Ballard, James Graham (1930- ) novelist

J. G. Ballard was born in Shanghai, China, to James Ballard, a business executive, and Edna Johnston Ballard. In 1937 Japan seized Shanghai, and while other families fled, the Ballards remained, convinced that the British Empire’s battle fleet based in Singapore guaranteed them protection. After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, however, the Ballards were captured and sent to a prison camp outside of Shanghai. Ballard became separated from his family and found himself struggling to survive on his own. Eventually, he chose to join his family in the prison camp at the expense of freedom.

After World War II, the Ballards moved back to Shepperton, England. Later he would remark, “Although I’ve lived in Britain for over 50 years I suspect I still see everything through a visitor’s eyes, and I think that gives my fiction its particular perspective, [a] heightened awareness of the ordinary.”

The experience of war haunts Ballard’s first four novels, in each of which a global catastrophe, linked to the unbalancing of an ecosystem, destroys civilization. In The Wind from Nowhere (1962), high-velocity winds literally blow away human civilization and all its surface artifacts. Rising world temperatures cause massive flooding in The Drowned World (1962), while drought plagues the Earth in The Burning World (1964). Finally, in The Crystal World (1966) living creatures are transformed into crystal statues.

Ballard’s early novels are steeped in images of desolation that reach back to the stress of his war-ravaged childhood and his separation from his family. (The 1964 death of Mary Matthews, whom he had married in 1953, only deepened his abiding sense of abandonment.) Thus, Ballard’s landscapes, vacant of human life (often all life), are strange and terrifying. They are landscapes filled with recurrent images of decay and water, as in the opening of The Crystal World: “The darkness of the river . . . impressed Dr. Sanders. . . . [T]he surface of the water was still gray and sluggish, leaching away the somber tinctures of the collapsing vegetation along the banks.” The image of the river water eating away at the vegetation on the bank evokes the mysterious crystal plague that is eating away at the living world. Moreover, this passage illustrates Ballard’s “unmistakable style,” which, according to filmmaker Michel Deville, “alternates between the bald and the baroque, the clinical sanity of the scientist and the raw, convulsive energy of Surrealism [the production of fantastic imagery through unnatural and incongruous combinations].”

Ballard’s experiences before and during his Japanese internment formed the basis for two autobiographical novels: Empire of the Sun (1984) and its sequel, The Kindness of Women (1991). In the first book Ballard describes how numbingly routine death becomes for the barely teenaged boy: “Wars came early to Shanghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese [embankment].”

In Ballard’s trilogy, Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), and High Rise (1975), concrete and metal replace water as the dominant image. The landscape, no longer natural, is wholly consumed by the concrete and steel of highways, buildings, and cars. Through graphic images of broken bones and bloody death, Crash portrays life as an open wound. The narrator, a fictional James Ballard, is part of a cult whose members purposefully crash their cars as a reaction against the unnaturalness of their lives and their world. While hospitalized from one such crash, the narrator thinks of the many types of wrecks that he and his now-dead mentor, Vaughan (killed in a car smashup), once visualized: “I think of the crashes of psychopaths, implausible accidents carried out with venom and self-disgust . . . the crashes . . . of manic-depressives crushed while making pointless U-turns . . . of sadistic . . . nurses decapitated in . . . crashes on complex interchanges.” The litany in part numbs not only the pain of Vaughan’s loss but also the narrator’s guilt in feeling insufficient pain over that loss. Ballard, critic Peter Briggs writes, “seeks to identify things (and people made into things by the media) as external representations of the inner map of the contemporary psyche.”

Other Works by J. G. Ballard:
- Cocaine Nights. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996.
- Rushing to Paradise. New York: Picador, 1994. Super-Cannes. New York: Picador, 2001.

Works about J. G. Ballard:
- Luckhurst, Roger. The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
- Orr, Ken. J. G. Ballard. Vancouver, B.C.: Macmillan Library Reference, 1997.