JG Ballard: Inside the Prison

In Empire of the Sun, the semi-autobiographical novel which made him famous, JG Ballard vividly describes returning home one afternoon as a child to the family home in Shanghai’s International Settlement to find it empty. In Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation, the young Jim explores the local neighbourhood, at once familiar and radically strange, on his bicycle. He enters gardens and wanders through abandoned houses. “It was like coming home to this street and finding everyone gone,” Ballard once told me when I visited him at his modest house in Shepperton, not far from Heathrow Airport in what he called the “television suburbs”. The modernist Heathrow Hilton was his favourite building.

It took Ballard 40 years to write directly about the experience of his childhood in Shanghai, the Japanese occupation of the city, and his internment, between the ages of 12 to 15, in Lunghua camp. There he shared a single cramped room with his parents and younger sister and witnessed suffering and several harrowing murders, including a Chinese rickshaw driver being kicked to death by Japanese soldiers.

Yet he found camp life thrillingly liberating. No longer constrained by the old rituals of school and colonial life among the gin-and-tonic and golf set of the International Settlement, he was free to roam the camp and relished the curfews and blackouts, and encounters with the Japanese guards. “Shanghai Jim”, as his parents’ friends called him, “was in a prison but it was in a prison where he felt free”, according to the authors of this new biography of the author. “It suited him.”

In his imagination Ballard never left the prison, and his memory of wartime Shanghai shaped his novels and stories in ways even he did not fully understand. “A sense of dislocation can have a profound effect on a young imagination,” Ballard told me. “It also leaves you with the sense that life is just a stage set: the whole cast and scenery can be cleared away at any moment. This gives a surrealist edge to existence.”

Christopher Priest’s motivation for writing The Illuminated Man (the title is from a Ballard story) was a “desire to consolidate Ballard in the literary pantheon”. Priest, the author of 18 novels, did not live to complete the book, dying from prostate cancer. His partner, Nina Allan, herself a science-fiction writer, completed it for him.

It is, therefore, both a collaboration and a celebration of a great writer. The chapters on Ballard’s Shanghai years and later struggles to establish himself as a writer in London are especially fascinating. Allan’s prose is not as smooth as her partner’s and a 30-page section midway through, on Priest’s illness and death, feels like an interruption to the narrative. The details are poignant but would have worked better in an extended introduction or postscript. One is less interested in the processes by which the book was written, and the authors themselves, than its subject. The central story, however, is well told and there are excellent passages of literary criticism.

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James Graham Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930, the son of an English businessman who worked for an international textile and printing company. The large family house was on Amherst Avenue (the name is more redolent of the Surrey stockbroker belt), and the young Ballard, who was distant from his parents, was cared for by Chinese servants and driven around by a chauffeur. Life was cultivated and serene but there were encroaching threats. Beyond the gated gardens and high walls of the International Settlement conflict was intensifying between the nationalist Kuomintang government and the insurgent Communist Party. In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria and war spread across China. Ballard recalled missiles and shells fired by Japanese and Chinese forces flying low over the houses of Amherst Avenue.

He returned “home” to England after the war but was dismayed by how drab and diminished everything seemed. He was told Great Britain had “won the war” but to him it looked like defeat. He was sent to board at the Leys School and then studied medicine at King’s College, Cambridge, which he abandoned after a year, although he enjoyed dissecting cadavers. Later he joined the RAF, but quit after being sent to train in Canada, and returned to England in 1955 where he worked as a travelling salesman selling encyclopaedias.

He finally settled into a job on a specialist science journal in London, where he met Mary Matthews, whom he married, as his early novels were published, including The Drowned World, in which London is transformed into a sub-tropical dystopia by extreme climate change. Ballard moved to a semi-detached house on Charlton Road, Shepperton in 1960, which he lived in for the rest of his life even after the success of Empire of the Sun.

In 1964, while the family were on holiday in Spain, Mary became suddenly ill. Her condition deteriorated rapidly and she died from pneumonia. “She was so young, 34, that I felt a crime had been committed by nature, against her,” Ballard said many years later. “And it reminded me of all those terrible crimes that I’d seen during the war in the Far East, and it reminded me in a peculiar way of the Kennedy assassination which had taken place the previous year.”

After his wife’s death, Ballard brought up their three young children alone in Shepperton. His two adult daughters, interviewed for the book, remember him as a kind and loving father, but he also drank heavily and had a long-term partner, Claire Walsh, as well as various lovers; one being the novelist Emma Tennant. Through it all, he continued to write.

Unlike many writers of science fiction, Ballard was not interested in outer space or the far future, but in what he called “inner space”: the psychic landscape of imagination, dream and fantasy. His protagonists, often doctors or architects, are driven by strange compulsions. His novels - except for Empire of the Sun, his least characteristic work, and its follow-up, The Kindness of Women - are works of external action not studies of the inner life. What animates his fiction is an attempt to understand and represent the pathologies of the present. In cool, burnished prose he chronicles disaster and disintegration.

His most controversial novel, the transgressive Crash (1973), which fetishises car crashes and their aftermath, was denounced by one senior reader at Jonathan Cape as sickeningly extreme: “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.”

The reader was ignored and Cape published the book. The 1996 film adaptation by David Cronenberg was widely condemned as obscene on release but much admired by Ballard. He later called Crash a cautionary work, a “warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape”.

For much of his career Ballard was marginalised as a cult genre writer, but he was always a superior stylist, his surreal word-pictures of urban alienation as unforgettable as the paintings of Giorgio di Chirico or Edward Hopper. An early champion was Kingsley Amis, who, after reading The Drowned World, presciently wrote that Ballard “is worth judging by the most serious literary standards”.

Ballard died in 2009 from the same disease as Priest. Meanwhile our world feels ever more Ballardian, dominated by technology, ruled by the smartphone in a post-literate age, shadowed by war and saturated by a constant stream of pornographic and violent imagery. Which makes The Illuminated Man a very timely book, and one that I hope will introduce new readers to a writer Priest rightly calls one of the greatest of the twentieth century.