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nakedly autobiographical novel (along with its successor
The Kindness Of Women) and of course that’s
true. But all of his fiction is no less autobiographical,
even Crash, because of its exploration of inner space.
One senses that he’s tired of this literalism, which has
dogged him since he first started writing, and which
reached its apotheosis with Crash. For example, a lot of
people, he says, still think that he loves cars or that he’s
a car buff (he drives a Ford Granada for God’s sake!)
because of books such as Crash and Concrete Island, in
his guise as poet of the motorways. “I’m not interested
in cars at all. But I am interested in the psychology of
the car user, the car as a facilitator of latent psychopathy
or of the latent imagination for good. I think that
a lot of people do express their imaginations through
the cars they own. Imaginations they wouldn’t be able
to express in other ways. Cars are a hugely liberating
force in all kinds of ways.”
So he doesn’t agree with groups such as Reclaim the
Streets or the wider eco movement? “I don’t agree with
the Reclaim the Streets people at all. I think that the
recent petrol tanker blockades across the country illustrates
how silly it is to talk about the end of the car age.
It hasn’t ended: more of us have cars and drive further
in them than ever before.” Or as Paul Sinclair puts it
in Super-Cannes: “Fanatical Greens always veer off
course, and end up trying to save the smallpox virus.”
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
When the fuel crisis was at its worst there was the
very real possibility that there would be thousands and
thousands of abandoned cars on motorway flyovers and
cloverleaf intersections. And this recent prediction that
a giant tsunami is going to swallow the east coast of
America. All very Ballardian. “I know; I feel I’ve been
here before,” he says, as if his fiction was a parent and
reality was a child lagging behind. As usual he’s done
his triangulations.
Angela Carter once said that there is an element
of Glen Baxter’s humour about Ballard’s fiction, and
in a way that’s right, there is this possibility that it
might descend into the ludicrous at any moment. But
the point, surely, is that it never does. What humour
there is is really so black that it could never escape the
event horizon of laughter. No, a much better analogue
is to be found with Martin Parr’s collections of Boring
Postcards, especially his latest, Boring Postcards
USA. Here we find interchange complexes, vast turnpike
systems, interstates, thruways, empty hotel lobbies,
freeways, bus depots, office buildings, shopping
malls, trailer villages, in short all those images of our
waking, solidified dreams that most of us look at and
find ugly or brutal but which when viewed through
Ballard’s visionary protagonists in their dry, affectless
realms, are transformed into something meaningful
and life affirming. �
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