A maverick for the millenium

IN a shrinking world increasingly bereft of original imaginations, the British writer J. Ballard stands alone, a bizarre visionary maverick.

Subversive, defiant and at times too daring for his peers, his strange fiction is interested in extremes; extreme states of mind in particular.

People are trapped in elevators; marooned under deceptively ordinary motorway by passes; are struck down by strange viruses; experience the threatening zero world of the modern hospital; or are bombarded by an unending succession of random objects falling from skies which seldom appear normal.

Normal, in fact, rarely features in Ballard's literary world. Whatever the situation, however surreal the wasteland landscape, there is always that familiar alienated character, the Ballard figure at the mercy of private obsessions.

Author of such cult classics as The Drowned World (1961), The Drought (1965), Crash (1973). The Concrete Island (1974) and High Rise (1975), Ballard's surrealist, futuristic and obsessional psychological novels and short stories had a select and devoted following long before a wider audience belatedly discovered him through the international success of the powerful autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984).

This detached yet unnervingly moving account of a boyhood spent in a camp in war time Shanghai possibly remains the most memorable and certainly the most strongly tipped of Booker favourites.

Controversially beaten by Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac, Empire of the Sun nonetheless became a major bestseller and enjoyed the knock on success created by Steven Spielberg's shaky film version, which pushed paperback sales up to almost a million copies.

The Day of Creation, the erotic, dream like quest of a mad doctor intent on irrigating the Sahara which followed in 1987 - typified the lucid madness lurking in much of Ballard's work.

The current volume of essays and reviews spanning some 30 years of Ballard's writing life is characterised by his perceptive and offbeat intelligence.

"The psychopath never dates. Hitler's contemporaries - Baldwin, Chamberlain, Herbert Hoover - seem pathetically fusty figures. . . " he writes in an article on Hitler's "novel" Mein Kampf Reviewing a 1991 biography of one of his mentors, he writes: "Hitman for the apocalypse in his trench coat and snap brim fedora, William Burroughs steps out of his life and fiction like a secret agent charged with the demolition of all bourgeois values."

Burroughs as outsider and literary outlaw is sure to appeal to Ballard, who commented in an essay written in 1978 for a French literary journal: "Parochialism seems to me to be the besetting sin of contemporary English fiction, a fault of which Graham Greene has always been completely free."

Ballard's journalism is matter of fact, direct, often quite personalised and marked by an exasperated, even impatient humour. "Einstein the philanderer? The notion seems as odd as Picasso the pickpocket or Jean Paul Sartre the arm wrestler."

Reviewing Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song in 1979, he begins by asking: "Ours is a season for assassins. How far does our fascination with Oswald and Charles Manson, Gary Gilmore and James Earl Ray play on the edgy dreams of other lonely psychopaths, encourage them to gamble their trigger fingers on a very special kind of late 20th century celebrity?"

He continues in this common sense vein: "Given the immense glare of publicity, a virtual deification by the world's press and television, and the remarkable talents these rootless and half educated men can show for manipulating the mass media, their actual crimes soon sink to a lower, merely human realm."

Elsewhere, in a piece on seminal cinema, he states: "Blue Velvet is, for me, the best film of the 1980s - surreal, voyeuristic, subversive and even a little corrupt in its manipulation of the audience."

Acknowledging its stature as "a full blown Oedipal drama" he concludes that it is "a sustained and brutal tease, The Wizard of Oz re shot with a script by Kafka and decor by Francis Bacon." Far less sympathy is extended to the ever complaining Hollywood script writer, ironically dubbed by Ballard "one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money."

Cinema, surrealist painting, crime, the future, madness, science fiction and China - these are Ballard's specialist subjects. Best of all in this eccentric, relaxed, always readable collection are his laconic wartime memories, the treasure house he kept locked for 40 years.

Recommended.