What does J.G. Ballard see when he peers from the window of the modest
semi-detached house in which he has lived for more than 40 years? Martin
Amis, after visiting him at home in the Thames-side suburb of Shepperton,
suggested that Ballard was the kind of writer who could look into the quiet,
ordered streets around him and "see anything he likes". He was
right. Ballard is a writer for whom anything is possible - a prose
surrealist drawn to extremity and stylised representations of modernity, in
which ordinary experience is never what it seems: it is always capable of
being transformed into something remarkable.
The political philosopher John Gray - perhaps Ballard's most astute reader -
has written of how societies, in Ballard's view, are composed of fictions
whose lack of substance is brought home in extreme situations. His new
novel, Super-Cannes, is, like so much of his work, a study of a utopian
settlement which, for all the cool perfection of its controlled environment,
inevitably fragments under the strain of its own internal contradictions.
The setting is an apparently anodyne business park called Eden-Olympia,
located high in the hills above Cannes on the sunny Riviera. A group of
intelligent, classless multinationals live there in affluent seclusion,
locked away behind high security fencing from the hot struggles of the
locals patrolling the night time streets below - the hookers and pimps, the
North African drug pushers and out-of-work waiters, the tourists and
nouveaux-riches.
Recovering from an aviation accident, Paul Sinclair follows his young wife
Jane to Cannes. Jane is a doctor and she soon loses herself in the seductive
hyperwork atmosphere of Eden-Olympia, leaving her husband to wither into
aimlessness. The previous doctor, in whose apartment the couple lives, was
an amiable Englishman called David Greenwood. One afternoon, Greenwood
embarked on a murderous rampage through Eden-Olympia, killing 10 people
before turning the gun on himself.
Sinclair is disturbed by the apparent motivelessness of this spree killing -
and begins a gruelling quest to discover what pushed Greenwood into madness.
In the process, he becomes a kind of detective of the self: the more he
discovers about the sinister secrets of Eden-Olympia, the more he discovers
about himself - and the more lost and emptier he feels.
Ballard has long been drawn to the deviant potential of artificial communities
- a tropical island, a highrise apartment block, an expatriate settlement.
In Concrete Island (1974) - the second of a trilogy including Crash and High
Rise which explores the psychopathology of post-industrial society - a 35
year-old architect crashes on his way to work. He lands on a traffic island
below three converging motorways. The days pass without anything happening:
he is trapped on his island of "seething grass", marooned in a sea
of concrete and steel, living in a condition of ontological shipwreck.
The theme of urban alienation is developed further in High Rise (1975), in
which the tenants of a luxury apartment block become warped by the synthetic
perfection of their environment: the soporific hum of air conditioning, the
artificial warmth and soft sighs of the lift. As order breaks down, as it
must in Ballard's dystopian satires (hell is always present in the dream of
paradise), the tenants reveal their capacity for depravity.More recently, in
Cocaine Nights (1996), the plot of which resembles this new novel, groups of
British expats on the Costa del Sol are corrupted by limitless leisure,
sliding into crime and debauchery amid the "memory-erasing white
architecture".
But it is in Crash - faithfully filmed by David Cronenburg - where Ballard's
vision of the apocalyptic marriage of deviance, technology and violent death
is most fully realised, where his signature cool, glazed prose is refined.
It is hard to think of a more willfully skewed (and prescient) book; the
original editorial reader at Jonathan Cape was so disturbed by the subject
that she wrote: "The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help".
From an early age, growing up in wartime Shanghai, James Graham Ballard had a
childhood as surreal as anything dreamed up in his fiction. As a detainee,
between the ages of 12 and 15, in Lunghua prison camp in Shanghai, he
watched as the occupying Japanese decapitated Chinese soldiers, as the
streets of Shanghai were bombed by low-flying aircraft and as his fellow
internees were brutalised. By the time he arrived in England, after the war,
he had the sense that "life is just a stage set: the whole cast and
scenery can be cleared away at any moment. This gives a surrealist edge to
existence, and led you to think that there must be a truth to all of this.
But where to find it?"
His heightened sense of the precariousness of life was reinforced when, in
1964, two years after the publication of his first important novel, The
Drowned World, about a futuristic London destroyed by global warming, his
young wife died suddenly of pneumonia during a family holiday in Spain.
She was 34. The meaninglessness of her death haunts Ballard's fiction. It
underpins his obsessive search for meaning in a world long since forsaken by
God. As Wilder Penrose, resident psychiatrist at Eden-Olympia, says when
discussing the accidental death of his father in an accident in Beirut, "one
of those pointless deaths that make the rest of life seem a complete mystery".
Death, like the world itself, seems always pointless in Ballard's fiction.
He began publishing in the early 1960s, mostly short stories for specialist
science fiction magazines, in which he ignored the standard concerns of the
genre - space travel, the far future - writing instead about inner space, a
subterranean realm of unconscious motivation and inner disturbance. These
fictions had a powerful clairvoyance: Ballard foresaw a world in which
television images of fame and death were to become all-powerful, a world in
which capitalism would stimulate desires that could never be fulfilled and
celebrity would become the defining interest.
The near future, Ballard once wrote, provides a better key to the present than
does the past, and much of the action of Super-Cannes takes place in an
unspecified present, which, at the same time, offers a flavour of what the
future of Euro-hypercapitalism may hold.
Ballard is not a didactic writer. His fiction dispenses with any recognisable
moral framework and has no overt political message to convey. He understands
that all schemes to remake the world - environmentalism, socialism - are
doomed to failure. Instead, as John Gray says, his achievement is to have
communicated what individual fulfillment might mean in a time of nihilism.
Reading the fiction of J.G. Ballard is a peculiarly enriching experience.
Every sentence he writes is absolutely characteristic. His novels, at their
best, resemble a series of surrealist tableaux. The motifs in his work are
abandoned runways, drained swimming pools, crashed cars, drowned cities,
overlit motorways - and they are as unforgettable as your mother's face.
"When I began to write, Britain was beginning to change," he told me
when I visited him in Shepperton. "The supermarkets were arriving,
motorways were being built, we had television for the first time, the first
jet planes. We had the beginnings of a consumer culture. I became aware of
these huge undercurrents flowing through our lives and wanted to reflect
them." And reflect them he did, creating in the process a body of work
that is richer and more imaginatively daring than any other post-war British
writer. Now, at the age of 70, he has turned his penetrating gaze to the
first years of the new century - and what a remarkably strange place the
world can seem when seen through his eyes.
