In Memoriam J.G. Ballard

This is a post that has been waiting unfinished for weeks. Although Ballard died two months ago now, I still want to pay my respects and maybe turn someone onto his amazing writing which was so much more than the Empire of the Sun...


J.G. Ballard was a writer who dealt in dystopias, dreams (mainly nightmares), disorders (mainly mental and sexual) and drugs. At the same time he was a family man who raised two daughters alone, spoke with a plummy accent and never let anything more adventurous than whisky and soda past his lips.

By the time he died on 19 April 2009, Ballard had published 19 novels, a dozen or so short story collections and countless other pieces. Even in the last months of his life he continued to write, producing a book on the cancer which was killing him called Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life.

I first came to Ballard in my early teens, attracted by the shocking titles (example: "The Asassination of President Kennedy considered as a downhill car-race", "Why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan") and the eerie, moody atmosphere of the work: perfect for a teenager.

I remember particularly the wonderful, crepuscular atmospheres of the collection Vermilion Sands, short stories set in a world that has stopped turning, and in which what remains of humanity inhabits a narrow, twilit strip of desert, plundering abandoned supermarkets for strange, luxurious provender and lost in lonely reverie. What this stuff said to a confused fifteen-year-old I can no longer accurately say: but it affected me deeply and helped to mould an aesthetic that still haunts me.

The early novels are also electrifying in their strangeness, their unconditional embrace of the other. Take The Drowned World, with its poetic descriptions of a London utterly submerged, or The Crystal World, with its too-literal fantasy of everything turning to rubies, diamonds and emeralds.

But despite these novels, Ballard was largely ignored by a literary community obsessed by novels of society and manners, neither of which figured greatly in Ballard's work. Where they did, they were indicators of an inner sickness or mental aberration: the calm smooth surface of a society was for Ballard like a glass motorway barrier dulling and attenuating the whoosh and the roar of unleashed humanity, as shown in novels like High Rise, Crash or the later Cocaine Nights and Super Cannes.

Finally though I just wanted to register my appreciation and wonder for the body of work that Ballard produced. To explain and describe each book would take longer than this occasional blogger can handle, but I'd like to give a personal list of favourites, my recommended reading:

Novels:

The Drowned World
The drought
Hello America
Super Cannes: A Novel
Unlimited Dream Company
High Rise
Crash
The Atrocity Exhibition
Empire of the Sun

Short stories

Vermilion Sands
The Voices Of Time
Low flying Aircraft and Other Stories
Myths of the near future

Hook Norton Brewery

For me, one of the great pleasures of being in England is the beer. Lower in alcohol than the continental stuff (3-4 percent), with bags of flavour and all the more drinkable for not being too cold or too fizzy.

One of the best proponents of classic ales in Oxfordshire is the Hook Norton Brewery in North Oxfordshire, a historical firm that dominates the charming Cotswold village of the same name.

We went to the Brewery recently, taking a look at the museum before repairing to the Tasting Room, where we tried several beers from the Hook Norton range: Hooky Best, a clear, plangent bitter; the weightier, hoppier Old Hooky; and the superb Gold, a pale ale of supernal delicacy with a floral nose and a beautifully balanced finish.

After making several necessary purchases we moved on to the nearby pub for a bite of lunch - and a decent pint of beer. I chose mother-in-law pie for lunch - a steak pie that is so named because the meat is marinaded in Old and Bitter before being cooked.

Thanks to my dad for staying sober and driving us home...


The brewery


A pub sign, perhaps?

Penny lane is in my ears

...and in my eyes. But it's not on Merseyside. Of course the 'real' Penny Lane is in Liverpool, but there's another one in the wonderfully named Crazies Hill in Berkshire, just a few steps from my parents' front door. As a child I used to take the family dog walking here. Now I can take my son. Unfortunately he doesn't really like wearing a lead and collar, though.

Where once there were fields of wheat, rye and cattle on either side of this enchanting, high-walled ancient footpath, one side now borders a golf course, which means that you have to keep an eye out for hard white flying objects and people wearing silly clothes shouting "four"!

But the golf course does have one advantage. Four year olds find the idea of looking for golf balls very entertaining and can be persuaded to take very long walks when there's a promise of finding plenty of them. Our haul on the day in question was ... four!

Photos below show the beginning (with my son Ivan), middle and end of Penny Lane, starting on Worley's Lane and ending on Crazies Hill road.

Bad husband

One morning we drove over to Hook Norton in North Oxfordshire, where they have an excellent brewery. On the way back we stopped at the Rollright Stones, a wonderfully gnarled and atmospheric mini-Stonehenge. [See previous blog post]

On the path leading to the stones the following devastating but amusing sign was on display:



Someone was in big trouble that night...

The Rollright Stones

Standing stones are a feature of the English countryside, like narrow, hedged-in lanes and endless golf clubs. The Rollright Stones in North Oxfordshire are a particularly atmospheric example, due to the strange, weathered appearance of the stones and the legend which says that they are in fact a group of warriors who were turned to stone by a witch.

Puffball

While we were in England we spent a lot of time walking, and one of the oddest things we saw on our walks was this puffball.



About the size of a standard football, it was the largest I have ever seen, and was a source of amazement to my son. When I told him that it is a kind of fungus/mushroom, and that it is also edible he said "Is that a joke, daddy?"
As you can see from the pictures we did give it a little tap to get it properly puffing.

More on Wikipedia...

This is England

A great film. Vibrant and beautifully made, This is England is a stark reminder of the ragged England of the early 80's, a time which seemed to combine all the worst aspects of capitalism - laissez-faire, militaristic, socially fractured and often just plain ugly.
This film throws us in at the deep end of this untempting era, tracing the life of Shaun, a young boy in a northern English town who has to come to terms with his father's death in the Falklands war, his own problems at school, and his mother's benignly neglectful attitude (under a scary 80's perm, she prefers to watch Blockbusters rather than deal with her son's emotional problems).
In this grim context, Shaun happens upon and is adopted by a group of skinheads who offer him friendship and self-esteem. While the skins are a slightly rough lot, they are not at this point racists. In fact one of their number, Milky, is black. But as the film progresses, we see how far-right "England first" elements come to dominate the scene. And here we reach what is the film's main theme: the insidious slide into racism that marked the skinhead subculture's path through the eighties.
As such it's an interesting story, but too much of a cultural footnote to support a whole feature film. But director Shane Meadows manages to take this subject matter and imbue it with a significance beyond its historical context. What is the nature of individual and national identity? How do we constitute our self images, and to what extent is the individual consciousness a product of social, economic and political forces, rather than the precious flame of liberty that some liberals would like to believe in? All these questions are raised, displayed and rotated before us in a compelling and ambivalent way. Anyone who moans about today's obsession with labels and brands should take a look at this film as a reminder that this kind of thing was already happening back then.
The film's look is rough and ready, an unsentimental representation in a rawly realistic mode. The one thing the had me a little confused was the geography. The characters all talk in Northern accents, but where we are is somehow indeterminate as West Yorkshire, Scouse and east coast accents mingle. Not a big criticism, but the only one I could find in this otherwise remarkable film.