by Martin Amis
The bathos of the enterprise is perhaps attributable to the fact that Ballard’s work is quite unprotected by irony. His eye for the comedy of human variety is non-existent, and this is why landscape naturally dominates his fiction. Only in the margins of the present novel is Ballard’s real strength allowed any play: the ability to invest abstract vistas with intense and furtive life. In his last two books Ballard has been developing a free-floating style, something lax and capacious enough to accommodate his fevered images of sublimity and decay. Hello America doesn’t in the end take him very far along this road, but the prospect still looks intriguing. In a way, though, it is futile to have expectations of Ballard: he will inevitably subvert them. All we know for certain is that the novels he will write could not be written, could not even be guessed at, by anyone else.
Observer June 1981
The Day of Creation by J.G. Ballard
Veteran Ballard fans were, I think, rather wrong-footed by Empire of the Sun – by the book and by its success. A heightened and ‘mythicized’ account of the author’s childhood experiences as an internee in wartime China, Empire was autobiographical, but it wasn’t characteristic. It was all about Ballard; but it wasn’t Ballardian. The main corpus of his work had long been neglected by the general public. With Empire of the Sun, the one-off, left-field novel came along, and Ballard – but which Ballard? – was ‘discovered’. When Ballard was the Booker favourite in 1984, his long-serving followers and addicts felt as if the street drug-pusher had been made chairman of Du Pont pharmaceuticals. This is just a way of saying that Ballard is – and, with fluctuations, will probably remain – a cult writer, the genuine article: extreme, exclusive, almost a one-man genre.
I don’t know what post-Empire converts will make of his new novel; but I know what old Ballardeers will make of it. Dialogues like the following are easy to imagine (indeed I have shared in one or two myself): ‘I’ve read the new Ballard.’ ‘And?’ ‘It’s like the early stuff.’ ‘Really? What’s the element?’ ‘Water.’ ‘Lagoons?’ ‘Some. Mainly a river.’ What’s the hero’s name? Maitland? Melville?’ Mallory.’ ‘Does Mallory go down the river?’ ‘No. Up.’ Yes of course. Up. Does he hate the river or love it?’ ‘Both.’ ‘Is he the river?’ Yes.’ ‘And does the novel begin: “Later …”?’ ‘Not quite.’
‘An hour before dawn, as I slept in the trailer beside the drained lake, I was woken by the sounds of an immense waterway.’ We begin, as usual, in aftermath, with the familiar cadences of exhaustion, of slow recuperation after some obscure psychic struggle, and in the familiar landscape, one from which vitality and human effort have at last absented themselves. ‘The drained lake’ is answered, in the first paragraph, by ‘the abandoned town’, ‘the dry riverbed’, ‘the disused airfield’. Having established mood and setting (the two always identical in Ballard), he goes on to tell us how they got that way.
The author of The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash and High-Rise (which begins, ‘Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events …’), and our leading investigator of the effects of technology, pornography and television, Ballard often seems to be on the very crest of modernity. But there is something antique about him too, something prelapsarian. For all its ambition and Freudian grandeur, The Day of Creation is an adventure story, as was Hello America. Further paradoxes include the fact that despite his acuity and wit, his deep ironies, Ballard remains an essentially humourless writer. Humour is available to the man, but it is denied access to the page.
Set in Central Africa, near the borders of Chad and the Sudan, in ‘the dead heart’ of the continent, the novel assembles the expected cast: a wounded obsessive surrounded by self-sufficient egomaniacs. Everyone calls everyone else by their surnames and they are capable of saying things like ‘Don’t be a fool’ and ‘Little did I know’ and ‘You’re still obsessed by this absurd dream.’ The dialogue is ‘stylized’, as usual and of necessity, because Ballard has no ear for it, has no aural imagination: he is fixedly visual. And the prose itself is by no means free of Boy’s Own intonations: ‘A second shot rang out … Stunned by the blow … I was now a hunted animal … I was determined to press on …’
Another of Ballard’s archaic mannerisms is a morbid fear of the common pronoun. Thus, instead of getting it, him or her, we get ‘this harmless mass of water’, ‘this amiable imposter’ or ‘this distraught woman’. The cast can perhaps best be evoked by these elegant variations: Kagwa, the local capo (‘this amiable but unpredictable police chief’); Miss Matsuoka, the oriental photographer (‘this intense young Japanese’); Mrs Warrender, head of the nearby breeding-station (‘this self-appointed guardian of the stream’, ‘this still numbed woman’, ‘this increasingly odd young widow’); Sanger, maker of soap documentaries (‘this third-rate television producer’, ‘this likeable but sly opportunist’), and his colleague Mr Pal (known merely as ‘the botanist’); and Noon, the pubescent desert woman (‘this odd child’, ‘this disorientated child’, ‘this simple child of the waterways’).
Most centrally, though, there is the river, the Mallory, the Third Nile which might irrigate the Southern Sahara and create a nature reserve ten times larger than the Serengeti – ‘this strange waterway’, ‘this unique waterway’, ‘this mysterious creek’, ‘this immense mass of water’, ‘this vast channel’, ‘this impossible channel’. As is the way with the obsessional, everything stops mattering except the obsession. And here Ballard will always win out, because of the remorselessness of his imagination, which itself is strange, vast, unique – and impossible. In all senses the river is an original creation, beautiful and leprous, putrid and austere, and as feral as the mind from which it flows.
Like all obsessions, Ballard’s novel is occasionally boring and frequently ridiculous. The invariance of its intensity is not something the reviewer can easily suggest. Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different – a disused – part of the reader’s brain. You finish the book with some bafflement and irritation. But this is only half the experience. You then sit around waiting for the novel to come and haunt you. And it does.
Observer September 1987
Crash by David Cronenberg
I reviewed Crash when it came out in 1973; and, as I remember, the critical community greeted Ballard’s novel with a flurry of nervous dismay. But of course reviewers do not admit to nervous dismay. Nervous dismay is a response that never announces itself as such, and comes to the ball tricked out as Aesthetic Fastidiousness or Moral Outrage.
Crash provoked much fancy dress. Some reviewers reached for their thesauri and looked up ‘repellent’: cooler hands claimed to find the novel ‘boring’. I’m not sure if anyone else adopted the disguise I wore: sarcasm. Haughtily (and nervously), I sent Crash up. I was twenty-three. Later that year my first novel appeared, and, like Ballard, I stood accused of displaying a ‘morbid sexuality’. In comparison, though, my sexuality – and my novel – were obsequiously conventional.
If you wanted to banish Crash, there was an obvious place to banish it to: a neo-Sixties avant-garde associated with confrontational theatre, conceptualist painting, installationist sculpture, experimental fiction, and the ICA. Originally a proponent of traditional SF (and, in this country, its brightest star),* Ballard was convulsing into maturity and freeing himself from the genre – was on his way, in fact, to becoming sui generis. Crash emerged from a background of surrealism, cultural activism, hyper-permissiveness and lysergic acid.
After its publication Crash settled down to being a cult classic. Ballard was in any case a cult author. And it was a cult I belonged to. Assembled votaries would spend whole evenings guiding one another round Ballard’s beautiful, excessive, schematic and preposterously unsmiling universe. It is perhaps instructive, here, to distinguish the Ballard buff from the mere admirer. While sharing in the general reverence for Empire of the Sun (1984), the true cultist also felt minutely betrayed by it. Not because the novel
won a wide audience and punctured the cult’s closed circle. No: we felt betrayed because Empire showed us where Ballard’s imagination had come from. The shaman had revealed the source of all his fever and magic.
It seemed to be an appropriately Ballardian development: Crash was being brought to the screen by the notoriously unsqueamish – and cultish – David Cronenberg, who made the equally unfilmable Naked Lunch. Cinematically, though, the Burroughs is full of exuberant possibilities, unlike the hard stare of Crash, which is about the sexuality of road accidents and doesn’t blink once in 225 pages.
The argument of the book gets going with a head-on collision between the narrator (called, uncompromisingly, James Ballard) and a woman doctor. The crash kills her husband. In the film, he goes out through one windscreen and comes in through the other; in the book he is content to die on the bonnet of Ballard’s car. The two survivors stare at each other.
He encounters her again – at the hospital, at the police pound. Grief, guilt, aggression, the shared sensitivities and deadnesses of various contusions and scars: all this leads, with disquieting plausibility, to an affectless (and car-bound) love affair. Round about now the figure of Vaughan looms in on the novel – Vaughan, the ‘nightmare angel of the expressways’, his leathers reeking of ‘semen and engine coolant’. At this point Crash bids farewell to plausibility and disquiet, and embraces unanimous obsession. Under the sway of a ‘benevolent psychopathology’, a ‘new logic’, the entire cast surges eagerly towards an autogeddon of wound-profiles and sex deaths.
Cronenberg had to take this vision and submit it to the literalism of film. He has also chosen to transport it through time: close to a quarter of a century. And it seems to me that all the film’s dissonances arise from that shift. In 1973 the automobile could be seen as something erotic, conjuring up freedom and power. In 1996 the associations point the other way, towards banality: car pools, leadless fuel, and asthma. Nowadays the car conjures up nothing more than a frowsy stoicism. Cronenberg might as well have gone with tail-fins, flared trousers, mini-skirts and beehives, so remorselessly does the piece insist on its historical slot. The sex feels pre-AIDS; the work-shy sensualism feels pre-inflation; even the roads feel pre-gridlock. These cavils may seem pedestrian – but car culture feels pedestrian, too, as the millennium nears.
On the other hand it feels delightfully nostalgic, and triumphantly retro, to sit in a theatre watching an intelligent and unusual art movie. Cronenberg has somehow found the cinematic equivalent of Ballard’s hypnotic gaze: the balefulness, the haggard fixity. By excluding all common sense (and therefore all humour), obsession invites comedy, and Crash is almost a very funny film. By a similar logic, the monomaniacal seem interestingly frail. Cronenberg’s ending isn’t there in the Ballard; it achieves a tragic modulation among all the gauntness and passivity.
Unlike the film, the novel is indifferent to the passage of time, and has lost nothing in twenty-five years. It is like a clinical case of chronic shock, confusedly welcomed by the sufferer. Prose remains the stronger medium for the glare of obsession. It’s not so much what you can put in: it’s what you can leave out. Ballard’s rhythms control everything: the crowds, the weather, the motion sculpture of the highways. Only in the stories collected under the title of Vermilion Sands (1973) did he duplicate this glazed and melodious precision.
Independent on Sunday November 1996
* In which task Crash sensationally and scintillatingly succeeds. I came to Ballard through his hard science-fiction. (His SF novels are not hard SF, but something else instead, as we shall see. The SF short stories are hard SF, and they constitute the best hard-SF short stories ever written.) It took me a long time to get the hang of Crash, and of Ballard. My review, here, is so straitlaced that I hesitate to preserve it. But I do: readers should always be wrestling with the writers who feel intimate to them. I preserve the setting also, a two-book batch from the avant-garde. My first novel appeared towards the end of the same year. It was mildly and peripherally post-modern. Ballard, who with the novelist Emma Tennant ran or dominated an influential literary magazine called Bananas, was at this time experimental. A wing existed, in 1973. In literary terms I was a social democrat and Ballard was a marxist. At the end of this section we shall, in any case, return to Crash.
* I see I am quoting my father here. A vocal admirer of early Ballard, Kingsley was decisively turned off by Crash, on moral grounds, and on anti-experimentalist grounds too. And, once they had displeased him, he seldom gave novelists a second chance. To his son, incidentally, he gave three, The Rachel Papers, Success and Time’s Arrow.
Anthony Burgess: Jack Be Quick
Abba Abba by Anthony Burgess
It was in Joysprick (1973), I think, that Anthony Burgess first made his grand-sounding distinction between the ‘A’ novelist and the ‘B’ novelist. The A novelist, apparently, writes in what we commonly regard as the mainstream: he is interested in character, motive and moral argument, and in how these reveal themselves through action (yes, oh dear me yes, the A novel tells a story). The spunkier and more subversive B novelist, however, is quite interested in these things but is at least as interested in other things too: namely, the autonomous play of wit, ideas and language (no, the B novel doesn’t necessarily tell a story at all). Certainly, ambitious novelists tend to get more B and less A as they develop. The Portrait of a Lady is very A, whereas The Ambassadors is clearly hoping to be B. Mary is contentedly A, Ada haughtily otherwise. A Portrait of the Artist is already fairly B, and Finnegans Wake is about the most B novel we have. In Joysprick Burgess described himself as a ‘minor B novelist’. He too, though, used to be happy enough being A. The Malayan trilogy, the Enderby books – these are all pretty A. A Clockwork Orange is definitely B-disposed, and the more recent MF, in which, for example, the protagonist’s skin-colour (black) is revealed on the penultimate page, has nothing A about it whatever. Abba Abba, appropriately, mixes the two; it is at least as A as it is B.
And does the title refer to this division between the types? I don’t see why not, since it refers to almost everything else you care to think of. Most specifically, of course, it refers to the rhyme-scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet octave (the first, and predominantly A, part of the novel stages a meeting in Rome between two sonneteers, Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli and the dying Keats; the second, and predominantly B, part consists of Petrarchan sonnets, evidently from the pen of Belli and translated by an author surrogate). But Abba Abba means other things as well. It is Aramaic for ‘father father’. It represents some sort of primal blurt about language (Keats dreams that Christ shouts the words from the cross) and about the way poetic form transcends it. Abba is a palindromic chant of the author’s (pseudonymous) initials. It is, further, the name of a Scandinavian pop-group. There may be other references that I have missed.
Such speculation, and such facetiousness, properly belong to the B part of the novel. Some of the B bits, as is increasingly the case with Burgess, seem detachable from the body of the novel, just a gratifying bonus for punsters and polyglots. There is, in addition, a good deal of unrecycled literary criticism here – about the non-translatability of poetry, about the disinterestedness of creative effort. The seventy-odd Belli sonnets which end the book, and provide much of its cheek (did they come first, one wonders?), carry a lot of responsibility for the B-stream, attempting as they do to pick up themes touched on in the main text. It is a pity, then, that they are not more fun to read, despite Belli’s much-plugged earthiness, scurrility, and so on. The rhymes, vital to the arresting monotony of the Petrarchan form, are impossibly lazy (begun/orison, skill/imbecile, fear/Maria, of/dove), and the roguish voice assumed for the poems is so uncertain of its real energy that almost every other sonnet ends in a yelp of mechanical obscenity. ‘And waste 300 fucking cannon-balls’, ‘Would say: “I’d rather have a fucking hen” ’, and ‘Don’t leave a feather on their fucking backs’ is how three consecutive sonnets draw to a close.
The A bits pose more
familiar challenges. Keats is an especially delicate subject for fictionalization, and Burgess doesn’t avoid many obvious traps. There are several near-crassnesses of the bio-pic variety (‘Tomorrow I go north … I may see your friend Mr Shelley there’; ‘Coleridge says something about the willing suspension of disbelief’), some startling indecorums of speech (‘Your so-called Reformation cut you off from the family of Europe’; ‘He ate the papacy for breakfast’), an awful, insistent ‘lustiness’ supposedly characteristic of the age (‘Cats are the eternal truths, and the taste of noonday soup, and farting, and snot, and the itch on your back you can’t quite reach to scratch’), and a tendency to present writers in general as unrelenting epigrammatists (Keats sometimes sounds like an amalgam of Beatrice and Benedick). But the book’s principal gamble pays off – and very handsomely. The fact that Keats’s death already has an almost unsurpassable poignancy does not make it easier to write poignantly about that death. The danger of blasphemy, indeed, is ever-present, and it is only by a new intensity in his prose that Burgess skirts it. Here is Keats’s last fever:
To put off the world outside – the children’s cries, snatches of a song, a cheeping sparrow, the walls and the wallpaper and the chairs that thought they would outlast him but would not, the sunlight streaking the door – was not over-difficult. A bigger problem was to separate himself from his body – the hand worn to nothing, the lock of hair that fell into his eyes, even the brain that scurried with words and thoughts and images … He tried to give up breathing, to yield to the breathless gods, but his body, worn out as it was, would not have that …