national treasure.”

Nicholas Royle, Guardian.

A large body of opinion says that Ballard’s a better short-form stylist than novelist. On some days, I agree. My first exposure to Ballard, aside from Crash, was his short story ‘The Subliminal Man’. It hung in my imagination like a sharp blade over a heifer’s neck. Absolutely incredible, the imagery of it:

The old cities were surrounded by the vast motion sculptures of the clover-leaves and flyovers, but even so the congestion was unremitting.
…
Then the flicker of lights cleared and steadied, blazing out continuously, and together the crowd looked up at the decks of brilliant letters. The phrases, and every combination of them possible, were entirely familiar, and Franklin knew that he had been reading them for weeks as he passed up and down the expressway.

BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY
NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
…
They walked out into the trim drive, the shadows of the signs swinging across the quiet neighbourhood as the day progressed, sweeping over the heads of the people on their way to the supermarket like the blades of enormous scythes.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Subliminal Man’ (1963).

All the criticisms that are usually applied to Ballard’s novels — style over substance; lack of characterisation; thin plot — simply don’t apply in this format. In fact, in this realm they become virtues, as the sheer weight of Ballard’s imagination is compressed, and then unpacked, with full force. He didn’t dub the short pieces that make up The Atrocity Exhibition ‘condensed novels’ for nothing. Ballard’s a radical, a man who saw that the 20th-century novel was stifled by 19th-century function and set about stripping it to its very essence. That aesthetic became his body of short stories: quite simply, the man’s a master of the form and it’s a damn shame he doesn’t write them anymore.

I have the hardback, single-volume, supposedly complete version — a fallacy, for it only includes three pieces from The Atrocity Exhibition. I’m not sure if the new two-volume set rectifies that — probably not, considering it would take away sales from Atrocity itself.

It’s a bit of a cheat. If the publisher considers Atrocity to be a novel (as Ballard does), rather than a collection of short stories, then the Complete Short Stories shouldn’t contain any Atrocity pieces at all. According to Ballard expert David Pringle, there are three Ballard shorts that weren’t included, seemingly at the expense of the three Atrocities: ‘Journey Across a Crater’ (1970), ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B——” (1984) and ‘The Dying Fall’ (1994).

I call that a missed opportunity.

Update: reader Mike Holliday contacted me with some further comments on this collection:

Despite its title, the book does not include all of Ballard’s short stories. If we discount those that are shortened versions of Ballard’s novels (Storm-Wind, The Drowned World, Equinox), then the following are missing:

(i) The Violet Noon, an early non-professional story published while Ballard was at university

(ii) most of the stories included in the original edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, namely You and Me and the Continuum, The Assassination Weapon, You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe, The Atrocity Exhibition, Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy, The Death Module, Love and Napalm: Export USA, The Great American Nude, The University of Death, The Generations of America, The Summer Cannibals, Tolerances of the Human Face, Crash!

(iii) the so-called ‘surgical fictions’, Coitus 80, Princess Margaret’s Facelift, Mae West’s Reduction Mamoplasty, Queen Elizabeth’s
Rhinoplasty, Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty

(iv) a few other pieces, namely Journey Across a Crater, The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******, Neil Armstrong Remembers His Journey to the Moon, and The Dying Fall. It also excludes those items classified as Miscellaneous Media [including Ballard's collages for Ambit magazine].

In 2006, The Complete Short Stories was republished in two paperback volumes, but this edition omits the novella The Ultimate City.”

Disappointingly, there’s not a lot of decent criticism surrounding Ballard’s short-form work. Over at Rick McGrath’s site, however, John Boston has posted a thorough and interesting account of “the four short stories that got [Ballard] back into writing science fiction: Now: Zero (1959), The Waiting Grounds (1959), The Sound-Sweep (1960), and Zone of Terror (1960).”

..:: LINKS
+ J.G. Ballard’s Introduction to the Complete Short Stories

..:: CONTENTS

+ ‘Prima Belladonna’ (1956)
+ ‘Escapement’ (1956)
+ ‘The Concentration City’ (1957)
+ ‘Venus Smiles’ (1957)
+ ‘Manhole 69′ (1957)
+ ‘Track 12′ (1958)
+ ‘The Waiting Grounds’ (1959)
+ ‘Now: Zero’ (1959)
+ ‘The Sound-Sweep’ (1960)
+ ‘Zone of Terror’ (1960)
+ ‘Chronopolis’ (1960)
+ ‘The Voices of Time’ (1960)
+ ‘The Last World of Mr Goddard’ (1960)
+ ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ (1961)
+ ‘Deep End’ (1961)
+ ‘The Overloaded Man’ (1961)
+ ‘Mr F. is Mr F. (1961)
+ ‘Billennium’ (1961)
+ ‘The Gentle Assassin’ (1961)
+ ‘The Insane Ones’ (1962)
+ ‘The Garden of Time’ (1962)
+ ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ (1962)
+ ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ (1962)
+ ‘Passport to Eternity’ (1962)
+ ‘The Cage of Sand’ (1962)
+ ‘The Watch-Towers’ (1962)
+ ‘The Singing Statues’ (1962)
+ ‘The Man on the 99th Floor’ (1962)
+ ‘The Subliminal Man’ 63 (1962)
+ ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ (1962)
+ ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1962)
+ ‘The Time-Tombs’ (1962)
+ ‘Now Wakes the Sea’ (1962)
+ ‘The Venus Hunters’ (1962)
+ ‘End-Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Minus One’ (1962)
+ ‘The Sudden Afternoon’ (1962)
+ ‘The Screen Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Time of Passage’ (1964)
+ ‘Prisoner of the Coral Deep’ (1964)
+ ‘The Lost Leonardo’ (1964)
+ ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964)
+ ‘The Illuminated Man’ (1964)
+ ‘The Delta at Sunset’ (1964)
+ ‘The Drowned Giant’ (1964)
+ ‘The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon’ (1964)
+ ‘The Volcano Dances’ (1964)
+ ‘The Beach Murders’ (1966)
+ ‘The Day of Forever’ (1966)
+ ‘The Impossible Man’ (1966)
+ ‘Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer’ (1966)
+ ‘Tomorrow is a Million Years’ (1966)
+ ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’ (1966)
+ ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’ (1967)
+ ‘The Recognition’ (1967)
+ ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ (1967)
+ ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968)
+ ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1968)
+ ‘The Comsat Angels’ (1968)
+ ‘The Killing Ground’ (1969)
+ ‘A Place and a Time to Die’ (1969)
+ ‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’ (1970)
+ ‘The Greatest Television Show on Earth’ (1972)
+ ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ (1974)
+ ‘The Air Disaster’ (1975)
+ ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’ (1975)
+ ‘The Life and Death of God’ (1976)
+ ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976)
+ ‘The 60 Minute Zoom’ (1976)
+ ‘The Smile’ (1976)
+ ‘The Ultimate City’ (1976)
+ ‘The Dead Time’ (1977)
+ ‘The Index’ (1977)
+ ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977)
+ ‘Theatre of War’ (1977)
+ ‘Having A Wonderful Time’ (1978)
+ ‘One Afternoon at Utah Beach’ (1978)
+ ‘Zodiac 2000′ (1978)
+ ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978)
+ ‘A Host of Furious Fancies’ (1980)
+ ‘News from the Sun’ (1981)
+ ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982)
+ ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982)
+ ‘Report on An Unidentified Space Station’ (1982)
+ ‘The Object of the Attack’ (1984)
+ ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985)
+ ‘The Man Who Walked on the Moon’ (1985)
+ ‘The Secret History of World War 3′ (1988)
+ ‘Love in a Colder Climate’ (1989)
+ ‘The Enormous Space’ (1989)
+ ‘The Largest Theme Park in the World’ (1989)
+ ‘War Fever’ (1989)
+ ‘Dream Cargoes’ (1990)
+ ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (1992)
+ ‘The Message from Mars’ (1992)
+ ‘Report from an Obscure Planet’ (1992)

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY VOLUME 1

..:: BUY VOLUME 2

OPENING LINE:
“The suburbs dream of violence.”

From the 2006 Fourth Estate edition:

Richard Pearson, unemployed advertising executive and life-long rebel, is driving out to Brooklands, a motorway town on the A25. A few weeks earlier his father was fatally wounded at the Metro-Centre, a vast shopping mall in the middle of this apparently peaceful town, when a deranged mental patient opened fire on a crowd of shoppers. When the main suspect is released without charge thanks to the dubious testimony of self-styled pillars of the community — including Julia Goodwin, the doctor who treated his father on his deathbed — Richard suspects that there is more to his father’s death than meets the eye, a more sinister element lurking behind the pristine facades of the labyrinthine mall.

Determined to unravel the mystery, Richard soon realises that the Metro-Centre, with its round-the-clock cable channel and sports clubs, lies at the very heart of his father’s death. Consumerism rules the lives of everyone in the motorway towns and feeds the cravings of this bored community with its desperate need for something new, whatever the costs. Riots frequently terrorise the streets, immigrant communities are set upon by roving bands of hooligans and sports events mushroom into jingoistic political rallies. Gradually, Richard finds himself drawn into this world, caught up in the workings of the mall, exposed to the insides of the consumer dream, and starts upon dismantling this wayward vision his advertising career helped to found…

In this gripping, dystopian tour de force, J.G. Ballard holds up a mirror to middle England, reflecting an unsettling image of suburbia and revealing the darker forces at work beneath the gloss of consumerism and flag-waving patriotism.”

The negative notices this remarkable vision have received don’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Ballard’s a man who admits he doesn’t read novels, instead devouring ‘invisible literature’: marginalia, copywriting, medical journals, psychiatric reports, Ikea catalogues, cereal boxes. He’s influenced by Freud, film noir, science fiction and Surrealist paintings; film, more than anything. To compare him with some literary type who practices the art of ‘tight plotting’ and ‘well-rounded protagonists’ is woefully inadequate. Reviewing KC in the Telegraph, David Robson wrote: ‘The plotting is clumsy … and the violence, integral to the whole design, belongs to the world of comic-strips’. Well, yes. Precisely. Honestly, do we still live in an age where popular culture is considered second-rate to the almighty ‘novel’? Funnily enough, I’m put in mind of my 78-year-old father, who refuses to watch The Simpsons because ‘cartoons are for kids’.

At least we have theorist Steven Shaviro, who has written the most insightful review of Kingdom Come to date, refreshingly free of the restraints of commercial media:

Kingdom Come has so far only been published in the UK, not the US. And it has gotten mostly negative reviews — even from speculative writers like Ursula LeGuin and M. John Harrison, who ought to know better. The book has been criticized for the fact that its plot and characters aren’t slick, catchy, and ‘well-constructed’ enough. But of course these are the wrong standards by which to judge Ballard. He writes genre fiction as social theory — and he remains, at age 76, one of the most acute social theorists that we have. His insights could not be communicated in the form of the artfully structured literary novel. His seeming repetitiveness, his clumsy prosaicness, and his insistence on a kind of pop-culture (so-called) ‘kitsch’ are necessary tools of insight. In a thoroughly Modernist way, his form coincides with his themes; though, as an anatomist of our “postmodern” condition, his forms/themes are such as the classic Modernists could never have imagined.”

Steven Shaviro. ‘Kingdom Come’.

Rick McGrath has also written a provocative review, from his own perspective as an ex-ad-man:

But what form does a non-message take? For Pearson, that’s easy: “Madness is the key to everything. Small doses, applied when no-one is really looking.”

Regardless of all the novel’s ranting about consumerism and violence and fascism, I find this marketing insight perhaps the most chilling prediction of Kingdom Come. Instinctive advertising – a direct message to the irrational, the purely emotional. It’s about using psychopathology, after all. It’s a chilling thought not because it could be a campaign as Ballard imagines it, but because it is a campaign which is currently being successfully employed by, oh, advertising for the fashion industry, Hollywood, political parties.

Rick McGrath. ‘Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Ads Be Run…’

And Ballardian contributor Pippa Tandy offers the following thoughts:

JGB is not Alan Sillitoe. There is little point in reading KC for direct equivalences to social conditions. Although he writes of the effects of consumerism, shopping malls and the obsession with sport, Ballard is not a realist writer. Although he makes reference to the notorious DuPont as the benefactor of a research wing of a mental asylum, (97) and uses as a chapter heading the expression ‘Exit Strategies’, has his protagonist speak of himself as only being good at ‘warming the slippers of late capitalism’, (9) and make other references to political and social realities of the past and present, this is not a direct socially realistic account of society. KC reiterates images that appear from his earliest work, images that are coded references to his earlier writing but which have another function. As in his other writing, they are a register of the psychic state of his society. It is not a question of whether his characters behave as ‘real’ people behave; KC is rather another myth of the near future, except that the near future is now on top of us. (And has been for a while, hardly Ballard’s fault!) Remember Ballard never felt like he needed to check the realist accuracy of his descriptions. You will recall that The Rockford Files and Kojak informed his understanding of America, a Thames Valley gravel pit supplies the lineaments of Cape Canaveral, and so on.

KC begins in the typical liminal setting of the Heathrow motorways, with a protagonist narrator who finds himself drawn into a maze of concrete and paranoia, who backs away from the reflected attenuation in his own mirrored face, who limps through the broken mallscape on a bandaged foot, a black comedy in which motorways and runways intersect, fugitives hide themselves as shop mannequins, the beach of a shopping mall echoes the beach of a nuclear test site, and a deracinated psychiatrist and mock Lemmy Caution move among the crowd. Ballard would probably not like to admit it, but he is doing something similar to Godard in Alphaville. He is using the materials of his time (shopping malls, sporting crowds, consumerism) as latent conditions. That is why it all seems a bit wrong when we try to match it all up. Like his other writing, this novel is Ballard’s attempt to bring vision to the present, to create, like the detonation in the Metro-Centre, a space in which a section of space-time had been erased, exposing a deep flaw in our collective dream.� (113-4)

And, just another point, for fun. Is not the description of the dead Cruise being wheeled around as a kind of totem figure, surrounded by grieving worshippers, very reminiscent of Mr Kurtz on his stretcher in Heart of Darkness?”

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK