Ballard’s Ballad

Back in the ‘60s when I discovered JG Ballard’s off-beat scifi (so much more fun than my school assignments), he instantly became one of my favorite authors. He continued to be up through his final (2006) novel Kingdom Come. He writes so elegantly that had he written user manuals for washing machines they would have been a joy to read. Fortunately he was more creative than that.

There often is a Lord of the Flies vibe to Ballard’s fiction, though with adults and triggered by an excess of civilization rather than the lack of it. Ballard came to believe that modern physical and social environments are so at variance with the natural world in which people evolved that our ids urge us to rebellion. When animals in zoos are enclosed in spaces radically at variance with their natural habitats they develop behavioral disorders. Ballard’s human characters do, too; being intellectual creatures, they couch their rebellions in philosophical terms, but there is really something much more primal at the bottom of them. In High-Rise, the residents cut loose in every imaginable way. In Crash the central characters find psychic release and erotic satisfaction in auto wrecks. In Running Wild, the children in an upper-crust gated community kill their parents. In Super-Cannes, highly educated professionals, egged on by a psychiatrist/philosopher, form gangs of roving violent thugs at night. In Millennium People, middle class folks rebel violently against their own suburban lifestyles, taking up terrorism and burning their own neighborhoods.

By 2019 I’d read the bulk of Ballard’s published work, but there were two full length novels I’d missed. They’re missed no more. 

Rushing to Paradise (1994) is a darkly funny novel written from the perspective of the adolescent Neil. Neil is mesmerized by the anti-nuclear/animal-rights protests in Honolulu organized by Dr. Barbara Rafferty, who has a controversial past involving assisted suicide. Ostensibly to “save the albatross,” she assembles an activist group to sail to the French South Pacific island of Saint-Esprit, which is being prepared for a nuclear test. [For historical context: The French continued nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific until 1995, and in 1985 sank in harbor the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, whose crew had intended a stunt much like that of “Dr. Barbara.”] Neil joins her expedition. The project attracts attention from TV and movie producers. Dr. Barbara and her followers reach the island but are forcibly removed by French soldiers amid a media circus. Neil is wounded in the foot.

Months later, they mount a second expedition, which Neil again joins. Arriving at the island they find the French military has withdrawn and that nuclear tests, at least for the time being, have been suspended. Dr. Barbara and her odd assortment of scientists, activists, and hippies establish the island as an animal sanctuary. Yet, charismatic leaders and their fanatical followers (of any ilk) often become brutal and dangerous when social restraints come off, and Saint-Esprit proves no exception. Despite all the sloganeering, Dr. Barbara seems singularly uninterested in the albatross. When Neil questions her about it, she explains to him that the real sanctuary is for women. The men have a way of dying on the island in the ensuing months; Neil eventually realizes his value to Dr. Barbara lies in not being a full grown man. Yet even the explanation she gives about this is an intellectualization by her of more primitive motivations.

The second novel, The Kindness of Women reveals much about JG Ballard himself. Ballard is most widely known for a very atypical book: the semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, based on his experiences as a boy interned as an enemy alien in WW2 Shanghai during the Japanese occupation. Spielberg directed the movie adaptation in 1987. The novel The Kindness of Women is the lesser known sequel to Empire of the Sun. “Semi-autobiographical” understates it: it is closer to three-quarter. Maybe more. His lifelong obsession with death, repressed sexuality, and the thinness of civilization’s veneer becomes much more explicable in light of this tale.

The protagonist James Graham (which is what JG stands for) leaves the Shanghai internment camp, which is suddenly unguarded, at the end of the war. The teen’s first encounter while walking along railroad tracks away from the camp is with Japanese soldiers (still occupying the area) who are slowly killing a Chinese in civilian clothes. (There might or might not have been a reason other than random cruelty.) James knew by then not to question anything Japanese soldiers did, so he puts on an air of as much nonchalance as he can manage. He assumes his own odds of survival in this moment are 50/50 but the soldiers  just exchange a few mutually unintelligible words with him and don’t bother him; he and they pointedly ignore the bound civilian. He walks on. After James leaves China, he attends medical school, serves in the RAF, marries but suffers an early loss of his wife, and unexpectedly achieves some success with writing. All of those events parallel Ballard’s own life, of course. It is clear that the years in Shanghai always followed him – both the character “James” and his real self. They deeply impressed on him what people could be like when effectively unrestrained – and when imprisoned. As one might expect from the title, his relationships to (and with) the special women in his life (sometimes kind, sometimes ruthless, sometimes both) from the days in the camp up to the time of the Spielberg movie are crucial to his sense of the world.

All of us are haunted by our personal Shanghais. Most of us (though some not) are fortunate enough for them to have been less extreme than Ballard’s, but his writing slips us into his shoes easily.

Both books get a solid Thumbs Up.

Doris Day – Shanghai