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He says that he’s always been interested in content
over style, even though he’s arguably our best stylist.
“I don’t know if I am actually,” he says uncertainly,
before warming to his theme. “I just want to push the
message across. I don’t sloganise a political message
but the sort of images that have appealed to me over
the years – all the drained swimming pools, abandoned
hotels, the strange business parks, gated communities
and retirement complexes – these are what I want to
convey, the peculiar latent psychology waiting to
emerge into the daylight. That’s what I’m trying to do.
Look at the world and see its latent content. I treat the
external world as if it was a solidified dream.”
Ballard means this to apply to his life as well as his
fiction: “With all the blandishments of advertisers and
politicians, everyone is trying to sell you something.
What are they really selling? What is the fashion industry
really selling? Not just a new frock or a new pair of
trainers, it’s selling something more than that.”
Super-Cannes involves a world where work is play
and recreation doesn’t exist. Is writing, for Ballard,
more work than play? “It’s part and parcel of the way I
live. I mean, it’s not an extraneous activity. There’s no
sort of office where, as it were, I say ‘right! I’ll have a
cup of coffee and go through the day’s post’ It isn’t like
that anymore.”
Ballard continues to be seen as a writer’s writer, his
fiction a succès d’estime (Empire of the Sun notwith-
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
standing), so it’s odd that at 70 Ballard still hasn’t had
much of anything in the way of gongs. Germaine Greer
has said that he is “a great writer who hasn’t written a
great novel”. There might be something to this, that it’s
his entire body of work that we should be assessing,
not the individual novels. One can imagine that for Ballard
it’s going to be like a great director or actor never
receiving an Oscar for an individual film, but getting
given one for lifetime achievement. How apposite that
it seems we will be only retroactively able to acclaim
his work in this way.
Of course, Ballard has always disdained or been uninterested
in ingratiating himself with any kind of literary
social scene. So maybe his lack of a public profile
is partly a function of this. Plus the fact that he chooses
to live in Shepperton (that locus of the twin Ballardian
obsessions of flight and imagination, with its proximity
to Heathrow and the film studios), out at the very
edge of west London. He’s unlikely, for example, to
be offered a South Bank Show after his comments last
year about Melvyn Bragg’s dumbing down of the arts.
And although he’s transcended the sci-fi genre in which
he started (and transformed it) it’s hard to imagine him
being particularly bothered about it. In this particular
phase of Western literature, one of autobiography, perhaps
a novelist of ideas, and rather outré ones at that, is
simply unpalatable.
It’s often said that Empire Of The Sun is his most
046
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