Ballardian

Photo: Eamonn McCabe.

Lee Rourke at the Guardian’s book blog has posted on Ballard, casting his vote for JGB as Britain’s ‘greatest living author’ and Crash as the ‘most prophetic novel written by a British writer in the last 50 years’.

Lee has some sharp observations:

Crash is the definitive novel of technocentrism: where the blurring of our technologies and functionality is evoked through a cultural and political desert in the urban environment, revealing a society governed by the car and the - mostly sexual - violence we are left with. A crumbling world where we are dwarfed by a new machine age that has no real need for us - a world we are ill-equipped to understand as it leaves us standing - forcing us to worship its gleaming by-products and ignoring its manipulation of us. To put it simply: Ballard understands that modernity has left us to our own basal needs - and we’re not coping too well.

Interesting, too, are the reader reactions.

Some get it:

* ‘Even ‘Empire of the sun’, his most biographical novel, reads like a forensic report written by visiting aliens.’
* ‘Empty cities and stuff. Cool.’
* ‘Yes, he is kind of unreadable, but the ideas and narratives are obviously super.’
* ‘The emotional distance from which he observes often means that the full horror only dawns on you after you’ve finished the book and taken a step back.’
* ‘I think the problem I have with Ballard is that I read Atrocity Exhibition first, and everything else was something of a let down. Not really a criticism of the other books, more a compliment of how utterly brilliant I think Atrocity Exhibition is.’
* ‘Reptilian coldness is not always the best attribute but Ballard at his best begs to differ.’

Some don’t:

* ‘Millennium People by JGB - i did find the experience of reading the novel’s first few pages extremely painful. i’ve read nothing else by Ballard and am proably being unfair - but i’m afraid of the pain coming back.’
* ‘Ballard: great as a conceptualist, lousy as a novelist. Sorry J.G, if you read these things, but all reviews send me rushing to your books only to give up after about 10 pages.’
* ‘I can’t stand him - I’ve read about three or four of his books and they all bored me to tears. The characters were utterly unconvincing and lacked any kind of psychological depth.’

Read the rest.