A hard rain is falling on the suburban semi in Shepperton where JG Ballard has lived for half a century, imparting an eerie sheen to the ancient Ford Granada that lies beached at an odd angle in his drive.

Ballard is courteous and genial in a slightly donnish way. At 77, he takes his time assembling his thoughts, but they remain unflinching and provocative, expressed with the verbal tics of his colonial background. But time, the malleable stuff of his science fiction, is running out. After being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 2006, he sat down at his electric typewriter – “The computer age came too late for me” – and rapidly wrote his autobiography.

It is a remarkable story, told modestly and with great eloquence. If Ballard’s Shanghai years seemed like a fantasy to him, his subsequent life reads like even stranger fiction. His agenda to pin down reality led him to cut up corpses as a medical student and to provoke uproar by speculating on the links between sex and smashed cars in his novel Crash.

Arriving in Britain as a stranger in 1946, aged 15, he was shocked by the spectacle of “putty-faced” Brits behaving like a defeated race. “I think people have forgotten just how grim it was,” he says. “England was supposed to have won the war but showed very little sign of having done so.”

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Background

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Background

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At the Leys school, a liberal establishment in Cambridge where he boarded, he kept quiet about his wartime experiences. “There was one boy in my house who was an Auschwitz survivor. I never mentioned that I had been an internee under the Japanese because it seemed so trivial by comparison.” Ballard sneaked off to watch European and American gangster films in town. “I don’t think I was unpopular. I think I was regarded as a bit of an odd fish,” he concedes.

Believing that reason and rationality failed to explain human behaviour, he resolved to become a psychiatrist. “I already had my first patient – myself.” To this end he studied anthropology, psychology and pathology at Cambridge. For the next two years he dissected cadavers, trying to exorcise the memories of dead Chinese on Shanghai’s streets.

“Sometimes there would be the bodies of entire families that had perished during the night,” he recalls. “I took it for granted, but I knew there was something wrong about all this. Perhaps I sensed that we were like a pack of wolves destroying itself.”

The corpses he studied existed in “a kind of twilight zone between life and death” that was almost human, he reasoned. “Dissecting them was almost like stepping through a doorway into a different world where secrets were to be revealed.” He counts those years among the most valuable of his life.

In 1953 “Shanghai Jim”, the small boy who had gazed out of the shell of a Chinese fighter plane, had his shot at flying real planes in the RAF. While grounded by icy conditions at his flight training base in Canada, his science fiction writing took wing. Two years later he married a young woman called Mary Matthews – “tall, with a striking figure” – and settled down as a full-time writer after his novel The Drowned World established him in the New Wave movement.

Mary died of pneumonia in 1964, leaving him to raise their three children alone. Ballard has affectionate memories of Kingsley Amis’s moral support during this period. “He was a very likable and warm-hearted man and I owe him a lot,” he says, although his friend had “a mean streak” and disliked Ballard’s writing.

Empire of the Sun, based on his years in Shanghai, marked his breakthrough into the literary mainstream in 1984, and the film of the book was a huge success.

Ballard returned to Shanghai in 1991 in search of his younger version, and in his mind’s eye saw Jim walking down the street. With this reconciliation of his two selves came a realisation: “I had to accept that, far from that period of my life being an all-dominant experience, it was a huge illusion.”

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