Ballardian

In an extraordinary, microcosmic review (behold: “the Amis full stop makes itself felt”; “these particular gerunds…allude to the male jaw”; “that dismissive ellipsis”) of Martin Amis’s new book, House of Meetings, Daniel Soar, an editor at the London Review, ends with an examination of Amis’s fixation with J.G. Ballard:

Why is Martin Amis so angry? And why is it all so personal? An unjust but tempting answer would be that he is – as a writer – jealous of the extremity and transgressiveness of his most vicious subjects: Islamism, the concentration camps. He is fascinated by their power, and needs something of it. In 1973, when he was 23, Amis reviewed J.G. Ballard’s Crash for the Observer. It was, he wrote, ‘heavily flawed’, though he refused to be shocked by it. In 1996 he praisingly reviewed David Cronenberg’s film of Ballard’s book for the Independent on Sunday. There he remembers the ‘flurry of nervous dismay’ that the book had induced in reviewers. Every writer, he says, had a defence against it: ‘I’m not sure if anyone else adopted the disguise I wore: sarcasm.’ In 2001, in The War against Cliché, he republished his 1973 piece and, in a footnote, says that – in fact – ‘Crash sensationally and scintillatingly succeeds’: ‘My review, here, is so straitlaced that I hesitate to preserve it. But I do: readers should always be wrestling with the writers who feel intimate to them.’ Yet the old Amis can’t quite come out and name the moral fastidiousness that he feels the younger Amis suffers from, in The Rachel Papers, in London Fields. Ballard is one of a number of writers Amis has been troubled by: he wasn’t able to live up to Ballard’s brand of perversity, or to Nabokov’s nymphet, or to Bellow’s vast inclusiveness. But now – in Islamism, and in Stalinism, and in the hatred he finds there – he has a subject large enough for his needs.”

It’s an interesting account, especially when we recall that Martin’s dad, Kingsley, was also troubled — perversely fascinated — by Ballard. But Kingsley’s relationship to JGB appears to operate in reverse to that of his son: Amis the elder initially considered Ballard to be “one of the brightest stars in postwar fiction”, before distancing himself from JGB when the Atrocity Exhibition stories began to appear.

As JGB told Jason Crowley:

Kingsley Amis was full of praise for my early stuff; but as with so many English novelists he was vaguely suspicious of the power of the imagination: it could be too much of a good thing. Yet surely the radical imagination is what we seek in a writer; when we read we want to encounter a very different world that will make sense of our own.”