Like many men scarred by war, JG Ballard spent much of his life
determined not to talk about it. Had he died in his early 50s (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 to 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 Kindness of Women, marketed as a "sequel" to
Empire of the Sun,
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.
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 15 words serve as a manifesto for all of Ballard's
novels.
If the strangeness of Shanghai is meant to foreshadow
Auschwitz, Vietnam and the contextless chaos of modern media, Jim's
medical studies in postwar 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 SF'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." Ballard 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. 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 60s 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."
