The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  I suppose that the improbability of such a deviation – like the nature of the author’s personal problems – should be irrelevant to the reviewer. For the tone of the book is neither gloating nor priapic; the glazed monotony of its descriptions and the deadpan singlemindedness of its attitudes aren’t designed to convert or excite the reader, merely to transmit the chilling isolation of the psychopath.* Granted this generous rationale, however, Crash remains heavily flawed: loose construction, a perfunctory way with minor characters, and a lot of risible overwriting make it hard not to see the book as just an exercise in vicious whimsy. True, the novelist must take from life what he can use rather than what he dares print; but Mr Ballard’s obsessions are too one-colour and too solemnly redeployed to sustain a whole book. In science fiction Ballard had a tight framework for his unnerving ideas; out on the lunatic fringe, he can only flail and shout.

  In the work of J.M.G. le Clézio you won’t find anything so outré as an obsession – unless it be J.M.G. le Clézio, the marvellous boy of French letters. Persons still in two minds about the meaning of life would do well to study War. When le Clézio is not wandering about like an owlish Zulu or a fact-finding Martian (three pages on a department-store placard, four on a lightbulb) we’re off on a guided tour of the cosmos, pensée after pensée on ecstatic materialism, para-Sartrean existentialism and seizième nihilism.

  The level of interest is set by the opening words of the grumpily neurotic heroine, Bea B.: ‘this girl blurted out, jokingly perhaps, or simply because it had suddenly become the truth: “I am nothing.” ’ Now which? It isn’t ‘the truth’; nor is it funny. But le Clézio is indeed a peut-être novelist, forever gripped by these unlikely alternatives. Since he is all too clearly a stylist, why waste the excellent Simon Watson Taylor in an attempt to translate him? Without the verbal surface of the French, War is such a torment to read that one yearns for the kind of nouveau-roman pranking whereby (say) the final 150 pages are left blank in order to symbolize the void of late capitalism. Expectably, the hints of talent that here and there survive only confirm the elusiveness of their substance.

  Observer July 1973

  Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard

  To anyone unfamiliar with J.G. Ballard’s work, Concrete Island will seem ridiculously slight; for rather different reasons, it will seem ridiculously slight to aficionados, too. Motoring home from the office one afternoon, Robert Maitland crashes down through the roadside trestles of a zoo-feet-long triangular concrete island, two of whose perimeters are formed by high banked walls. Barely hurt, he crawls back up the loose-soiled verge to the expressway. Four hours later he is still at the roadside, queasy with carbon-monoxide, waving and yelling as the automobiles zip past him. Dejectedly he boots a stray trestle into the road; it is glanced towards him by a speeding car, and Maitland is flung back on to the concrete island.

  Where he stays. The rest of the book chronicles the injured Maitland’s attempts not so much to escape from the island as to ‘dominate’ it. This involves marshalling its resources in the normal improvised-survival tradition and, more particularly, subjugating its two hidden occupants, a mad, dwarfish old tramp and a mad, whorish young girl. The improvised-survival stuff is about as good as it ever is when the hero wants water and remembers the windshield-washer reservoir, when the hero wants fire and remembers the car cigarette lighter, and so on. The interpersonal set- to is as preposterously remote as Ballard always is in his dealings with the human race: Maitland bests the dwarf by sexily urinating in his face, after which the girl says, ‘We’ll have some food and I’ll fuck you,’ after which, in turn, it isn’t long before Maitland can call the island his own. A disastrously ambiguous last page sees an exhausted, triumphant Maitland resolving ‘to plan his escape from the island’ without showing any sign of wanting to do so; escape is now possible, but in Ballardian terms (one infers, pitching the book aside with a ragged yawn), the possibility no doubt renders the escape unnecessary, irrelevant.

  And that’s about it. There are inevitable resonances, of course. ‘You were on an island long before you crashed here’; ‘you’re marooned here like Crusoe’; and (best) Maitland’s husky ‘I am the island’: such keen observations assure one that significance is just round the corner. In fairness, the parallels aren’t altogether as trite as these pointers suggest. However obliquely, Maitland’s solitary explorations of the island do recapitulate the lone rambles of his childhood and the orderly heartlessness of his adult life. However predictably, the analogy with Crusoe, whose Rousseauesque exile has a certain wholesome domesticity, tellingly isolates the bleakly urban Maitland; whereas Crusoe is a stoical son-of-the-soil, Maitland is a ragged urchin of the city, picking his way through crushed cigarette packs, sweet wrappers, matchbook stubs, old newspapers and spent condoms to the endless drumming of the indifferent highways. And – however arcane the notion promises to be – Ballard is one of the few living writers who could get much out of his hero’s half-delirious self-identification with the island, an adept as he is of the language of heightened, dislocated consciousness:

  As he crossed the island the grass weaved and turned behind him in endless waves. Its corridors opened and closed as if admitting a large and watchful creature to its green preserve.

  Night and silence settled over the motorway system. The sodium lights shone down on the high span of the overpass, rising into the air like some disused back entrance to the sky.

  But despite these small felicities both the plot and the prose of Concrete Island are distanced by an oddly wilful negligence. One example of each. First, Maitland arrives on the island with £30 in his wallet; although he throughout defrays the cost of the wine the tramp buys from a local supermarket, he still has £30 in his wallet just before the end – a startling lapse in such a short, uncluttered book. Second, the slaggy girl, who is on-set for only twenty-odd pages, is ‘strong’: we get surer and surer about this because she is described as having ‘strong hands’ (four times), a ‘strong body’ (four times), a ‘strong jaw’ (twice), a ‘strong head’, ‘strong shoulders’, and ‘strong arms’. Now it is true that all Ballard’s novels are marked by similar inconsistencies and repetitions. Essentially, his fiction does not propound, it embodies; the prose is simply the rhetoric of an obsession, as dense, one-colour and arbitrary as the obsession requires it to be, and it’s no use squaring such a writer with standard fictional procedures. Concrete Island, however, for reasons that will become clear, doesn’t unnerve conventional criticism in this glamorous way.

  Ballard’s four early novels are ostensibly cataclysmic science-fiction stories in the routine Wyndham mode; gradually, though, as the texture of the prose thickens and Ballard’s stare hardens on the bizarre landscape he has precipitated, the cataclysm ceases to be of much importance. In The Crystal World, for instance, the opulent refractions of the imagery become virtually self-generating, causing the end of the world to seem a rather footling affair by comparison. Although all these novels incorporate their own theoretical time-schemes – which are very complicated and (between ourselves) not very interesting – they are, broadly speaking, speculative and futuristic. More recently, Ballard has applied the imaginative habits of a lush, numinous fantasist to the present day, imposing an over-conceptualized, over-poeticized vision on the metal and concrete furniture of a technologized society. In the jangling, piecemeal Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard sets himself up as the apologist of deviance, breakdown and psychopathology. Its successor, Crash, a novel born of quite immeasurable perversity, posits an ‘alternative sexuality’, a sexuality emotionless, stylized and unerotic, which is offered as the appropriate response to a dehumanizing technoscape. Sample tumescents:

  Beside a casualty ward photograph of a bifurcated penis was an inset of a handbrake unit; above a close-up of a massively bruised vulva was a steering-wheel boss and its manufacturer’s medallion. These unions of torn genitalia and sections of car body and instrument panel formed a series of disturbing modules, units in a n
ew currency of pain and desire.

  I visualized the fantasies of contented paedophiliacs, hiring the deformed bodies of children injured in crashes, assuaging and irrigating their wounds with their own scarred genital organs, of elderly pederasts easing their tongues into the simulated anuses of colostomized juveniles.

  While one is inevitably sickened and appalled by Ballard’s glib whimsicality, Crash remains a mournful and hypnotic tour de force, possibly the most extreme example in modern fiction of how beautifully and lovingly someone can write 70,000 words of vicious nonsense.

  For Ballard is the rarest kind of writer – an unselfconscious stylist: it is the measure of his creative narcissism that he has his eye on no audience. Equally, Ballard’s characterization is hardly more than a gesture; his men are morose and fixated, his women spectral nonentities, his minor figures perfunctory grotesques. He has nothing coherent to ‘say’, and his plots are merely the gateways to exotic locales. Concrete Island is by far his most realistic novel to date and, patently, a writer with little nous, wit or concern for individuals has no business being realistic; the book is slight not because the obsession fails to engage us but because it demonstrably fails to engage Ballard. His raison, after all, is his awesome visual imagination and his complementary verbal intensity. Ballard’s vision is, simply, too occult for the observable world; it needs some grand perversity to give it the altitude which good writing alone can sustain.

  New Review May 1974

  High-Rise by J.G. Ballard

  Towards the end of Auden and Isherwood’s The Ascent of F6, Ransom, the Oedipal, megalomaniac hero, is about to scale the last heights of the mountain when he is told that the local demon will be awaiting him on the summit. Ransom climbs on alone, and as he reaches the summit unharmed – his great moment of personal and public triumph – he sees a small hooded figure on the crest, facing away from him. He approaches the demon, it turns – and it is his mother. Folding on to the ground, Ransom feels his life begin to drain away, as the demon sings him a tender lullaby which is also his dirge. J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise is a harsh and ingenious reworking of the F6 theme, displaced (as one now expects from this author) into the steel-and-concrete landscapes of the modern city.

  The high-rise, with its 1,000 overpriced apartments, its swimming pools and shopping concourses, is what Ballard calls ‘the vertical city’, and to begin with its residents observe conventional class and territorial demarcations (‘upper’, ‘lower’ and ‘middle’), showing resentment, expediency and disdain for their fellow citizens in much the same way as life is run in the outside world. Soon, though, the enclosed nature of the building has encouraged and intensified these aggressions beyond any clear analogy with external society. After various piracies and beatings-up, the class system within the high-rise deteriorates as readily as the building itself, becoming a filthy warren of violent, apathetic or paranoid enclaves. Drunken gangs storm through the blacked-out corridors; women are found raped and murdered in defused elevators; disposal chutes are clogged with excrement, smashed furniture and half-eaten pets. Eventually the high-rise takes on that quality common to all Ballardian loci: it is suspended, no longer to do with the rest of the planet, screened off by its own surreal logic.

  Ballard being Ballard, though, High-Rise explores no ordinary atavism. The mental journey undertaken by these colonists of the sky is not a return to ‘nature’: it is a return to the denurtured state of childhood: ‘for the first time since we were three years old what we do makes absolutely no difference,’ enthuses one of the affluent anarchists. Ballard’s stranded characters have always been more than half in love with their lethal and unnerving environments, and the delinquents of the high-rise are soon completely defined by their new psychopathological ‘possibilities’. One of the most ghostly and poignant scenes in the book has a middle-echelon psychiatrist attempting to leave his barricaded slum and return to work at his medical college; he gets as far as the car park before the shrill clarity of the outdoors sends him running back to the affectless and soupy warmth of the high-rise, satisfied that he will never try to leave it again. In the closing pages, as hauntingly wayward as anything Ballard has written, the retrograde logic of the high-rise is fulfilled, when the passive, derelict women emerge as the final avengers.

  I hope no one wastes their time worrying whether High-Rise is prescient, admonitory or sobering. For Ballard is neither believable nor unbelievable, just as his characterization is merely a matter of ‘roles’ and his situations merely a matter of ‘context’: he is abstract, at once totally humourless and entirely unserious. The point of his visions is to provide him with imagery, with opportunities to write well, and this seems to me to be the only intelligible way of getting the hang of his fiction. The prose of High-Rise may not have the baleful glare of that of Crash or Vermilion Sands, but the book is an intense and vivid bestiary, which lingers in the mind and chronically disquiets it.

  New Statesman November 1975

  Hello America by J.G. Ballard

  J.G. Ballard’s talent is one of the most mysterious and distempered in modern English fiction – and it is by far the hardest to classify. For the past two decades he has produced almost a book a year, without ever really making it clear what genre he belongs to, where he stands vis-à-vis realism and reality, or where (even in the vaguest terms) his fiction is heading. Hello America gives us no assistance on these points, unsurprisingly enough; so perhaps a brief Ballard retrospective is in order.

  In the late 1950s Ballard was an exponent of hardcore science fiction. His early stories (about overpopulation, futuristic advertising, etc.) remain as good – as direct and logical – as anything by Fred Pohl or Arthur Clarke. Ballard’s first novel, The Wind from Nowhere (1962), was so timorously conventional that the author has since disowned it. By the time of the book’s appearance Ballard was already championing the ‘New Wave’ movement in SF, coining the phrase ‘inner space’ to delineate his own preoccupations within the genre.

  His next three novels were variations on the cataclysm theme, imagining a world consumed by the peculiarly Ballardian elements of (respectively) water, crystal and sand. Crucially, these holocausts are seen not as fearful visitations; on the contrary, they are welcomed and embraced for the ‘psychic possibilities’ they disclose – the jewelled fantasies of The Crystal World, the deep-dreaming of The Drowned World, the atavistic rediscoveries of The Drought. The world’s mutated panoramas are densely realized, and portrayed with livid beauty, full of wonder and anxiety.

  The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) heralded Ballard’s most problematical phase, his concrete-and-steel period. Training the electronic eye of the SF fantasist on the landscape of the present day, Ballard became the prose-poet of the tabloid headline, the operating theatre, and the motion sculpture of the highways. ‘The Facelift of Princess Margaret’ and ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ are two representative stories in this style, and they are as scurrilous, and as open to puzzled ridicule, as their tides suggest … Then, in 1973, came Crash.

  This cult novel exclusively concerned itself with, of all things, the sexuality of the road accident. You’d think that a book with such a purview would turn out to be one of the shortest ever written – along with Keats’s Craftsmanship and The Vein of Humility in D.H. Lawrence. In fact, when Ballard handed Crash in to Jonathan Cape, it was over 500 pages, and had to be cut by half for publication. Seemingly unaware of its own perversity, the novel is both obsessive and obsessed, with a numb, luminous quality that loiters in the mind. It is also, by virtue of the kind of paradox we expect from Ballard, his most mannered and literary book, its sprung rhythms and creamily varied vowel-sounds a conscious salute to Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé. Crash seemed to bring Ballard near to the end of something in himself, and after two far milder experiments in the same style, Concrete Island and High-Rise, he found he had exhausted this cul-de-sac of his talent.

  So we enter the present phase. In 1979, after a four-year silence, Ballard c
ame up with The Unlimited Dream Company. A vision of death and deification, charged with sombre erotic ritual, it makes Crash look like Sister Carrie. Here as elsewhere, Ballard gives meaning to blurb phrases like ‘hypnotic power’, ‘maniacal logic’, and so on; with Ballard, fantasy takes on a vertiginous steepness, giving the reader a sense of near-depersonalization.

  Hello America is recognizably a continuation of the same vein, though in terms of form it takes us back to Ballard’s earliest mode, that of SF. In the twenty-second century an expeditionary force from Europe sets out to explore the wastes of post-industrial America. By means of the parenthetical SF style we piece together the past from stray details in the present: the Manhattan skyline, for instance, features ‘the 200-storey OPEC Tower which dominated Wall Street, its neon sign pointing towards Mecca’. In the 1980s, apparently, energy depletion caused the evacuation of the continent; subsequent experiments in climate control have turned the eastern seaboard into a desert. As the party moves westwards it discovers a waterless Mississippi, a Death Valley transformed into an equatorial forest, and a Las Vegas

  half-submerged in a lake of rain-lashed water, its wheels stilled, the dying lights of its hotels reflected in the meadows of the drowned desert, a violent mirror reflecting all the failure and humiliation of America.

  Initially we expect a mystic outward-bound course in the manner of The Drowned World or The Drought. ‘Under the guise of crossing America … they were about to begin that far longer safari across the diameters of their own skulls,’ promises Ballard; but in fact the psychic safari is never completed. The novel is more like a lightshow of the iconic past of pop America, and the characters are hardly more human than the laser projections of John Wayne and Gary Cooper, the androids of Frank Sinatra and John Kennedy that stalk through the action. In many respects Hello America is a simple adventure story, Buchan or Henty adrift in the time machine.