Ballard must always have seemed something of a puzzle throughout his grotesque and glorious high period. He was said to live in Shepperton, of all places, in a small suburban house with three children — his wife was known to have died suddenly and young. Occasional lady journalists were dispatched to the respectable outer suburbs, to return with sardonic views of the bourgeois setting and Ballard’s vagueness about household matters.

But only the most foolish journalist would presume that imaginative writing is conducted exclusively in a double-doored salon in Hampstead. The way that literature continues to be written by people who live in perfectly ordinary houses, rather than by the sort Philip Larkin called the ‘s**t in a shuttered chateau’, ought to be no surprise.

Still, the publications that were regularly issuing from Shepperton were a surprise. Ballard’s often gruesome fantasies had the brilliantly simple conceit of taking a situation to its logical conclusion. They are horrid, but perfectly sensible. In Concrete Island, a man crashes his car on a gigantic round- about and cannot be rescued from the sea of traffic; he ventures into a savage community of similarly car-wrecked people. In High-Rise, civil war breaks out between the inhabitants of a huge, respectable block of flats, the war being conducted in the evenings and at weekends.

Most alarming of all was The Atrocity Exhibition (1969), an assault on contemporary news events as entertainment long before Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. The American publisher, Nelson Doubleday, ordered the entire print-run pulped when he picked it up to find chapters entitled ‘Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’ and ‘Why I Want to F**k Ronald Reagan’. ‘The governor of California,’ Ballard notes, ‘was a close friend.’

This outrage was followed by Crash, a psychological extravaganza postulating an erotic component to contemporary obsessions with car crashes. It was launched with an exhibition of crashed cars, while a topless woman interviewed the guests at the vernissage. Outrage and outbreaks of violence in Ballard’s direction then, and scandal when David Cronenberg’s film of the book, decades later, had the same effect. ‘All my suspicions had been confirmed about the unconscious links that my novel would explore.’

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