On JG Ballard's Must-Read Novels

(The Drowned World, Crash, Millennium People)

This was commissioned by the Guardian just before Christmas 2008, but not published before January 2009.

By that time, Ballard was already very ill with the cancer that ended his life.

Between the last piece I wrote for Time Out and this, I’d been to Barcelona to attend Kosmopolis 08, an annual literary festival. That year, it was accompanying a huge exhibition on Ballard under the title Autòpsia del nou mil*lenni. I was on a panel with Bruce Sterling and Will Self.

Whilst at the Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, where this took place, I’d met Ballard’s partner and collaborator, Claire Walsh. She was pleased at all the attention for Jim’s work, but it wasn’t hard to tell she was suffering through most of it.

We exchanged email addresses, and stayed in touch afterwards. She was well disposed towards me because I worked in the English Department at Birkbeck, where she was studying, and which she loved. She had also read and liked my novel deadkidsongs.

I let her know that I was writing something for the Guardian, and she said she’d look out for it.

When it appeared in print, I got a short email from her, thanking me on Jim’s behalf. It had given him a lift, she said. It had brightened them.

I couldn’t believe that, given Ballard’s achievements, something so small could matter. But it was the timing.

I replied saying how much I admired Jim, both as a writer and as a person (particularly as a father). And I said that there were passages in Miracles of Life which made me feel I could do with a great deal more of his tolerance, sympathy, optimism and sense of mischief. These qualities, I said, must be horribly tested.

Jim died that April.

The Drowned World (1962)
Crash (1973)
Millennium People (2003)

When I read JG Ballard, I go into a particular kind of trance. The effect of his books isn’t comparable to those of any other writer. His prose, right from the beginning, has a mesmerising pace, rhythm and decorum all its own. Even more remarkably, Ballard has established his own set of visionary locations. Plenty of other writers now fictionally venture into multistorey carparks, airport hospital wards, decaying hotels, but they do so in the knowledge that they’re trespassing on Ballard’s territory. He was here first; he was the pioneer — back when these places were seen as totally unliterary. What could possibly happen on a motorway embankment that was of interest?

Ballard’s first four novels, The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World, can be read as a series of variations on the global catastrophe novel. Some critics have discovered an elemental programme within the quartet: world-death by air, water, fire and earth. Whether or not this is the case, Ballard was definitely experimenting with different ends for civilisation. In the wake of his bestselling autobiographical novel The Empire of the Sun and his most recent autobiography, Miracles of Life, it’s easy to trace glib links between Ballard’s boyhood in a wartime Shanghai internment camp and the collapsed-then-resurrected ecologies and communities that so often feature in his novels. Ballard has always been remarkably chipper on the subject of his imprisonment. And, through the total destruction of normal human society, his invariably male heroes are able to find some sort of fulfilment.

The Drowned World is perhaps the most mesmeric of these four novels. It contains a series of hyperreal descriptions: a cityscape beneath waves, suburban swamps and lagoons. Too much contemporary art is compared with a state of waking dream, but in this novel Ballard really comes close. He’s always been a devotee of the surrealists (Max Ernst is a close companion-in-imagery), and in The Drowned World this works in synch with the hero Kerans’ quest to adapt and survive.

In mid-period Ballard, represented by Crash, the catastrophic collapse moves inside the characters’ heads. Guided by the monomaniac Vaughan, our hero enters a society-within-a-society — life as a sterile mating game in which first contact can be made only by car crash. Mechanistic paraphilia has replaced any sort of romantic love or genital sex. The human body is attractive only when seen within the intersecting frames of car door, seatbelt, steering wheel — preferably smashed and warped. The flesh comes to erotic life only once violated.

Of Ballard’s most recent novels, the most successful, in my opinion, is Millennium People, which redoes the collapsing society but in a comic mode. A middle-class revolution takes place within Chelsea Marina, an exclusive Thames-side estate. Unsurprisingly, the results are inept and farcical. Ballard’s writing, though still focused on the weird forms human normality can take, is gently tickled by our creative misdemeanours rather than awed by them.