The Japanese soldier had cut down lengths of telephone wire and had tied the Chinese to a telegraph pole, and was now slowly strangling him as the Chinese sang out in a sing-song voice … I drew level with the platform and was about to walk past it when the soldier with the telephone wire raised a hand and beckoned me towards him. He had seen the transparent celluloid belt that held up my frayed cotton shorts. It had been given to me by one of the American sailors, and was a prized novelty that no Japanese was likely to have seen. I unbuckled the belt and handed it to him, then waited as he flexed the colourless plastic and stared at me through it, laughing admiringly. Behind him the young Chinese was slowly suffocating to death, his urine spreading across the platform.
It is a shock to move from this to post- war England and Cambridge, the familiar world of art movies and tea at the Copper Kettle. Ballard, by this time, was drawn to the grotesque, and if it was ultimately to emerge in monomaniac surrealist fantasies, at first it pushed him towards the study of medicine and the dissecting room. Evelyn Waugh remarked that the outbreak of war ought to be just the thing for a surrealist, what with all those spare limbs lying about. Ballard’s career shows just how accurate that gruesome joke was, and he was to make something overwhelmingly new out of it.
The novel thrived on static societies, which the novelist could examine like an entomologist labelling a tray of butterflies. But too much had happened to me, and to the boys sitting at the desks around me, in the wartime years.
Much of the boyhood behaviour, calmly described, would nowadays earn an Asbo without hesitation. But that, I suppose, is evidence of the comparative poverty of experience which has subsequently overtaken the profession of the writer. Plenty of novelists, however, have transformed quiet lives into works of major interest; and plenty of people have mistakenly thought that highly interesting experience was enough to justify the writing of a book. The fascination of Ballard is that the extremity of his youthful experiences was transformed, in the first instance, into a glorious flight of fantastical horror, and only 40 years later into anything resembling a factual account.
Comments
Edward Morris
February 7th, 2008 5:06pmBallard is not the last of any line, and nothing has "all but disappeared." Genre fiction is completely alive and well, and if anyone here or at the NYT managed to bring their nose out of the air or remove their head from their backside they might actually find what Kit Marlowe called 'the literature of the age' right there in front of their noses instead of assuming that "genre fiction" ends at any given year. "Genre fiction that the mainstream supports or is willing to understand", yes. But the pulps haven't died at all, simply gone to where it takes some actual heart and research to write about them instead of nailing an entire arm of fiction into a coffin just to feed the world view that Random House or whoever is pushing this year. For shame.
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