mewsings in May 2018

After High-Rise (1975), J G Ballard wrote one of his strangest novels, The Unlimited Dream Company. Published in 1979, it won the 1980 British Science Fiction Association award for best novel — which was, as the SF Encyclopedia points out, the only SF award he won — but, perhaps because it stands shadowed between the Ballardian monoliths of Crash (1973) and Empire of the Sun (1984), it’s a book that gets little attention, not least from Ballard himself, who rarely seems to have mentioned it in interviews — certainly nowhere near as much as The Atrocity Exhibition, to which it could well stand as a sort of opposite. It is, in a sense, his magical realist novel, his most outrightly fantastical. It’s also, compared to the novels that came before it, perhaps his first non-dystopia. But it doesn’t seem right to call it a utopia, either. Rather, it seems better to call it a sort of imaginative vision.

The narrator, Blake, is a young ne’er-do-well whose schooling and early attempts at employment are nothing but a series of increasingly bizarre and self-destructive failures:

“Whatever new course I set myself, however carefully I tried to follow a fresh compass bearing, I flew straight into the nearest brick wall.”

One morning, after an abortive and seemingly spur-of-the-moment attempt to murder his latest girlfriend, Blake steals a light aircraft (having picked up the basics of operating one while working as an aircraft cleaner at London Airport) and pretty soon crashes it into the Thames by Shepperton (which he calls “the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere”, and where Ballard himself lived for most of his adult life). Soon after emerging from the drowned aircraft (where he may have spent as long as eleven minutes trying to free himself, meaning he may actually have died underwater), Blake discovers that he cannot leave the town. If he approaches its borders they recede before him, meaning he can walk infinitely in any direction without ever leaving Shepperton.

He also learns he has begun to develop magical, even god-like, powers. The blood from his wounded hands has the ability to heal; he can transform himself, and others, into fish, birds, and animals; he can fly, and can give others the gift of flight, too. His bodily fluids — and it’s a novel rather full of bodily fluids — cause exotic plants to grow. His presence leads all sorts of birds to start appearing in Shepperton, from pelicans to penguins to parrots and condors. He eventually finds he can absorb people into his body, feeding off their existence within him while they reside there, awaiting release.

With so many miracles on show, he soon wins the people of Shepperton over, and it’s not long before, as in High-Rise, the commuters are ignoring their trains, doffing their clothes, and (unlike High-Rise) giving away all their possessions. Bank managers lay out the currencies from their vaults on tables for anyone to take, supermarkets and white goods stores abolish their checkouts.

The town comes to see Blake as a sort of messiah — as does Blake himself, who soon progresses, in his own estimation, to local god, and then to “the first god, the primal deity”. The only exceptions are the seven people who witnessed Blake’s crash and subsequent revival. (One of whom, Blake suspects, may have attempted to murder him, judging by the hand-shaped bruises on his body.) These seven, whom Blake comes to think of as his “Family”, often resist his orgies of transformation and flight, but they are the ones Blake most wants to transform.

Among their number is a widow, Mrs St Cloud, and a priest who dabbles in archaeology, Father Wingate (a father-mother pair whose names both mix sky/flight with religion). There’s also Mrs St Cloud’s daughter, Dr Miriam St Cloud, whose running of a local clinic is disrupted when Blake begins healing all her long-term patients. Stark, a young man who owns a nearby zoo and amusement pier, is the most immune to Blake’s wonders — when the whole town is giving away its possessions, it’s Stark who drives around collecting TV sets and washing machines, stuffing his pockets full of free foreign currency. Finally there are three children, a blind girl, a lame boy, and another boy with Down’s Syndrome. Although clearly affected by Blake’s crash, they’re almost shy when it comes to his attempts to include them in his town-wide transformations, as though they see a value in their disabilities that Blake’s easy cures and magical transformations into birds, fish, or flying humans would do away with. Blake’s relationship with the townspeople of Shepperton goes through dark patches — one of his festivals of free money and flight is about to swerve into violence at one point, and, oh yes, they later shoot him and dump his body by the town War Memorial — but ultimately it’s his relationship with these seven, his “Family”, that drives the novel in its strange, dream-like progression.

Ballard often said he was a moral writer — that his dystopias, despite the way they offered his protagonists a sort of inner fulfilment, were nevertheless meant as warnings — but it’s hard to see the moral in The Unlimited Dream Company, whose protagonist/narrator’s mix of self-deification and lack of self-recrimination often treads a line between the god-like and the infantile. The Blake who begins the novel with an attempt to murder his girlfriend is hardly a reformed character by the end, nor is he ever really challenged or taught any lessons. He comes close, several times, to crossing a line even a pagan god shouldn’t cross with Shepperton’s children, and it’s only because of a moment of distraction that he doesn’t go through with it.

Instead, the book seems to be a pure, if brutal, dream-like vision of transformation. Nothing matters, between its covers, but Blake’s, and Shepperton’s, ultimate liberation through flight. When things change, when Blake discovers a new power, or when the town turns either for him or against him, there doesn’t seem to be a particular reason for the change, as though these are ritual stages that have to be gone through rather than the results of cause and effect. At times, the transformation Blake seems to be offering is harsh, almost inhuman, and The Unlimited Dream Company, to my mind, sits alongside some of the more blatantly visionary writers about fantastical transformations, like Clive Barker, or the Robert Holdstock you find in the second half of Lavondyss.

Ultimately, The Unlimited Dream Company seems to work best as a dream or vision, an intense dose of imagery centred on flight, freedom, and transformation, and a literal rising above the everyday life of a suburban town.

It’s a book that took Ballard two and half years to write, something true only of Crash before it. And despite the seemingly effortless sequence of dream-like scenes in the novel, he found the writing of it “imaginatively exhausting”. At first, when you read one of Ballard’s few comments about the novel, it’s tempting not to take him entirely seriously when he says something like:

“In many ways I feel that, without realising it at the time, I was writing a piece of my own autobiography — that it’s about the writer’s imagination, and in particular my imagination, transforming the humdrum reality that he occupies and turning it into an unlimited dream company.”

(This is quoted in Interzone #106, but originally comes from Sam Scoggins’s 23-minute film, The Unlimited Dream Company — which is not an adaptation, but mostly an interview with Ballard, and well worth a watch.)

The more I think about it, though, the more the idea that this novel is a sort of inner autobiography fits. It’s an allegory of the imaginative writer’s life. It begins with a troubled and unconventional young man’s difficulties in finding a place in life (“the police harassment and third-rate jobs, the dreams running off at half-cock”). Then the crisis, the breakdown and break-away in one last desperate attempt at self-expression, trusting himself entirely to his purest impulse, “the simplest and most mysterious of all actions — flight!”

Then, realising he’s as trapped in Shepperton as an imaginative or visionary artist is trapped in the mundane world, he sets about doing his best to transform it and its residents through the power of his imagination, bringing his own particular magic into all these humdrum lives, elevating them, freeing them, changing them at the deepest level. And he passes through darkness, and through self-aggrandisement, and through death, but ultimately he’s freed from his old, ne’er-do-well self, that history of failure.

(And the character Stark could be seen as the sort of man Blake would have become without a visionary imagination — a peddler of cobbled-together amusements, a pier-attraction zoo-owner, doing his best to bring a little exoticism and fairground magic into people’s lives, but never going to amount to much.)

The Unlimited Dream Company is an expression of Ballard’s faith that “a powerful and obsessive enough imagination can reach, unaided, the very deepest layers of the mind” — a faith in the transformative powers of imagination, a kind of creative dream-manifesto. As I say, it could be seen as an equal-and-opposite to The Atrocity Exhibition, standing in the same relation to that earlier book as Alan Garner’s Stone Book Quartet stands to his traumatic Red Shift — a necessary and healing counter-balance to the earlier work’s images of dislocation and trauma.

I must admit I still don’t fully get the title, though.

The unnamed narrator of Anna Kavan’s 1967 novel Ice returns to his (unnamed) home country “to investigate rumours of a mysterious impending emergency in this part of the world”. But immediately he becomes gripped with an obsession for a young woman he was formerly infatuated with, a girl (she’s known throughout the novel as “the girl”) whose “timidity and fragility” made him want to “shield her from the callousness of the world”. Her rejection of him left him traumatised, and he still suffers from insomnia and headaches, the medication for which gives him “horrid dreams, in which she always appeared as a helpless victim”, dreams which are “not confined to sleep only”. Even as he drives to the house that the woman shares with her painter husband, he sees her before him, helpless, surrounded by encroaching cliffs of ice — the first of the novel’s many slips into a different sort of reality.

His visit is unsatisfactory — he hardly sees her, and when he does, she hardly speaks to him — and soon after, he learns she has fled the country. Ignoring his mission to understand “the coming emergency”, the narrator follows, ending up in an (unnamed) nordic country semi-ruined by war, where the girl seems to have been taken by a militaristic leader known as the warden. The narrator poses as a historian, looking for sites of potential archaeological investigation, and manages to convince the warden to let him see the girl. He wants, of course, to take her from the clutches of this overbearing, controlling man, but when he’s finally taken to her, she’s plainly afraid of him. When the political state in the country worsens, the warden flees, taking the girl with him. Again, the narrator follows.

All this time, the strangeness of the narrative is escalating. The narrator continues to have even more vivid, elaborate, and violent fantasies about the girl being endangered and his trying (and failing) to save her. In one, told that she’s dead, his main feeling is of having been “defrauded”: “I alone should have done the breaking with tender love; I was the only person entitled to inflict wounds.” He also finds, at times, his identity somehow merging with that of the warden; also, with the girl’s: “It was no longer clear to me which of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of one another.” Sometimes, his narration slips to include scenes in which he is not present, but the girl is, and in which he can somehow know her feelings. There’s a dreamlike blurring of boundaries between the narrator, the girl, and the warden who, at times, because they’re left unnamed, seem not so much fleshed out characters as roles being played, or, perhaps, fragmented aspects of an absent whole. Is the narrator projecting his fantasies of saving/“shielding” someone onto the young woman he’s pursuing, despite her obvious fear of him, or is the young woman projecting her fear of others onto the narrator? Whenever he does get to be with her, his actions are hardly those of a protector, more those of the sort of abuser who tells his victim, “I’m doing this for your own good.”

We never learn the origins of the “coming emergency”, only that:

“Day by day the ice was creeping over the curve of the earth, unimpeded by seas or mountains.”

At the same time, though, the world is descending into militaristic chaos, “a senseless mania for destruction” even in the face of the coming environmental annihilation. There are rumours about “a self-detonating cobalt bomb, timed, at a pre-set, unknown moment, to destroy all life”. It’s as if, the narrator says:

“An insane impatience for death was driving mankind to a second suicide, even before the full effect of the first had been felt.”

It all focuses on “the girl”, even though she makes only brief appearances (usually to flee from the narrator as soon as she can). Early on, we’re told the origins of her permanently terrified state:

“She was over-sensitive, highly-strung, afraid of people and life; her personality had been damaged by a sadistic mother who kept her in a permanent state of frightened subjection.”

She has a permanent “victim’s look”. Fear, we’re told, is “the climate she lived in” — a fitting word, “climate”, for an ecological disaster novel. And:

“The irreparable damage inflicted had long ago rendered her fate inevitable.”

Just as the world is heading towards extinction — through ice or nuclear fire, it hardly matters which — the girl is heading towards her own inevitable fate. The ice in the world echoes her inner numbness to her own condition, driven by a lifetime of emotional helplessness; the lack of names given to countries and characters echoes her disconnection from the world around her; the narrator’s unstable sense of reality echoes how “Systematic bullying when she was most vulnerable had distorted the structure of [the girl’s] personality”.

The characters, and the world they’re in, all become echoes of one another, reflections of one another. The boundaries between them are unstable, just as a child victim’s are with an abusive parent. Victims of abuse, reduced so utterly to powerlessness, take their abuser’s side in a last-ditch attempt at psychological survival. It’s quite possible Ice’s male narrator is in fact the girl’s own narrative voice, seeing herself, through another’s eyes, objectified and victimised because it’s the only way she can see herself and not experience that paralysing fear. (Which would explain the narrator’s initial trauma on being rejected by her — it wasn’t a love rejection, but a shattering of the self.) Meanwhile, the ice encroaches — the chilling distance between herself and her own emotions, freezing the world as she herself is frozen inside, forever trapped at the moment of her victimisation. (Hence, she’ll always be “the girl”, the victim of her mother’s bullying, and never a grown-up woman in her own right.)

And all this takes place in a world of power, possession and increasingly mindless violence, a totalitarian, male-dominated world on the brink of chaos, all too ready to pander to the girl’s “I deserve no better” siren call to be terrorised, victimised, brutalised.

This was Kavan’s last novel before her death in 1968, and it’s all too easy to read it in the terms laid out in biographical sketches, which include a lonely, neglectful childhood, a probably abusive early marriage, battles with heroin addiction (which began in the days when heroin was an over-the-counter drug; she was apparently persuaded to try it in the belief it would help her tennis serve) and depression. Even her name — adopted as a pseudonym, then taken on in real life from one of her own fictional characters — could be seen in the same terms as the self-distancing use of “the girl” in Ice: an attempt to divorce oneself from one’s unhappy past, an attempt to outrun one’s shadow, to numb the pain through dissociation.

I came across this book while looking for something similar-but-different to the last disaster novel I reviewed here, John Christopher’s Death of Grass, but it was a cover quote from J G Ballard that clinched me into reading Ice. Its vision of a world being slowly encased in ice echoes Ballard’s The Crystal World, but in Ice the examination of the human story in the face of worldwide disaster is deeper (though Ballard’s is also, curiously, a tale of love triangles being fought out while the world freezes).

Kavan’s novel, with its unnamed characters, unnamed countries, and never-fully-defined disaster, has a sort of Kafkan purity of fable to it, but at its heart there’s a weird, hallucinogenic feeling in which it’s impossible to fully separate any of the characters from one another, or from their unstable, violent, ecologically-endangered world — each seems a facet of the same central, frozen crystal, a prismatic illusion thrown off from the ice-hard heart of unhealed, perhaps unheal-able, psychological abuse that seeded this novel.

Chilling.