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Driving to Distraction

Nick Garrard

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For an aspiring writer, the rejection note is a rite of passage. At best, these demon haiku can crush hope from fifty yards; yet even the most mean-minded of replies has rarely met the high standards accorded one early draft of JG Ballard’s infamous novel, Crash:

‘Do not publish’ the note ran. ‘This author needs psychiatric help.’

The complaints didn’t stop there. On finding a publisher, the notorious novel, which explores a psychotic link between the car crash and the sexual urge, was met with trumpeting ire and calls for a blanket ban. Yet atypically, the ensuing row ran right to the end of the century. Censorship rows are nothing the twentieth century had already seen the Chatterley trials and great fuss kicked up over volumes like Lolita and Ulysses.Yet atypically, the ensuing row ran right to the end of the century. To this day, David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of the novel is banned from ever being screened in Westminster. Meanwhile, copies of SS Love Camp and I Spit on Your Grave remain freely available in a number of London outlets. Evidently, this most waspish of writers retains the ability to sting.

However, with the recent publication of his autobiography Miracles of Life, it becomes ever clearer how far Ballard has been absorbed into the mainstream. A swathe of glowing reviews and a serialisation on Radio 4, bastion of all things comfortably middle class, indicate that the perennial outsider is now regarded more as the errant uncle of the literary world – albeit, one with his own series of odd obsessions. How has he made the leap from the edge when so many of his early contemporaries remain mere cultural footnotes? Is this Ballard – war child, raconteur and family man – the same man who once described his life’s work as an attempt to ‘rub the human face in its own vomit’?

Evidently, he has come a long way since his name first appeared in the avant-garde science fiction magazine New Worlds. There, his complex, condensed fictions baffled and disgusted in equal measure. 

The Terminal Beach, a typical collection from this period, gives a clear indication as to why fame eluded him for so long. Each of the stories exists in its own peculiar space – not quite straight realism, yet without the familiar trappings of genre fiction. ‘12 chill splinters of unreality!’ proclaims the back cover of my old Penguin copy, an odd burst of hyperbole which comes closer to describing the peculiar contents than the ‘science fiction’ branding along the spine.

Among the stories, ‘The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon’ is a powerful tale of blindness rife with Freudian imagery, while ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ offers a portrait of domestic disharmony, which swiftly evolves into something far more disquieting. The collection’s first story, ‘A question of re-entry’, is a Conradian tale of crashed astronauts and cargo cults which stands poles apart from the final piece, ‘The Lost Leonardo’, a gothic oddity which might not feel amiss among the fables of Machen or Poe.

With a scope as broad as this, we cannot -maintain a grasp on Ballard: he eludes us still. His most “cult” work, The Atrocity Exhibition, is a masterpiece of strange invention and one which Will Self has called ‘the zenith of the experimental novel in English’. Beloved of Ian Curtis and William Burroughs, it has confused countless readers since first published in 1970. Ostensibly a short story collection, its fifteen chapters, each broken into single paragraph sections (or ‘condensed novels’ as the author has it), explore several of Ballard’s obsessions: chiefly Marilyn Monroe, the space race, JFK and the psychic implications of wall-to-wall reportage. In this collection, Ballard abandoned the structure of the conventional narrative, advising his reader that rather than reading from cover to cover, they were best advised to ‘simply turn the pages until a paragraph catches your eye’.

After years in the wilderness, it was Empire of the Sun that finally thrust him into the limelight. Winner of several awards, Booker-nominated and filmed by Steven Spielberg to Oscar-winning effect, it was a comparatively straight fiction when compared to the dystopian climes of his earlier novels. Empire was Ballard’s semi-fictionalised account of his childhood experiences in wartime Shanghai: lost by his parents, imprisoned and raised behind barbed-wire fences. The book’s success increased his renown, but for long-time fans its value went much deeper – here was the key to a new understanding of his work, a book which, in the words of Martin Amis, ‘retroactively humanised’ his writing. Ballard’s fiction has always erred -toward repetitious and Empire captured the origin of a number of images that appear throughout his work: downed aircraft, empty swimming pools and abandoned houses, all explained away as deep driven memories.

The world he described seems at once terrible and fantastical, almost too strange to be true. And so it proved: in his autobiography Ballard comes clean about the abundance of warped facts. His family, both his parents and a sister, were present throughout his time there, and while he depicted the camps as an unbearable struggle, other internees had approached them with a mid-century English verve. I already had an inkling of this: my grandparents were also interned there and had often bemoaned Ballard’s account. In Miracles, Ballard mentions productions of Gilbert and Sullivan run by sturdy Brits to keep spirits up (my grandfather, I have always been told, performed an exceptional Pirate King). It seems that even when mining his own experience, Ballard’s writing dwells in a secondary reality. 

Reputation firmly established, his fiction has since taken a turn towards the real world or, at the very least, an offshoot. Inhabiting hinterlands of the imagination, his later novels feel like broadcasts from an alternate space. Current obsessions lie within the strange, enclosed communities of the idle rich and the unleashing of buried, violent urges, key memes of the last century. He has often expressed his contempt for the polite social politics of the Hampstead novel, but his writing has always shown an interest in the bourgeoisie: from Vermilion Sands to Super-Cannes, the executives and rogue geographers stalking the corridors of his peculiar fictions are all resolutely middle class. Ballard explored this theme to greatest effect in Millennium People, one of his most recent works. Here, a disenchanted faction of Chelsea residents – academics, estate agents and advertising executives – band together in violent rebellion. In some of Ballard’s funniest prose, they bomb the Barbican and the totems of the South Bank, in protest against the stultifying boredom of everyday life. 

From our position at the turn of the twenty-first century it seems that, much like William Gibson, the future Ballard once predicted has caught up with him: 24-hour broadcasts, a shifting global climate and a celebrity culture of obsessive proportions have all become central to the modern condition. And with the publication of his autobiography Ballard also lets slip a terminal diagnosis – he is dying of cancer. In a few years, his entire body of work will be fit for academic scrutiny. The magnifying glasses will be out and a spiderweb of links perceived between the scattered poles of his canon. Until then, we must pick over the pieces ourselves and draw our own truths from the mercurial depths of this most unique imagination.

 

Ballard Quotes*

  1. ‘Sex times technology equals the future.’ – Corridor #5, 1974
  2. ‘Already we can see, a little sadly perhaps, the beginnings of a world without play.’ – The Guardian, July 31, 2004
  3. ‘Money is the original digital clock.’  – Kindness of Women, 1991
  4. ‘Guilt is so flexible, it’s a currency that changes hands, each time losing a little value.’ – Cocaine Nights, 1996
  5. ‘Catherine Austin stood in the doorway of Trabert’s office, watching the reflection of the television screen flicker across the slides of exposed spinal levels. The magnified images of the newsreels from Cape Kennedy dappled the enamel walls and ceiling, transforming the darkened room into a huge cubicular screen. She stared at the transcriptions clipped to the memo board on Trabert’s desk, listening to the barely audible murmur of the soundtrack. The announcer’s voice became a commentary on the elusive sexuality of this strange man, on the false deaths of the three astronauts in the Apollo capsule, and on the eroded landscapes, which the volunteers in the isolation tests had -described so poignantly in their last transmissions.’ – from ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1969
  6. ‘This place [Chelsea Harbour where his novel Millennium People is set] was designed on the drawing board, and the sociology was designed at the drawing board stage, before a single bucket of concrete was poured. I thought, it’s designed to be the perfect community of well-to-do people – but it feels like a stage set – and what would happen if some of these sets -collapsed, I thought: well, yes, that’s interesting – and that seeded the whole idea.’ – from an interview with Mariella Frostrup broadcast on Book Club, BBC Radio 4, October, 2003.
  7. ‘[L]iving out in Shepperton gives me a close-up view of the real England – the M25, the world of business parks, industrial estates and executive housing, sports clubs and marinas, cineplexes, CCTV, car-rental forecourts ... That’s where boredom comes in – a paralysing conformity and boredom that can only be relieved by some sort of violent act.’ – from an interview with Chris Hall for SpikeMagazine.com, 2006

 

* Quotes 1–5 from RE/Search Publication website: www.researchpubs.com