J G Ballard, page 5 of 6

Brian Aldiss famously dubbed John Wyndham “the master of the cosy catastrophe”, and so damned him with an adjective. Now, whenever anyone writes about Wyndham, they dig that one up. “The essence of the cosy catastrophe,” Aldiss says in Trillion Year Spree, “is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off.” I can’t help feeling Aldiss’s scorn for Wyndham extended just as much to his readers — his many readers, I should say. This is what he says about The Day of the Triffids and Wyndham’s next novel, The Kraken Wakes:

“Both novels were totally devoid of ideas but read smoothly, and thus reached a maximum audience, who enjoyed cosy disasters. Either it was something to do with the collapse of the British Empire, or the back-to-nature movement, or a general feeling that industrialisation had gone too far, or all three.”

(There’s always an explanation for other people’s reading tastes.)

In Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia, John Clute takes the same view:

“And in 1951 came The Day of the Triffids, a tale that captured the insecurities of the middle-class English reader in the austerity years perfectly, and envisioned to a nicety the kinds of self-protective communities that would comfort that readership… The comforting implausibility of this outcome, along with the calm, analgesic style of the Wyndham persona, contribute to what Brian Aldiss called the Cosy Catastrophe.”

“Middle-class”, here, is used with as much a sense of derision, or at least belittlement, as “cosy” and “comforting”, which is, let’s face it, a very middle-class thing to do (trying to distance oneself from middle-class guilt through being tough on the middle classes). Perhaps it was Wyndham’s success — and the fact that his readership inevitably would have been larger than a dedicated SF readership (far less of a sin nowadays) — or perhaps it was that Wyndham’s revolt against the way things were didn’t go far enough for Aldiss, who was of the next literary generation, SF’s New Wave, that wanted the far more extreme revolutions of the 1960s. (For me, the best New Wave response to Wyndham’s novels is Ballard’s: he rewrote them, as The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Burning World, and the surreal The Crystal World, thus developing them, rather than merely critiquing them. Aldiss himself wrote a catastrophe or two. Greybeard was one I remember reading, but Hothouse (not a catastrophe), a far-future jungle Earth where pretty much every other plant is a triffid of some sort, is the novel of his I most enjoyed.)

I’ve never subscribed to the idea that reading should be a sort of mental & moral cold bath. I like reading for pleasure. I like things that “read smoothly” (which, to me, is evidence of craft), and don’t see why I shouldn’t. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I like my reading “cosy” and “comforting”, but I certainly wouldn’t go to a book for the purposes of self-torture.

The main “cosy” aspect of the “cosy catastrophe” is, I suppose, the fact that the catastrophe doesn’t completely destroy the world, but offers a chance to start again. As someone says in Triffids:

“The Earth is intact, unscarred, still fruitful. It can provide us with food and raw materials. We have repositories of knowledge… And we have the means, the health, and the strength to begin again.”

But this doesn’t mean there’s nothing but cosiness, comfort and having it your own way. The Day of the Triffids has an inviting air of adventure, of working out what you’d do in the hero’s place, of treating the world you know as a sort of imaginative playground for looting, shooting and uprooting; but it also has moments of real poignance, as when a young woman, blinded and now dying from disease, says:

“So futile — and it might all have been so different.”

Which perfectly captures, I think, the sense of a young life ending too early. And the beginning of chapter 13 strikes such a heartfelt note of loneliness, it’s impossible to believe Wyndham’s hero was simply having a good time in this de-populated England:

“Until then I had always thought of loneliness as something negative — an absence of company, and, of course, something temporary… That day I had learned that it was much more. It was something which could press and oppress, could distort the ordinary, and play tricks with the mind. Something which looked inimically all around, stretching the nerves and straining them with alarms, never letting one forget that there was no one to help, no one to care.”

Day of the Triffids is, I think, a truly good read. The opening two chapters have an almost classical perfection as openings go: the first, so tightly focused on the narrator’s immediate predicament (in a hospital bed waiting for someone to remove his eye-bandages, he starts to be aware from the sounds alone that something is deeply wrong), while the second chapter is almost pure exposition, as the appearance of the triffids is described alongside a potted biography of the narrator. After that, we’re set up and onto the adventure.

Triffids wasn’t Wyndham’s first book — he’d been published before the Second World War in the US pulps, under different names, and had had two detective novels published in the UK — but it was the first of his new approach, something he called “logical fantasy”, which downplayed the pulpier SF elements (all the wilder speculations about the triffids’ possible intelligence, for instance, are placed in the mouths of characters other than the narrator, allowing him to sound skeptical, and so reassure the reader they aren’t in the hands of a whacko).

The Kraken Wakes is a more disappointing book. Whereas the emphasis in Triffids is on the immediate survival of the characters and, later, the far-range survival of the human race, Kraken is mostly about the slow unfolding of the initial catastrophe (a lot of which is by secondhand report, distancing the reader from the action). As a result, it’s far more about something that’s only a minor note in Triffids: how reluctant people are to believe in anything outside their daily experience. In Triffids this comes out in the way most people belittle Bill Masen’s warnings about how dangerous the triffids are going to be in this newly-depopulated England. Kraken, on the other hand, is so much more about the media, and the way it, and its readership, mocks any suggestion they may be experiencing the opening stages of an alien invasion until it’s too late (and even then they still want to blame it on the Russians). So Kraken reads more like a satire on modern civilisation than Triffids’ straightforward adventure, and I don’t think Wyndham has the bite for satire. Also, in contrast to Triffids, Kraken is set in a still-socialised world, and feels bogged down in the highly straightjacketed manners of its time. So, in Kraken we get the rather dated spectacle of the protagonist’s wife having a sudden rant (about the need for the government to arm the people, of all things), then apologising for the display and taking herself off for a lie-down. Then a doctor is called, as though any sign of emotion were cause for medication.

What’s most surprising about Kraken is that, though it was published in 1953, it reads so much like a reaction to the 1956 Suez crisis, and the final end of the British Empire:

“We, a maritime people who rose to power upon shipping which plied to the furthest corners of the earth, have lost the freedom of the seas. We have been kicked out of an element that we had made our own.”

Triffids is the better book: yes, “smoothly written”, but not merely cosy. And the 1981 BBC adaptation had one of the spookiest TV theme tunes of all time (if you can call that eerie choral drone a tune).

Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust (1939) was one of J G Ballard’s favourite novels, and it’s easy to see why, considering the way its ending, in which a crowd outside a 1930s Hollywood premier turns into a rioting mob, serves up such a Ballardian mix of celebritised glamour and seething everyday savagery:

“New groups, whole families, kept arriving. He could see a change come over them as soon as they had become part of the crowd. Until they reached the line, they looked diffident, almost furtive, but the moment they had become part of it, they turned arrogant and pugnacious. It was a mistake to think them harmless curiosity seekers. They were savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and the old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment.”

The novel’s protagonist, Tod Hackett, is a would-be fine artist working as a designer for a film studio. He notes two types of people in the streets of Hollywoodland: those who live (or pretend to) the life of glamour, and the underclass of the un-glamorous and ordinary, come to California with the forlorn hope of fixing the misery of their lives with a dose of the glitz they see on screen, only to be disillusioned and betrayed:

“Scattered among these masquerades were people of a different type. Their clothing was somber and badly cut, bought from mail-order houses. While the others moved rapidly, darting into stores and cocktail bars, they loitered on corners or stood with their backs to the shop windows and stared at everyone who passed. When their stare was returned, their eyes filled with hatred.”

Hackett is making sketches for a painting to be titled “The Burning of Los Angeles”, in which that underclass of the ordinary finally revolts against those it envies, but the book’s ending implies that the reality of Hollywood will always be one step ahead of the most blatant attempt to satirise it.

Hackett himself is not immune to the glamour, caught as he is in a (mostly lustful) infatuation with a would-be starlet called Faye Greene, who explains to him matter-of-factly how “she could only love a handsome man and would only let a wealthy man love her”, thus ruling Hackett out on two counts. Instead, Tod gets to witness as Faye conquers one of the newly-arrived saps — one Homer Simpson, by name — inveigling her way into both his spare room and his wallet, having him buy her swathes of new, glamorous outfits so she can parade herself in front of other men and somehow win herself a film career. Homer — who, in his utter limpness of personality, is more like Hans Moleman than his actual Simpsons namesake — simpers through his every humiliation at Faye’s hands, and only lashes out, near the end, at the wrong person, in the wrong place.

Nathanael West worked as a writer in Hollywood at the time he wrote Day of the Locust, but before that already had an eye for the wasteland of early 20th century American life:

“Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio and newspapers. Among many betrayals, this one is the worst.”

This is a quote not from Day of the Locust, but one of West’s previous novels, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), in which a newspaperman, given the job of providing answers in the paper’s agony column, is overwhelmed by the sheer weight of human misery that pours in via the mailbags each day, as well as by the cynicism of his colleagues who treat it all as a joke, and who are themselves nothing but “machines for making jokes”. The likes of Miss Lonelyhearts, he’s told, “are the priests of twentieth-century America” and “Jesus Christ, the King of Kings, [is] the Miss Lonelyhearts of Miss Lonelyhearts”, but his work offers no real redemption, salvation or true substance.

West refers to the (male) protagonist of Miss Lonelyhearts throughout as “Miss Lonelyhearts”, something which puts a distance between his character and the reader, as though forcing us to take the part of his mocking peers. Day of the Locust‘s Tod Hackett, by planning his satirical painting, seems to be taking a similar stance towards the denizens of Hollywoodland, but nevertheless wonders “if he himself didn’t suffer from the ingrained, morbid apathy he liked to draw in others.”

Writing in 1993, Ballard called Day of the Locust “the best of the Hollywood novels”, even though we get to see very little glitz and glamour in its pages. It’s much more about being on the outside looking hungrily, angrily in. Which is perhaps the point about the paper-thin Hollywood West presents: all its glamour is an illusion, so everyone is on the outside, looking in. Paper-thin as it is, it has no inside.

I’ve just finished reading J G Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of Life, having reached the halfway point yesterday, then giving in to the urge to just keep reading. As it moves towards his declaration that he has been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer, it seems less and less like an autobiography, more like a final statement he wants to make to the world, an affirmation of his life, and a series of thank-you’s to the people who have meant most to him in his life. But this is no criticism at all.

Ballard spends most of the book on his early, and extremely formative, years in Shanghai, both as the only son of a wealthy family, and as a borderline feral teen in a prison camp during the Japanese occupation. He’s at his most poetic when describing the time he spent dissecting human cadavers in anatomy classes during the two years he studied for a medical degree. But he is at his most moving when writing in simple terms about how much raising his three children (who give the book its title) has meant to him. In a way, the second half of the book, and the latter half of his life, seems to have been a means of coming to terms with the amazing clash of near-decadent luxury, fantastic exoticism, casual brutality and too-easy mortality of those early years, as well as the tragically early death of his wife. The fact that he can speak so eloquently about the happiness he later found in the simple, human things of life proves how successfully he overcame those early, dehumanising influences. Following him on this journey is wonderfully moving. And this is from the pen of the man who plumbed the depths of human psychopathology in Crash — a man supposed to be “beyond psychiatric help” (as one early reader of Crash had it)? But I’m primed to sympathise with Ballard, as he’s one of my favourite writers, whose originality of mind and imagination, as well as his peerless prose style, have been a constant joy in my reading life. (If this sounds a bit elegaic, it’s only because I’ve caught the mood from his book.)

I have to admit, right away, that I’ve never read his most famous book, Empire of the Sun. Having devoured so many interviews with him (and, of course, having watched the film — yes I know it can’t be any sort of substitute), I haven’t quite been able to sum up the enthusiasm. (Reading Miracles of Life has only put the event off even longer, of course, as it covers a lot of the same ground.) And, as far as Ballard’s most notorious book is concerned, I’ve read Crash, and felt that while it was doubtlessly an amazing writing achievement, and although it was obviously a personal milestone for Ballard, a very necessary confrontation with the “dark powers that propelled the novel” (Miracles of Life, p. 242), it’s not a book I’m ever intending to re-read. As the most intense part of Crash is its prose, Cronenberg’s 1996 film struck me as curiously flat and literal, lacking the intense obsessive poetry that made the book worth reading at all. (The film only approaches the experience of reading the novel once, when, in the midst of a conversation between the two lead male characters, we get a seemingly inconsequential close-up of some details of the car they’re driving, as if James Spader’s mind has wandered, distractedly, to mentally caress the car’s wing mirrors.) No doubt this puts me beyond the literary pale, but my favourite Ballard novels are the earlier, more obviously fantastic ones: The Drowned World, The Crystal World, and, from his post-Crash period, The Unlimited Dream Company.

The Crystal World contains his best writing. Just reading the opening page never fails to impress me, again and again, with the precision and vividness with which Ballard uses words, and never fails to enthuse my own writing. The Crystal World is, aside from its incredible premise (in the most surreal of his early disaster novels, the world becomes supersaturated with time itself, and a slowly-spreading infection starts to crystallise everything, whether plant, animal, or mineral), a book infused with the conjuring up of light from language itself, in a way that means even the darknesses and shadows Ballard describes become somehow luminous. This is the second paragraph of the first page:

“At intervals, when the sky was overcast, the water was almost black, like putrescent dye. By contrast, the straggle of warehouses and small hotels that constituted Port Matarre gleamed across the dark swells with a spectral brightness, as if lit less by solar light than by some interior lantern, like the pavilion of an abandoned necropolis built out on a series of piers from the edges of the jungle.”

But the plot is weaker (a minor fault in such a poetic book) than in my favourite Ballard novel, The Drowned World. I was gratified, in reading Miracles of Life, to find Ballard was fond of film noir, because there’s something about the prose of The Drowned World that makes me feel it’s a mix of surrealist painting and film noir thriller. Ballard’s skill as a writer isn’t only in his use of language, but the ideas behind it. This description always strikes me as one of his most perfect:

“Looking up at the ancient impassive faces [of the giant iguanas], Kerans could understand the curious fear they roused, re-kindling archaic memories of the terrifying jungles of the Paleocene, when the reptiles had gone down before the emergent mammals, and sense the implacable hatred one zoological class feels towards another that usurps it.” (p. 18)

That “implacable hatred one zoological class feels towards another” is the most incredible idea, and one that could only be found in science fiction, yet it so perfectly captures something about the stony-faced malice of lizards. This description, from the same book, of starting a suited dive into a lagoon has always remained with me as startlingly evocative and vivid:

“The water was hotter than expected. Instead of a cool revivifying bath, he was stepping into a tank filled with warm, glutinous jelly that clamped itself to his calves and thighs like the foetid embrace of some gigantic protozoan monster.” (p. 104)

The Unlimited Dream Company — a book whose only disappointment is that the title seemed to me to promise a far different story — has to be one of Ballard’s strangest. A young man steals a light aircraft and promptly crashes into a river in Shepperton. Escaping the wreck, he finds he has gained a transformative power over the inhabitants of the suburb, which eventually leads to them being able to fly. He, however, cannot leave the area of his submerged plane. It seems, to my mind, to be the anti-Crash among Ballard’s novels, combating the “dark powers” of modern technological death-wish with the transformative powers of the human imagination. It is one of the few books to have directly entered my dream world upon reading it — only three days after finishing it, I was also teaching people to fly.

These are my favourite Ballard novels, but the book of his I’m fondest of is the short story collection The Disaster Area — or should that be The Four-Dimensional Nightmare — or perhaps it’s The Overloaded Man? Maybe I should just settle for that literary brick, The Complete Short Stories, which contains them all. But then there’s High Rise, the first Ballard book I read (I bought it because of the Hawkwind song), and Concrete Island, and his book of essays and reviews, A User’s Guide to the Millennium. Or even Miracles of Life…