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enjoys this as a professional writer, but as a knowing
extract from The Kindness Of Women shows, he has an
instinctive feel for his core readership. This is Ballard
describing the audience of an aversion therapy film at
the Rio film festival: “…they gazed at the screen with
the same steady eyes and unflinching expressions of
the men in the Soho porn theatres, or the fans of certain
kinds of apocalyptic science fiction.”
It seems that the “invisible literature” that he has
written about, and which acts as compost for the mind,
increasingly comes from the internet. Ballard doesn’t
have a PC himself but his girlfriend, he says, supplies
him with sites that might interest him: “She is a keen
net surfer, she’s constantly giving me fascinating stuff
that she’s printed off. Extraordinary articles. Some really
poetic, touching stuff. There’s one site that we first
visited a year ago. It’s by these people at a bird sanctuary
in Norfolk who have been tagging ospreys with
radio transmitters. They’ve been tracking their flights
to and from their winter ground, an island off Ghana or
somewhere, and they show maps of the routes taken by
each bird flying across Europe and the Mediterranean,
some of them detour for years before returning to this
bird sanctuary. Watching all this is deeply moving. It
lets another dimension into your life.”
Flight as a metaphor for transcendence occurs in Ballard's
work passim, and he has described in The Kindness
Of Women how his own obsession with flying,
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
which had started in Shanghai, had lead him to become
an RAF trainee fighter pilot in Canada. “Flying is a
very strange experience, it’s very close to dreaming,”
he says. “The normal yardsticks, the parameters of
our movements through space, are suspended. You’re
travelling at 150mph, but if you’re 1,000ft up you’re
not moving at all. Likewise, you can be travelling quite
slowly coming in to land, yet you seem to be hurtling
along like a Grand Prix car. The problem with light
flying is that it’s very unstable and dangerous and also
very noisy, there’s hardly any time to think.”
So, it’s a transcendental experience for him? “Yes,
there’s no doubt about that. When I drive up to London,
I go by London Airport and I always get a strange kick
out of watching those big planes taking off and coming
in to land. An empty runway moves me enormously,
which obviously says something about my need to
escape I guess.”
If Ballard’s interest in this bird sanctuary website
seems apposite, then consider another of his favourites:
“There’s this group that got into a disused American
nuclear silo. It’s wonderful! You’re taken on a tour and
you can choose alternatives. ‘Would you like to look at
the missile control room?’, ‘Would you like to see the
sleeping quarters?’. It’s straight out of the stuff that I
was writing about all that time ago.
“Sites such as these feed the poetic and imaginative
strains in all of us who have been numbed by all the
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