I visited Shepperton last summer whilst “Walking the Thames”. To some it might be a suburban nightmare, but I took a liking to the place. There is something other worldly and still about the atmosphere, all that water and planning: I can see why Mr Ballard has chosen to continue living there. However, I doubt that the area has changed much in the last 40 years.

I wonder whether JG has fully appreciated all the massive changes that have occured in Britain in recent decades; though I must admit he has a fine track record regarding the consumerism, privatisation, concrete and loss of direction. No one stands for anything – good or bad. These are changes that might be a little more extreme in the UK (?) but I suspect they are all part of a path travelled on by by the rest of the Anglo Saxon world and perhaps the rest of the western world as well.

Mr Ballard seems strangely ignorant about America – I am thinking of his offhand comparison to gated communities, private services and insularity of moneyed Britons. The rich/poor divide has been growing in the states for decades, alongside such perversions, and inevitably in urban Australia too. (for more background: Jeremy Rifkin covers gated communities, shopping malls, and other aspects of “hypercapitalism” in his book “The Age of Access”.)

By the way, my mum, who’s around your age, uses the world wide web.

I will try and pass on your comments to JGB if i possibly can.

best wishes,
simon

To answer to R. Maitland(;-). You just have to ask any french man about the riots during the CPE or the november Riots, they will say that nothing happen. The french press has put a lid on the information, the media are scared to make the way for Lepen, so they hide informations. Typical french denial reaction.
There is a new word in French-slang for beating up white french : BOLLOSSER. It comes from french hip hop.
Links:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/10/05/wmuslims05.xml
News, statistics are on the web, mainstream media, as I said, are too scared to inflamed the situation and to ease the way for Lepen. What people don’t realize is that it’s not a racial problem, the wild guys attacking people, police and rioting are not considered arabs in Algeria, and they don’t consider themselves french…they are a mixture of brainless muslim(described by Salman Rushdie in Shalimar the Clown) and Nike, Louis Vuitton fanatics…Materialist nihilists… That’s why strangely, the average guy immigrants (father of family, Algerian, Asian, Eastern Europe) is voting National Front, Lepen, now. And that’s unconceivable by the mainstream media or the Left-wing(caviar)…
The 2007 election are going to be a big suprise…minds are going to blow…

If such under-reporting is indeed the case, might we speculate that someday the literary world will see an Algierian Ballard emerge, whose novels plot some kind of racial inversion of Super-Cannes, attacks on the white underclass, and so on…? This is a very interesting possibility.

Great interview, by the way.

This is a wonderful interview, Simon. The fact that so many commenters appreciate how you’ve avoided many of the typical interview cliches makes me wonder if you could set up another interview with JGB in which he accepts questions from your readers via you. I know that I have half a dozen questions I’d love to pose the man, and I’m sure your other readers probably feel the same. We could email them to you, post them to a thread, or some such, then you could edit them, shape them, and pose them to the man.

What do you think?

P.S. I’m reading The Kindness of Women right now. I’d never read it before, probably because the title doesn’t seem to promise much and the premise is less obviously compelling than in many of JGB’s other books. But now that I’m reading it, I’m finding it to be a really fascinating text. It makes me miss your forum, since it would be a pleasure to have somewhere to discuss the book. You almost never see it cited or analyzed in JGB literature.

At any rate, great job with the interview, Simon. Congrats.

As a French immigrant in Australia, I think you are overestimating the racism in your country and underestimating the racial-religious crisis in old-Europe. A new reallity is taking shape , something between ‘Millenium people’ and the french racials riots. As an Asian, I fled France because I witnessed the great divide between the White french and the 2nd generation of Arab-french immigrants, I was stuck in the middle. The tensions and hatred are not coming from the ones the media are usually targetting
(the usual stupid skinheads, neo-nazis).
Look closely and you will notice that Europe is cracking from everywhere (France, Sweeden, Danemark, Holland, Spain, Germany…), racial riots are emerging, the white people, the average middle-class guys are chased like rabbits and no-one seems to care or even wants to report it in the mainstream medias. The fear of being labeled as ‘Racist’ is devastating at a time where late capitalism means image making career. It is so unproper to show a racist mob of 2nd generation immigrants bashing a young white middle class woman. It is so unproper to show 1st generation immigrant (Arabs) voting for the French National Front…
Things are getting so crazily out of control that the mainstream media are lost. Cliches are torn upside down.
Ballard is right, Australia has other things than just consumerism and Shopping. Let’s hope we are not going to import the new trends in Europe: importing cheap immigrants, easy labor to get rid of the middle class immigrants, just to satisfy some left-wing, full of guilt, upper-class…

PS I can’t believe there were ikea riots…

With regards to the economic benefits or costs of Empire, the book to read is ‘British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion’ by PJ Cain and AG Hopkins (Longman, 1993).