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PART THREE After the War
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Into the Daylight
CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Final Programme
CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Impossible Palace
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Dream’s Ransom
‘The Ballard Tradition’ by Will Self
‘The Worst of Times’ by J. G. Ballard and Danny Danziger
About the Author
By the Same Author
About the Publisher
Like many men scarred by war, J. G. Ballard spent much of his life determined not to talk about it. Had he died in his early fifties (not such an improbable fate, given his intake of alcohol and tobacco) only one short story, ‘The Dead Time’, would have existed to pay direct witness to his wartime experience. He preferred to divert the memories into more fantastical conceptions: drowned worlds, concrete islands, terminal beaches, atrocity exhibitions.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that he commanded his fiction to shine a documentary torch into his own life, to illuminate and perhaps exorcise his Shanghai ghosts. He confronted them first in Empire of the Sun, tackled them again from another angle in The Kindness of Women, and finally – just before he died – offered a conventionally ‘truthful’ account in his autobiography, Miracles of Life. The author who’d built his reputation on a ‘never explain, never apologise’ attitude seemed increasingly concerned that people should understand what he’d gone through and how it had affected him.
Empire of the Sun was not the book to achieve that, partly because it didn’t show what happened ‘afterwards’ to the boy who saw corpses littering the streets of his city and spent several years in a Japanese internment camp, partly because the public’s view of the novel was filtered through the lens of Steven Spielberg’s sentimental, soaringly upbeat movie adaptation. The Kindness of Women, marketed as a ‘sequel’, steered back towards the provocative style of Ballard’s earlier work, exploring the psychic fallout of horror and violence. The scene where young Jim watches four somnolent Japanese soldiers slowly murder a Chinese prisoner with telephone wire is a masterpiece of understatement and baleful resonance: even as Jim negotiates his own escape, we know that, on a deeper level, there is no escaping from such a sight.
As in Empire of the Sun, Ballard erases his real-life parents from the Lunghua camp, turning Jim into an orphan for dramatic purposes. Other than this, the events of the earlier book are handled quite differently, with a different cast of characters. Seventeen novella-like chapters fictionalise the key phases of Ballard’s life from 1937 to 1987, starting with his childhood in Shanghai where the rich, perpetually tipsy Westerners play tennis, go shopping and sidestep the growing mound of refugee bodies felled by hunger, typhus and bombs. ‘To my child’s eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I could imagine had already been taken to its extreme.’ Those last fifteen words serve as a manifesto for all of Ballard’s novels.
Ballard was enthralled by the Surrealists, and felt that his discovery of their paintings gave his fiction its distinctive aura. The Shanghai we encounter in The Kindness of Women evokes a gallery full of unknown masterpieces by Dalí, Magritte, Delvaux and so on. The dead Chinese lying outside the bombed amusement park are ‘covered with white chalk, through which darker patches had formed, as if they were trying to camouflage themselves’ – an image worthy of De Chirico. Severed hands are eerily described as ‘mislaid’. Chauffeurs ferry the expats to abandoned battlefields where open coffins protrude ‘like drawers in a ransacked wardrobe’, spent rifle shells create ‘a roadway covered with pieces of gold’ and dead infantrymen lie in ‘drowned trenches, covered to their waists by the earth, as if asleep in a derelict dormitory’. Forced to spectate upon such scenes in the company of well-dressed ladies ‘fanning away the flies’, Jim gets a nightmarish education in the emotional and moral disconnects that would define the 20th century.
If the strangeness of Shanghai is meant to foreshadow Auschwitz, Vietnam and the contextless chaos of modern media, Jim’s medical studies in post-war England tell us a lot about Ballard’s values as a prose-writer. When he begins to dissect a cadaver, a friend warns him: ‘You’ll have to cut away all the fat before you reach the fascia.’ It’s an appropriate metaphor for Ballard’s clinical approach to narrative, an odd mixture of focus and nonchalance. While he liked to set himself apart from oh-so-literary avant-gardists by insisting that he was ‘an old-fashioned storyteller at heart’, he was impatient with the conventions that had underpinned respectable mainstream fiction since the Victorians. Surrealism’s emphasis on the inexplicable and Sci-Fi’s tolerance for haphazard characterisation and unnaturalistic dialogue suited his own inclinations, even if some readers might find these things alienating.
It is in the area of physicality – especially sex – that Ballard’s style jars most with the conventions of British fiction. It’s hard to imagine another English author who could come up with a sentence like ‘Her small, detergent-chafed hands, with their smell of lipstick, semen and rectal mucus, ran across my forehead.’ Frequent references to penises, labia, pelvises and prostates underscore Jim’s contention that ‘Gray’s Anatomy is a far greater novel than Ulysses.’ Even in a chapter that celebrates the miracle of birth and the love between a husband and wife, we see Jim pushing Miriam’s prolapsed rectum back into her anus during her uterine contractions. Readers who discover Ballard via the Booker-shortlisted, essentially sexless Empire of the Sun might find such explicitness repellent; indeed, once Ballard was famous, he began to receive letters from disgruntled people who regretted reading his other books. Yet, though Ballard shares William Burroughs’ disregard for ‘good taste’, his focus on the visceral is not a mere shock tactic. Unable to believe in an immortal soul or any of the transcendent mysticism that offers comfort to more ‘spiritual’ writers, he is unashamedly fascinated by the flesh – every pore, blemish and scar of it. The scenes in The Kindness of Women where Jim dissects the woman’s carcass inspire some of Ballard’s most tender, most respectful, most reverent writing.
For all his modernity, however, Ballard was formed by the fashions of a previous age; he could never quite shake the values instilled in him by Biggles and Boy’s Own. His ambivalent fascination with soldiers, his disdain for the defeatism of the British in Singapore, and his lifelong love affair with fighter planes set him apart from the long-haired peaceniks of later generations. It was not Ballard’s date of birth per se that caused this disjunct: Burroughs and Timothy Leary were both much older, but it’s impossible to imagine them standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Jim and the RAF ‘honour guard’ at the funeral of a Spitfire pilot. As this scene from The Kindness of Women shows, Ballard could be cynical about many things, but not the tragic dignity of fallen soldiers.
Much of The Kindness of Women is set in the 1960s and early 1970s, when Ballard hatched the stories that made his reputation as a social anatomist. His relationship with the times was atypical. Indifferent to music, immune to the charms of psychedelia, and bemused by the idealism of hippies, he felt less enamoured of the 1960s than many of his fellow experimenters. He approved of the shake-up of the class system, and celebrated the rise of the literary counterculture that promoted his work, but in The Kindness of Women he chooses to present the sixties as an era driven to psychosis by a steady diet of drugs, assassinations, war trauma and TV. ‘The demise of feeling and emotion, the death of affect, presided like a morbid sun over the playground of that ominous decade.’
If society is insane and the world has turned toxic, what hope is there? The kindness of women? Is it through female nurture that Jim (and his author) survives and thrives? So the book’s title invites us to think. Closer examination renders that notion dubious: Jim’s mother is absent; his sulky nanny is employed merely to mind him; Jim’s occasional