JG Ballard: 1930-2009

“Soon it would be too hot. Looking out from the hotel balcony shortly after eight o’clock, Kerans watched the sun rise behind the dense groves of giant gymnosperms crowding over the roofs of the abandoned department stores four hundred yards away on the east side of the lagoon. Even through the massive olive-green fronds the relentless power of the sun was tangible. The blunt refracted rays drummed against his bare chest and shoulders, drawing out the first sweat, and he put on a pair of heavy sunglasses to protect his eyes. The solar disc was no longer a well-defined sphere, but a wide expanding ellipse that fanned out across the eastern horizon like a colossal fire-ball, its reflection turning the dead leaden surface of the lagoon into a brilliant copper shield. By noon, less than four hours away, the water would seem to burn.”*

I’d planned to write something different this week. It was, probably, going to be about lager-sticky, darkened floors, jangly guitar riffs and sudden flashbacks to ten years ago, but then as I wasted time by lurking around the BBC News website on Sunday afternoon, still feeling a like a donkey had kicked my liver out during Stu’s stag do, I read that JG Ballard had died.

And suddenly silliness with too much weak-warm lager sloshing over the rims of compressible plastic pint pots no longer seemed important, relevant or even vaguely fucking interesting. Because Ballard was important, relevant and extremely interesting. He was important to me, he should have been important to you and he was important to literature with every subversive nod he made.

Besides, it felt serendipitous. Barely two hours earlier I’d found myself in an ever-so slightly Ballardian landscape. I’d been driving down the M40, back to the hub of London from the gentile neatly spired horizon of Oxford. The alcohol percentage rate of my blood may have been a little high given that my body had finally given up at four-thirty in the morning and the sun was blistering across the asphalt and metallic paints, shimmering as though tinted through water. I wanted to lower the sun-visor, but given that the damn thing had broken off in my hand the week before, couldn’t. Instead, I decided to leave the road whilst I could still see.

So, I sat outside the new Beaconsfield services, perched on the unblemished wooden picnic tables rubbing my inexplicably throbbing upper ribs and slurping at a mushed banana-based smoothie. The red canopies offered insufficient shelter to the half dozen people sunglassed up like a travelling mafia convention drinking bad coffee and stuffing themselves with fried chicken and chocolate dripped pastries. The automatic doors back inside sprung open like a bear trap whenever anyone got within two feet, but because they swung outwards rather than across they nearly collided with every scampering, piss-desperate urchin.

The picnic tables were around the back of the glass and steel glided complex, away from the ranks of parked indenti-kit cars, away from the odour of spilt diesel absorbing into the Shell forecourt and away from the dull roar of the crawling traffic that routinely trid to escape the city on a Friday night before being sucked back its vortex on a Sunday afternoon.

I stood up, flipping my empty bottle into an already over-flowing and over-ripe bin, and ambled over to the rickety pine viewing point. I looked out, viewed upon, the beige brown mud slopes like the discarded lesions from a motorised digger dropping down to the pond. “Danger!” The red sign howled. “Deep Water!” The pool looked as though a deer had died in it twice over the night before.

I sneered to myself. I wanted to go home, but for the time being that was impossible.

“Forgetting the Jaguar, I walked down the ramp and followed the trio as they set off for the underpass. The Paris express was leaving the station, passengers standing at the windows of the couchettes, their cars stacked on the transporter wagons at the rear of the train. I entered the tunnel as the wheels bit into the steel, a noise like pain through which the silver-lipped child walked and skipped.”

“...’They couldn’t believe that a madman with a rifle was walking into offices and shooting people dead. Their moral perception of evil was so eroded that it failed to warn them of danger. Places like Eden-Olympia are fertile ground for any messiah with a grudge. The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.’”**

Ballard has often been called a science-fiction writer. More unusually, just as I switched the TV off on Monday evening I heard Jon Snow say 'Coming up, we’ll be asking Martin Amis whether JG Ballard was the last, great writer to be a product of the second world war.'

Both are true, yet neither are.

Ballard wrote science fiction in that he wrote about possible tomorrows and by that I mean literally tomorrow. He wasn’t interested in a far flung future of space ships, lasers and aliens, for him the future was happening now in amongst the concrete spires of the brutalist architecture, the artificiality of the lives lived indistinguishable from the fakery of film sets, the near-collapsing of prudish social barriers. The future was in our heads, yet Ballard’s head was dominated by the years he spent as a child in an internment camp in Shang-Hai.

He wrote so many things before anyone else. His second novel, The Drowned World, told of a land flooded due to the melting of the icecaps and of the people left in the upper levels of the submerged London department stores. This was a Global Warming novel in 1963, but still its primary concern was the mental fragility of the central characters.

Ballard wrote himself into both his past and our futures. This was helped by a large number of his leading men being called Jim, or James or Jamie or some other variation. Yet, he seemed unable to avoid either fictionalising the truth, or splicing fantasy with reality. Even with Empire of the Sun and the Kindness of Women he was adamant that they were no more than semi-autobiographical at a push, even though the latter featured a novelist whose wife died tragically young, who lived in Shepperton, who courted controversy with a novel about the erotic nature of car crashes and whose work about growing up in a Japanese internment camp was adapted by Steven Spielberg into a movie staring Christian Bale.
The lines had disappeared.

As I try to write about the edge of the possible end, about tension and hate and fear, back in March I wrote scenes about a protest march heavily dealt with by the police, where a man was accidentally killed and a woman slapped across the face on live broadcast camera. Whenever we turn the TV on we can never be sure whether we’re watching actors or real people acting out a fantasy of their own terrible imaginations of populist entertainment, as we appear to slip further into a world of instant media and pleasure, of celebratory politics, of wilfully harmful self-indulgence where the dead of the past can only growl in our ears it seems to me that we’re all living in Ballard’s head now.

“Below the bows of the Arrawa a child’s coffin moved on to the night stream. Its paper flowers were shaken loose by the wash of the landing craft carrying sailors from the American cruiser. The flowers formed a wavering garland around the coffin as it began its long journey to the estuary of the Yangtze, only to be swept back by the incoming tide among the quays and mud flats...”***



* The Drowned World
** Super-Cannes
*** Empire of the Sun

DavidMarstonWrites wholeheartedly recommends The Drowned World, The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women, Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and Millennium People. Go read.