Novelists make up a surprisingly big presence in the longlist for this year’s Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction, with memoirs of JG Ballard, VS Naipaul and Julian Barnes in the running for the £30,000 award. The 20 books in contention for the prize also feature a number of very personal takes on subjects including mathematics, climate change and national traumas in Northern Ireland and Congo.

Novelist Julian Barnes’s autobiographical meditation on death, Nothing to Be Frightened of, makes the list, alongside Miracles of Life, JG Ballard’s memoir of the traumatic experiences that fed into his work. Also in the running is Patrick French’s Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul, which has recently been startling critics with its unflinching portrayal of its subject’s flaws.
…
The shortlist will be announced on May 15, with the prize awarded at a ceremony in central London on July 15. As well as the winner’s £30,000, each of the five shortlisted authors will receive £1,000.

The longlist in full
Mad, Bad and Sad by Lisa Appignanesi (Virago)
Nothing to be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape)
Miracles of Life by J G Ballard (Harper Collins)
Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher (Chatto & Windus)
Crow Country by Mark Cocker (Jonathan Cape)
Finding Moonshine: A Mathematician’s Journey Through Symmetry by Marcus Du Sautoy (Fourth Estate)
The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French (Picador)
The Whisperers by Orlando Figes (Penguin Press)
Rudolf Nureyev by Julie Kavanagh (Fig Tree)
Austerity Britain 1945-1951 by David Kynaston (Bloomsbury)
Mrs Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light (Fig Tree)
Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes by Ferdinand Mount (Bloomsbury)
Watching the Door by Kevin Myers (Atlantic Books)
Confessions of an Eco Sinner: Confessions of an Eco Sinner: Travels to Find Where My Stuff Comes from by Fred Pearce (Eden Project Books)
Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland by Jonathan Powell (Bodley Head)
The Discovery of France by Graham Robb (Picador)
A Life of Picasso: Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 vol 3 by John Richardson (Jonathan Cape)
The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross (Fourth Estate)
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury)
The Brother Gardeners by Andrea Wulf (William Heinemann)

More at the Guardian.

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)

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

‘An Exhibition of Atrocities’

excerpt:

Goodall: Can you recall any critical or other ‘professional’ reactions to Jacopetti’s films when they were released?

Ballard: The critical/respectable reaction to the Jacopetti films was uniformly hostile and dismissive. As always, this confirmed their originality and importance.

From The Telegraph, 14/5/06.

“Next month at Tate Britain, John Constable’s magnificent canvases of the English countryside will be shown together for the first time. J.G. Ballard, Jon Snow, Sir John Mortimer and others describe what his paintings mean to them…

JG BALLARD: I have a feeling that Constable supplies the heart that is now missing from this country. England is now a nation of suburbs and a few decaying cities, but its spirit lies in the countryside, in the rolling meadows and the scudding clouds and the settled order of ancient country ways.

But now all that is gone, and a modern-day Constable would have to cope with the fact that the countryside is a factory floor owned by business conglomerates. So Constable touches on our powerful nostalgia for red tunics and maypole dancing; we need him to satisfy our dreams of what we once were. He provides the opportunity for a huge emotional bath.

I always disliked the notion of Constable country. Meadows and haycarts drive me up the wall. I prefer car washes and Chinese takeaways – they’re truer of the world we live in.”

Read what lesser mortals have to say about Constable.

A handful of dust

The modernists wanted to strip the world of mystery and emotion. No wonder they excelled at the architecture of death, says JG Ballard.

The Guardian, Monday March 20, 2006

” … Modernism was never popular in Britain – a little too frank for its repressed natives, except at lidos and the seaside, where people take their clothes off. The few modernist houses and apartments look genuinely odd. Why?

I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be rebuilt in the style of Michael Manser’s brilliant Heathrow Hilton. But I know that most people, myself included, find it difficult to be clear-eyed at all times and rise to the demands of a pure and unadorned geometry. Architecture supplies us with camouflage, and I regret that no one could fall in love inside the Heathrow Hilton. By contrast, people are forever falling in love inside the Louvre and the National Gallery.

All of us have our dreams to reassure us. Architecture is a stage set where we need to be at ease in order to perform. Fearing ourselves, we need our illusions to protect us, even if the protection takes the form of finials and cartouches, corinthian columns and acanthus leaves. Modernism lacked mystery and emotion, was a little too frank about the limits of human nature and never prepared us for our eventual end.

But all is not lost for admirers of modernism. They should visit the mortuary island of San Michele in the Venice lagoon, where many pioneers of modernism such as Igor Stravinsky, Serge Diaghilev and Ezra Pound are interred. After taking the ferry, you disembark at a gloomy landing stage worthy of Böcklin’s Island of the Dead. This is a place beyond hope, of haunted gateways and melancholy statues.

But then, in the heart of the cemetery, there is a sudden lightening of tone, and you find you are strolling through what might be a Modern suburb of Tunis or Tel Aviv. The lines of family tombs resemble cheerful vacation bungalows, airy structures of white walls and glass that might have been designed by Le Corbusier or Richard Neutra. One could holiday for a long time in these pleasant villas, and a few of us probably will.

So, there is one place where modernism triumphs. As in the cases of the pyramids and the Taj Mahal, the Siegfried line and the Atlantic wall, death always calls on the very best architects.”

More here.

“Look back at Empire

JG Ballard waited 40 years before writing about his experiences in a Japanese internment camp. Here he remembers how Hollywood hijacked his childhood memories to create a deeply moving film.

Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed. Hauling them into the daylight can be risky. Within a few hours, a precious trophy of childhood or a first romance can crumble into rust.

I knew that something similar might happen when I began to write Empire of the Sun, a novel about my life as a boy in Shanghai during the second world war, and in the civilian camp at Lunghua, where I was interned with my parents. Coming to England after the war, and trying to cope with its grey, unhappy people, I hoarded my memories of Shanghai, a city that soon seemed as remote and glamorous as ancient Rome. Its magic never faded, whereas I forgot Cambridge within five minutes of leaving that academic theme park, and never wanted to go back. The only people I remembered were the dissecting room cadavers.

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?
…

In 1984 the novel was published, a caravel of memories raised from the deep. Enough of it was based on fact to convince me that what had seemed a dream-like pageant was a negotiated truth. Curiously, my original memories of Shanghai still seemed intact, and even survived a return trip to Shanghai, where I found our house in Amherst Avenue and our room in Lunghua camp – now a boarding school – virtually unchanged.

Then, in 1987, like a jumbo jet crash-landing in a suburban park, a Hollywood film company came down from the sky. It disgorged an army of actors, makeup artists, set designers, costume specialists, cinematographers and a director, Steven Spielberg, all of whom had strong ideas of their own about wartime Shanghai. After 40 years my memories had shaped themselves into a novel, but only three years later they were mutating again.
…

Coincidences were building strange bridges. Thanks to the film studios in Shepperton, many of my neighbours worked as extras, and now called out: ‘Mr Ballard, we’re going to Lunghua together’. Had some deep-cover assignment led me to Shepperton in 1960, knowing that one day I would write a novel about Shanghai, and that part of it would be filmed in Shepperton?
…

Surprisingly, it was the film premiere in Hollywood, the fount of most of our planet’s fantasies, that brought everything down to earth. A wonderful night for any novelist, and a reminder of the limits of the printed word. Sitting with the sober British contingent, surrounded by everyone from Dolly Parton to Sean Connery, I thought Spielberg’s film would be drowned by the shimmer of mink and the diamond glitter. But once the curtains parted the audience was gripped. Chevy Chase, sitting next to me, seemed to think he was watching a newsreel, crying: “Oh, oh . . . !” and leaping out of his seat as if ready to rush the screen in defence of young Bale.

I was deeply moved by the film but, like every novelist, couldn’t help feeling that my memories had been hijacked by someone else’s. As the battle of Britain fighter ace Douglas Bader said when introduced to the cast of Reach for the Sky: “But they’re actors.”

Empire of the Sun Special Edition will be released by Warner Home Videos on March 6, priced £19.99.

The interview goes for six pages, and there’s also a reprint of Ballard’s article ‘End of My War’ (1995), which, David notes, ‘should already be familiar to anyone who’s got a copy of A User’s Guide to the Millennium‘.

“David Cronenberg’s films are full of images that make us recoil in horror. But what we are really trying to hide from is the whole messy business of being alive. By JG Ballard”

“Are we all, without realising it, taking part in a vast witness protection programme? Did we observe, at some time in the distant past, a deeply disturbing event in which we were closely implicated? Were we then assigned new identities, new personalities, fears and dreams so convincing that we have forgotten who we really are?

These questions crowded my head as I watched A History of Violence, a film as brilliant and provocative as anything David Cronenberg has directed. All Cronenberg’s films make us edge back into our seats, gripped by the story unfolding on the screen but aware that something unpleasant is going on in the seats around us.

That unpleasantness, needless to say, is ourselves, a damp bundle of passions, needs and neuroses that conceal our secret nature. The disturbing event we witnessed in the past is the experience of being alive, a state of affairs that Cronenberg most definitely does not take at face value.

Existence, in Cronenberg’s eyes, is the ultimate pathological state. He sees us as fragile creatures with only a sketchy idea of who we are, nervous of testing our physical and mental limits. The characters in Cronenberg’s films behave as if they are inhabiting their minds and bodies for the first time at the moment we observe them, fumbling with the controls like drivers in a strange vehicle. Will it rise vertically into the air, invert itself, or suddenly self-destruct?”

"Should the war against Japan ever have taken place? The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 brought a devastating response from the United States, and turned the European war into a world-wide conflict. Sixty years after Japan capitulated, the old soldiers have marched past the Cenotaph, still proud and spry, but probably for the last time. Few of them, sadly, will parade on the 70th anniversary, though arguments about the end of the Pacific war, and whether it was right to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, will go on without them."

Full article…

Several heavyweights of the literary world were impressed to have an unexpected new novelist in their midst.
JG Ballard, the veteran author of more than 30 books including Empire of the Sun, said: “I hope she has every success. It might win the Booker Prize. One has to accept that we are living in times when the only things that matter are celebrity and money, and if Jordan writes a novel, that will bring the two together. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing I’ll leave for you to judge.”

JG BALLARD SAYS: “I think 30 years ago, men were the main buyers of novels because they had the spending power and women did not. That of course has changed,” he said.

“Women readers now outnumber men and they tend to seek out writers who know their own world at first hand. Women tend to find a lot of male writers boyish, macho and a little too interested in violence. The believe their books are too dependent on quick thrills.”

CSI … as characterless as life

It has no car chases, no shoot-outs, no emotions. So what makes Crime Scene Investigation so utterly compelling? The answer, writes JG Ballard, goes to the heart of our most basic fears.

JG BALLARD: “Television today is an ageing theme park, which we visit out of habit rather than in hope of finding anything fresh and original. At times I think that the era of television is over, but then it suddenly comes up with something rich and strange. A few years ago, hunting the outer darkness of Channel 5, I began to linger over a series called C.S.I: Crime Scene Investigation. After only a few episodes I was completely hooked, for reasons I don’t understand even today.”

JG Ballard used to skip class to watch Michael Powell’s extravagant, unsettling postwar movies. They taught him all he needed to know about the art of storytelling…

JG BALLARD SAYS: “Films, like memories, seem to re-shoot themselves over the years, reflecting our latest needs and obsessions. In many cases they can change completely, and reveal unexpected depths and shallows. Will Four Weddings and a Funeral be seen one day as a vicious social satire? Could Jaws become as tearful and sentimental as Bambi? Could Crash be seen as a tender love story?”

New Statesman, Monday 4th July 2005 

“Strange though it is, our fascination with the Nazi era shows no signs of fading. Scan the shelves of your local bookshop and you will see more swastikas than Union flags, and many more jacket portraits of Hitler than of Winston Churchill. A large part of Channel 5′s peak output is devoted to Nazi genocide, to German weapons and battle tactics. Despite my best efforts, I know more about the gearbox in a Tiger tank than the one in my own car.”