One to buy; a collection of J.G. Ballard’s short stories. I’m a big
Ballard fan, so I’ll be keeping an eye out. Great review too:
The drowned worlds, scorched cities and overgrown jungles of his early
fiction; his concentration on the new media landscape of celebrity and
stylised catastrophe; his exploration of the connections between sex,
eroticism and death; his fetishism of motorways, cars, technology and
high-rise buildings - Ballard wrote about the twentieth century in its own
idiom, at a time when most other literary writers were no more than
grappling with the same old tired clichés of the English class system.
Date: Sun, 04 Nov 2001 11:29:27 -0000
From: “Tim Chapman” (spam-protected)
To: forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: Complete Stories - Observer review
http://www.observer.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,587030,00.html
The Ballard of Shanghai jail
The poetry of disaster gleams among the anti-utopian’s collected short
stories in JG Ballard’s The Complete Stories
Jason Cowley
Sunday November 4, 2001
The Observer
The Complete Stories
JG Ballard
Flamingo £25, pp1,189
When I worked at the Times, a couple of years ago, a shout used to echo
through the newsroom at moments of great national trauma, the death of
Princess Diana, say, or a terrorist outrage - ‘Call JG Ballard’. Strangely,
at such moments, JG Ballard seldom seemed to be at home or was, at least,
sensibly not answering the phone.
Yet the news editor, for all his harassed panic, was right to think that
Ballard might have something to contribute at a time of crisis, because no
other contemporary British writer possesses his prescience and perspicacity,
his instinct for catastrophe. No other writer foresaw, in quite the same
way, how televised images of fame and death were to become all-powerful in
our culture.
Reading this book of collected stories, spanning more than 1,000 pages and
40 years, is a peculiarly enriching experience. Every sentence Ballard
writes is absolutely characteristic. Ever since he began publishing stories
in the mid-1950s, in low-circulation science-fiction magazines such as New
Worlds and Science Fantasy, he sought to find new ways of writing about our
emerging consumer society, not as other sci-fi writers did through
speculating about space travel or the far future, but through constructing
his own cool, detached psychopathology of post-industrial society.
The drowned worlds, scorched cities and overgrown jungles of his early
fiction; his concentration on the new media landscape of celebrity and
stylised catastrophe; his exploration of the connections between sex,
eroticism and death; his fetishism of motorways, cars, technology and
high-rise buildings - Ballard wrote about the twentieth century in its own
idiom, at a time when most other literary writers were no more than
grappling with the same old tired clichés of the English class system.
Those who complain that he repeatedly writes the same book, that he cannot
do character or convincingly animate women, misunderstand a writer who is
less a formal storyteller than a prose surrealist. The motifs in his work
are abandoned airfields, drained swimming pools, crashed cars, flooded
lagoons, overlit motorways. His male heroes - doctors, pilots, architects,
engineers - are emblematic last men, moving uneasily though flimsy,
disintegrating worlds (in their impassive striving they recall the sad urban
dreamscapes of Edward Hopper).
Through his interest in medicine, science and psychoanalysis, Ballard
understands how powerfully we are driven by irrational and unconscious
forces, that we are often no more than mysteries to ourselves.
In ‘Motel Architecture’ a man called Pangborn retreats from the world,
spending his days alone in a solarium, amusing himself by endlessly
replaying the shower sequence from Psycho on a bank of television screens
(this story was written in 1978, before the age of video and digitised
surveillance cameras). One day, he discovers there is an intruder in the
solarium, eating his food and sharing his private space. Sometimes he
catches glimpses of the intruder, his spectral presence and shifting
shadows. Then a cleaning woman is found murdered in the solarium, lying in
the ‘familiar postures he had analysed in a thousand blow-ups’. Pangborn is
terrified until, in a moment of blazing self-revelation, he realises he has
always been alone in the solarium, that he is his own intruder, a stranger
to himself and perhaps now a murderer, too.
‘I’ve always thought that life was a kind of disaster area,’ says Ransome,
the narrator of his third novel, The Drought. In Ballard’s fiction society
is always close to or actually breaking down, and civility is threatened
with extinction.
In many stories, he constructs closed, artificial communities - a tropical
island paradise, an internment camp, a luxury high-rise apartment block, a
hi-tech business park, a seaside leisure resort - then watches as they
collapse under the strain of their own internal contradictions. ‘Is this the
promised end?’ asks Kent in King Lear. ‘Or,’ replies Edgar, ‘image of that
horror?’
Through reading Ballard, we have lived vicariously with a sense of an
ending, simultaneously embracing what we most fear and perhaps most desire -
the ruin of cities, the collapse of communities, the wilful embracing of
deviance and obscenity.
Many of the stories here can be read as sketches for the later novels they
became. ‘Dead Time’, in particular, is a template for Empire of the Sun
(1984), the marvellous autobiographical novel which liberated Ballard from
the cult of avant garde celebration and carried him to an international
audience.
As a detainee, between the ages of 12 and 15, in the Lunghua prison camp in
Shanghai, Ballard watched as Chinese soldiers were decapitated, as the
streets of Shanghai were bombed by low-flying aircraft and as his fellow
internees were harassed and brutalised. In Empire he writes of returning to
the International Settlement where his parents lived in colonial seclusion
to find the houses inexplicably deserted, and of watching the distant glow
of the atom bomb explosion in Hiroshima, ‘that spectral mushroom cloud’.
In ‘Dead Time’, the young narrator, liberated from an internment camp, hides
for hours under a pile of corpses to avoid detection from the Japanese, and
later journeys across a ravaged landscape in search of his missing parents,
a search that Ballard enacts again and again in his fiction, as if seeking
to return to that Edenic first moment, the world of tranquillity that was
destroyed the day the Japanese arrived in Shanghai and took him away from
home.
If Ballard is an anti-utopian writer, a pessimist of human nature, it is
because by the time he returned to England, as a young adult after the war,
he had seen and experienced the worst of the world and of man’s potential
for depravity. He was without hope or illusion, his imagination forever
after to be shadowed by the ruined towns, abandoned aircraft, crashed cars
and arbitrary disappearances and injustices of his childhood. And so, as the
political philosopher John Gray has written, Ballard’s fictional achievement
is to have communicated a vision of what fulfilment might mean in a time of
nihilism. And who would argue that ours is not a time of nihilism and that
Ballard is not the ideal chronicler of our disturbed modernity?
Tags: catastrophe, collection, death, eye, fan, observer, review, stories, time, writer
