J G Ballard, page 6 of 6

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…

In the words of Futurama’s dithery Professor Farnsworth, “Good news, everyone!” — apparently, I am incredible. At least, I am according to this rather fatuous report, “Oops — I Read It Again!” (link from Neil Gaiman’s blog).

Why am I incredible? (You read my blog, yet have to ask?!) Because, it seems, I’m part of a rare 13% of the reading population — not just that 77% of it who admit to having “enjoyed a book* so much that they’ve gone back to read it again” (I’m not sure why “book” gets an asterisk — perhaps it’s a term that needs a more precise definition for the sort of people who read a site with a name like booktrade.info), but I’m part of the 17% who “have re-read a favourite tome more than five times” (surely not all of them were tomes, you lazy journalist, you — try scratching your head a few times before reaching for the thesaurus!)

Alright, so maybe reading a book — or several, I’ll not get into specifics yet — five times or more is odd, but surely it’s not “incredible”? But that’s just the word-geek in me getting picky. (To show how picky I can get, I also wonder why the report gives “C. S. Lewis” a full-stop after each initial, “J. K Rowling” only one, and “JRR Tolkien” none.) What makes this all the more distressing is that this is a report, I assume, from some sector of the book trade itself — as if the trade were so assured the wares it sells are so deeply worthless that reading them even once, after buying them, were to take things a bit far. (Certainly true in the case of sleb biographies and their like — maybe that’s the special meaning of book-with-an-asterisk I was looking for.)

Now that my incredible nature is out in the open, I might as well be frank about it. Not only do I habitually re-read books, I tend to regard reading a book for the first time as merely an opportunity to decide whether it’s worth re-reading — the re-reading bit being, for me, where the fun really starts. I tend to only keep books if I plan to re-read them at some time.

I haven’t always been like this. I used to be un-incredible, at least most of the time. (Except as a kid. All kids demand re-reading of the books they like. They’re not stupid.) I can’t actually pinpoint when my incredible, perhaps even mythical, status kicked in, but aside from re-reading favourite Doctor Who novelisations (which, at one point in my life, were all I read), I tended to read books only once. What happened was something like this: I kept buying new books and finding they were bad. After a while, getting distressed that I hadn’t read anything good for a while, and worried that it was me that had gone wrong rather than the hallowed publishing industry, I decided to revisit a book I had enjoyed, just to make sure. To my relief, I found I enjoyed it even more. And then, perhaps, other new approaches to this whole business of “reading books” (that’s books-without-asterisks) started to suggest themselves. Such as the idea that books which have been around for a long time, and which have continually been published and read for decades, if not centuries, might actually be better than new books. Classics, as they’re sometimes called, even by people without thesauruses. This was when I started reading (and re-reading) books like Moorcock and Cawthorne’s Fantasy: 100 Best Books and Horror: The 100 Best Books edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, and doing bizarre things like frequenting secondhand bookshops.

I know I’m probably still in a minority to re-read at least as much as I first-time read, but I do genuinely find it more pleasurable to re-read a book. Perhaps this is in part because I am, by nature, rather untrusting and over-critical as a reader. I want to know a book is worth investing in before I really go for it 100% in the reading — but if I am untrusting, it’s only because I’ve read so many bad and disappointing books that I’ve ended up that way.

The main objection to re-reading a book is that there’s no point because you know what’s going to happen. But, to me, knowing what’s going to happen not only doesn’t matter, it actually makes it better. Exposed to stories as much as we are, we’ve all developed enough of a “story sense” to second-guess where a story is going anyway, and the real pleasure of a twist-in-the-tale is not so much the twist itself, as how skilfully it’s handled. My two most recent re-reads are both minor books by favourite authors — Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami, and The Violet Apple by David Lindsay. The first time I read Sputnik Sweetheart was when I’d just discovered Murakami. At the time, I’d only read his massive (genuinely tome-like) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and in comparison found the slim Sputnik Sweetheart a bit disappointing, though with a strikingly weird bit in the middle (where a young woman gets stuck at the top of a Ferris wheel for the night and has an experience that turns her hair completely white), mainly because I wasn’t sure how to understand the end. Re-reading it, knowing how it ended, everything fell into place and made sense, and I had time to relax and understand other things about the book, like how each of the three main characters faces the same sort of strange crisis, but one evades it, one falls before it, and one — maybe — triumphs. With The Violet Apple, I found that knowing what was going to happen at the end only made the build-up much more poignant and emotionally powerful. (That’s how tragedy always works. Macbeth’s downfall was only a surprise for Macbeth himself.)

Another possible peculiarity of mine comes into play here, and this is to do with re-reading books by certain authors. The more you read of an author’s work, the more you get to understand them, and the more you get out of reading them. The first time I read the David Lindsay book, The Violet Apple, I was still under the spell of his most famous and impressive book, A Voyage to Arcturus, and so I read The Violet Apple with that other book in mind. But The Violet Apple is a very different book. It’s very un-fantastic, whereas A Voyage to Arcturus is almost nothing but fantastic; it’s also very human, whereas A Voyage to Arcturus is starkly inhuman. A Voyage to Arcturus could never contain a sentence such as “She could not bear that awful family loneliness and unsympathy”, but The Violet Apple does and, knowing Lindsay to be capable of writing such a sentence, I will in future re-read A Voyage to Arcturus slightly differently.

You don’t listen to a favourite song only once, do you? Why should books be any different, just because they take more time to re-experience? Human beings are memory-loving creatures. We treasure our experiences and go back over them, in our heads, again and again. Sometimes we do this to understand the experiences better, sometimes it’s just because revisiting them is so enjoyable. The reading of a book is an experience just like any other, and the reasons for doing it can be just the same.

To end off, a not-necessarily-complete list of books I’ve read four times or more (with no explanations or apologies — though, to intensify my weirdness, I’ll say that at least two in this list are books I’ve re-read straightaway after reading them for the first time): Moving Zen by C W Nicol, The Belgariad by David Eddings, A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, The Outsider by Colin Wilson, The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula Le Guin, Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, The Influence by Ramsey Campbell, The Drowned World by J G Ballard, V for Vendetta by Alan Moore & David Lloyd… Not to mention the countless short stories I’ve re-read many more times than four or five. Short stories are, after all, so much more re-readable. But simply reading short stories nowadays is enough to commit you to a very dark and dingy corner of the asylum reserved for book-readers. Catch you re-reading the things, and they throw away the key. Before you eat it, or do yourself an injury with it or something.

Comment imported from the old version of Mewsings:
Gavin Burrows

Hi Murray, My response here!

http://lucidfrenzy.blogspot.com/2007/12/time-to-stop-consuming.html

I read Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho without being aware of any of the controversy surrounding its release. My reaction to it was similar to how I felt about J G Ballard’s Crash: an incredible writerly achievement, but not a book I was ever likely to re-read, not just because of the extreme subject matter, but because neither book had enough story to justify its length. (I think Ballard happily admits Crash was a short story extended to novel length, as a sort of balance to the novel-squashed-into-a-short-story approach of his “condensed novels” from The Atrocity Exhibition.) Of the two, I enjoyed American Psycho slightly more, as there were brief hints of real human despair in the isolation of its protagonist, despite the fact he was a monstrous serial killer. It also had its funny moments, which can’t exactly be said of Crash.

Having said this, I’ve read most of what Ballard has written, and am slowly filling in the gaps, but I wasn’t tempted by any of Ellis’s other novels till his latest, Lunar Park, which returns to horror territory. Lunar Park reads very much like a Stephen King novel. The main difference is that instead of (as with King) the narrator being an “average Joe” family man who just happens to be a writer and who gets mixed up with supernatural events, Ellis’s protagonist is more the rock-star type of celebrity author whose lifestyle few of his readers, I suspect, will be able to identify with. In fact I found the narrator’s pampered lifestyle something of a put-off near the start of the book, and it was only because the narrator was so personable, so open about his many failings, that kept me going. He was often quite funny, too.

In a neat link with Crash, where the protagonist was called Ballard, Ellis’s protagonist in Lunar Park is called Bret Easton Ellis, and seems to have lived a life similar to that of his creator. He has, for instance, written a much talked-about book called American Psycho. The opening chapter, summarising his life so far, could well be a satirised version of Ellis’s own rise to fame — I’ve no idea of the details of Ellis’s life. It certainly acts as a good start to the novel, with enough of a whiff of metafiction to pacify the genrephobic among its readers.

In the novel, Ellis (the narrator) has just been shocked into acknowledging the total emptiness of his drug-addled life by the lonely death of his estranged father. Trying to quickly patch in some stability and meaning, he marries an ex-girlfriend Hollywood actress with whom he fathered (or didn’t) a son he previously refused to acknowledge. Fatherhood, however, is not a role he’s prepared for. Three months into the marriage, he has barely connected with his son, is in serious “couples counselling” with his wife, and the family dog thinks — knows — he’s a fraud. Odd things start to happen. He’s been receiving a series of blank, anonymous emails from the bank where his father’s ashes are locked away in a deposit box (against his father’s wishes). The house where he lives seems to be spontaneously changing colour, and the furniture is rearranging itself. Worst of all, he meets several people who seem overly reminiscent of characters from his own fiction, one of whom may be Patrick Bateman, the serial killer from American Psycho. Kids have been disappearing in the neighbourhood.

This first half of the novel is entertaining, mainly because of the dry comedy in the narrator’s estrangement from his family, and the sheer weirdness of the over-medicated, sterilised & psychoanalysed lives of the wealthy suburbanites and their unfortunate children. It’s as the novel starts to descend more firmly into genre territory, as the genuinely weird events become more and more obviously supernatural, that the book loses its charm. The easy flow of humour gives way and Ellis (the author) loses his style. At moments of horror the flow breaks down completely and we get nothing but single-sentence paragraphs for pages at a time:

It was tall and had a vaguely human form, and though it was skeletal it had eyes.

Rapidly my father’s face was illuminated in the skull.

And then another replaced it.

Clayton’s.

I was stunned into rigidity. (p 401)

The simple statement of fact can be quite chilling when applied to moments of supernatural horror — Sheridan LeFanu uses it brilliantly in some of his fiction (“his throat was cut across like another mouth, wide open, laughing at her; she seen no more, but dropped in a dead faint in the bed” from Ghost Stories of the Tiled House) — but when it’s the only device, when we get no dynamics or contrast with passages of greater length, the constant thud of short sentences becomes a rhythmic jolt breaking you out of the dream-state the book ought to be working to keep you in. On top of this, the actual details of the novel’s various hauntings are so varied that there isn’t any focal point, nothing the reader can build their own expectations and anxieties on. You don’t feel, as you do with Lovecraft, that there’s a unifying idea behind it all (even though it turns out there is).

It’s a shame, because the start of the book was really enjoyable, and the ending managed to achieve a satisfying emotional resolution — but this was largely thanks to the story of what happens to the narrator’s son, which, although it is only a subplot compared to the main supernatural events, is far more affecting and interesting, and would have made a better book on its own. (Something akin to a reverse of Ballard’s novella Running Wild, perhaps.)