Visionary

I'm ashamed to say I've only read three of J.G. Ballard's visionary novels but I think I've always thought I'd read more, they'd be there for me. Well, as of today the author isn't, as Ballard died after several years with prostate cancer at 78 in England. Something interesting said about his work:

His influence stretched across a modern world that he seemed to see coming years in advance.

His dark, often shocking fiction predicted the melting of the ice caps, the rise of Ronald Reagan, terrorism against tourists and the alienation of a society obsessed with new technology.

As Martin Amis once said of him: “Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different – a disused – part of the reader's brain.”

The bands Joy Division, Radiohead, The Normal, Klaxons and Buggles all wrote records inspired by Ballard stories.

I read High Rise decades ago, which Stanley Kubrick should have made into a movie, the story of a fall of a great new modern building, new yuppies and better off increasing to the highest levels, which drifts into primordial chaos as the floors begin fighting each other. Like watching a slow motion car wreck, which is fitting with Crash (made into a sleek, disturbing flick by David Cronenberg) all about auto accident fetishists, and the second one I read about seven years ago, Concrete Island, about a businessman who crashes his car on the way home one weekend and ends up dropping out of civilization by not leaving that piece of highway for a very long time.

His most adventurous piece is evidently The Atrocity Exhibition (that title used by Joy Division) which is actually a number of separate pieces deconstruction and reconstructed together, including his riff on the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the main character's psychosis brought on by mass media causing his mental illness.

By coincidence I read his first novel, The Wind From Nowhere, published after short stories and other pieces in 1961, which has never gotten a lot of press. I found the vintage edition in a used book shop, and while his work certainly deepened, it's a wild ride, very hard to put down. There's a wind that's been building for a few weeks, growing every day, imagine a single wind blowing West to East around the world, non-stop, unidirectional. Pretty soon pieces of buildings start breaking off and water bodies move, flooding begins, the decimation of houses, the inability to go out doors without being swept away. Relentlessly building, as we follow several intersecting characters in different parts of England, desperate to find a safe place, no end in sight.

I can't wait to read my next Ballard book, and while his death is sad it'll surely renew interest in his books. And the movies from them -- Steven Spielberg's adaptation of his memoir, Empire of the Sun, about how he survived gamely as a child during the WWII Japanese invasion of Shanghai. There's a load of Ballard material here, albeit laid out all Anglo-techie, and a clip of him interviewed very cool montage style embedded with this obit.

I'm reminded of writing about the passing of Polish visionary writer Stanislaw Lem a little over three years ago, soon after I'd started this blog. It's a bummer to be marking the passage of time like, by losing another seminal literary hero. But, of course, there will be more.

Ballard knew how to commit and his visions were lucid. So considering his subject matter, the degree to which our veneer of civilization can easily strip down to primal savagery, meant he was transgressive, especially to his times. And I'd say there's a Fight Club because there was a Ballard and maybe a Caprica.

Dangerous prose, so highly readable.