This week, I’d like to share some stuff about JG Ballard.
He has been a big influence on many writers, including myself.
I met JG Ballard in 2006 when I went to his house in Shepperton to interview him for Waterstones magazine.
A fuller version of the interview appeared in Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with JG Ballard. But here’s what I took from that brief time in Shepperton.
Looking back, what Ballard said could hardly be more prescient. Scarily so —
As we were saying goodbye, after chatting for a couple of hours, J.G. Ballard said, ‘I feel like I’m in a witness protection programme.’ He was standing on his doorstep, looking out through the rain at the street where he has lived for the past forty-odd years. I mentioned the end of Goodfellas – Ray Liotta stranded on a suburban driveway. ‘I’ve always liked films about witness protection programmes,’ Ballard replied.
Little wonder. Ballard is one of the great witnesses of our times – and it’s not surprising, given what he’s seen, that he feels the need for sanctuary.
In his autobiographical novel The Kindness of Women, Ballard’s girlfriend says to him, ‘You always behave as if Shepperton only exists thanks to an act of will on your part.’ And throughout our interview, he gazed out through a gap in the curtains, seeming to check if it were still there.
When I’d first stepped through the door, he’d said, ‘Come aboard.’ And there was definitely something of the Ship’s Captain about him. Upright, formally informal, he keeps a weather-eye.
I drove out to meet him, of course. To visit the author of Crash, it’s the only way. Apathetic sunshine lit the Tarmac. Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’ played on the car stereo. And, inevitably, somewhere in the defiantly leafy suburbs, I got lost. But, at the same time, I knew exactly where I was. Ballard, through his fiction, has mapped every inch of my approach.
Graham Greene’s fictional territory eventually became known as ‘Greeneland’. No-one, as far as I’m aware, has come up with a similar word for Ballard’s world. And for good reason. Of all contemporary British writers, he is the one in whose territory – like it or not – we spend the majority of our lives. We are there when circling the M25, when awaiting our flight at Heathrow, when reading about celebrity plastic surgery and now, after Kingdom Come, when shopping. Rather than say ‘Ballardland’ it’s much easier just to speak of ‘Now’. Because in a series of extraordinary novels, Ballard has scripted Now more accurately than anyone else.
He also has an uncanny knack of seeing the future. The first chapter of Kingdom Come is called ‘The St George’s Cross’. It begins with three lines that may go down as the most perfect encapsulation not only of this novel, but of all Ballard’s work. ‘The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world…’ This inevitable violence is foreshadowed by a rash of St George’s crosses, overtaking the fictional Thames Valley town of Brooklands. Sound familiar?
When I spoke to Ballard, the day after the World Cup Final, he said, ‘Had you come here a week ago, every bloody shop in Shepperton had a large St George’s flag. Many of the houses around here had flags fluttering. Every other car had more than one flag. You know, you can’t help but think the excitement over the World Cup was about more than mere sport… I don’t say that it’s the first sign of a fascist takeover. But – ’
Politely, I begged to differ. One of the central themes of Kingdom Come is the soft fascism of consumer society. The word fascism is far from avoided; it is the crux.
Ballard conceded, ‘Maybe it is. I mean, the point is that people are obviously bored, and they are very dissatisfied with their lives, and I think it only would take a small push, and something rather unsettling might begin to happen.’
And ‘something rather unsettling’ does take place in Kingdom Come. At the heart of Brooklands, replacing the school, the town hall, the church and all the older civic meeting-places, is the Metro-Centre – a kind of über-Blue Water. The novel’s hero, failed advertising-man Richard Pearson, is brought to the Metro-Centre after his father is gunned down there in a seemingly random shooting.
Less detached than many of Ballard’s other protagonists, Pearson becomes deeply involved in Brookland’s society – or what remains of it. His main contribution is to mastermind the rise to popular power of chatshow host, David Cruise. All those St George’s flags are waiting for a reason to wave in earnest.
‘I think fascism it does need a leader. But the leader may take an unexpected form. And I suggest in the book that our equivalent of the ranting fuhrer is the cable-channel chatshow host. The thing about fuhrers and messiahs is that they always come out of the least expected places – deserts, usually. But of course the shopping malls and retail parks of 2006, England, are a desert by any yardstick you like to apply. I mean, consumerism itself is a vast desert. A desert without a single oasis, as far as I can see.’
All of this, however, was said in a tone of detachment rather than despair. Kingdom Come is a more sombre book than Ballard’s previous, Millennium People, but still full of deadpan aperçus and asides: ‘Wherever sport plays a big part in people’s lives you can be sure they’re bored witless and just waiting to break up the furniture.’
Kingdom Come is also, perhaps, Ballard’s most directly political novel. And he is quite open about how he hopes it will be read. ‘This is a warning. I’m trying to say “Dangerous bends ahead. Slow down.”’
And if his warnings, and others similar, are ignored, he is clear on the consequences.
‘I think it may be that in the future we’ll be dominated by huge masochistic systems. Soviet Russia was an example of this. I mean, people tolerated their own abuse because for some reason they wanted to be abused. Someone says in this book that the future is a system of huge competing psychopathologies. I’d say that was true of the 20th century. It sort of sums it up, in a way. So I’m not talking about an individual impetus that will drive the engine. This engine has been assembled, and will be started, by everyone, probably working unconsciously.’
I drove home, not along M3 but round the deadly smooth curves of a Ballard paragraph.
I've read snippets of Ballard. A story here and there. I've read Crash. I'm afraid to read more Ballard because I have an uneasy feeling it might infect my writing for the next decade.
What a wonderful experience and brilliant piece, Toby. In 2006 I worked on a South Bank Show about Ballard. I have a DVD copy somewhere and if I manage to find it I will make you a copy. He had incredible views of the now and yet also future, prophetic really. X