Ballardian

My hometown newspaper, the Age, reviewed Miracles of Life last week. Check out the review’s subtitle, ‘Shaghai to Shepparton’, an illiterate disaster zone that does little to dispel the notion that Australia just doesn’t get Ballard.

If you take into account the semen-encrusted antics of Crash and The Unlimited Dream Company, then you might be able to enjoy a Freudian field day with ‘Shaghai’, but it’s ‘Shepparton’ that offends the most. Everywhere else, ‘Shepperton’ is renowned as Ballard’s home base, with that second ‘e’ ingrained in the psyche, as synonymous with the author as Shanghai. Yet here in the Australian state of Victoria, the country town of Shepparton, replete with that rogue ‘a’ and famous for mainly canned fruit, vibrates more intensely on this particular sub-editor’s cultural radar.

Shame about that.

With any luck the Age will pick up the trackback from this post and set things to right.

UPDATE: the subtitle has now been removed altogether.

As for the review, Russ Radcliffe spends more time reviewing Ballard’s life and career than the book itself. Just towards the end, though, he does get around to the actual writing:

[A] lack of regard for that centrepiece of contemporary fiction — the self — is … what makes Ballard’s autobiography, at times, unsatisfying. He can’t shift register from dispassionate observer to emotionally involved participant.

We learn in a perfunctory manner about the death of his first wife, Mary, and that he brought up three children as a sole parent… Miracles of Life is very much the biography of the thinking writer, rather than the feeling man.

Compare with Nicholas Shakespeare’s review in the Telegraph:

The most moving passages are those devoted to his wife, Mary, and to his three children, the book’s dedicatees, who gave him a home life he never knew in Shanghai. “The years I spent as the parent of my young children were the richest and happiest I have ever known.”

He boasts: “My greatest ally was the pram in the hall.” It is as rare to read a writer celebrate the hearth like this (think of Waugh) as it is to sleep under the stars.

Do you they think they were reading the same book?