J.G. Ballard: 1930 - 2009
Litt: So, when you say a ‘warning’… I went to a reading recently by American writer George Saunders, and someone asked him from the audience, and it’s a fairly bland way of putting it, ‘Are you an anti-capitalist?’ So, are you an anti-capitalist?
Ballard: No. Not really. I mean, I was a great supporter of Margaret Thatcher. I thought economic freedom was the one thing this country desperately needed. I think her economic policies were right almost to the end. I think her social policies got out of hand, and she paid the price. I rather supported Tony Blair in his early days. I thought he was a con from the word go. I think I wrote to that effect in the Statesman. I think we wanted to be conned. We wanted this nice young man with his people-carrier and his suburban wife and kids. We wanted him. Out on the M25, that’s where I live, I could see that people wanted the new suburbia. And Blair promised a sort of blandness. He just played mood music, but we like mood music.
- J.G. Ballard interviewed by Toby Litt
Heh. Chalk up one for the conservative/libertarians. I have not read tons of Ballard, but frankly, I think the pishing on about how he was a science fiction writer, and what a social critic he was is dreadfully overcooked. Crash is about about technology, of course, but it is entirely about here-and-now tech or, rather, our response to it. Crash is the death drive, heh, made flesh and bone and iron and chrome. It is a novel about psychopathology, individual, societal, but it is not a crime novel, which is the usual hangout of of the pathologists. Likewise, The Unlimited Dream Company (my favorite by him) is hardly science fiction, nor is it even magical realism: but its opposite, rather, which we can call real magicalism.
In Dream Company, a cast-off ne’er-do-well steals a plane, crashes and seems to get “magic” powers, but as the book goes on, you become aware that a better term for his gifts may be “spiritual,” or even “divine.” Ballard is an entirely moral writer, but he is too wise to think human, never mind 20th century Western middle-class/liberal, morality, is the end-all of the universe, so the story is uncomforting. The lioness and the hare have a morality too, between them, but not of a kind PETA cares to reflect on. And then, of course, we are all too aware of the possible Donnie Darko end looming, so we may be reading a fever dream before black. I won't spoil it.
Anyway, Ballard treats spiritual truths as respectfully as anything in this book, which means it is, in a way, beyond genre. It doesn’t have one. You could lump it with Baba Ram Dass and Carlos Castaneda, but Ballard is a luminous artist so that would make no sense at all. Call it science fiction if you like. We’ll be happy, and proud, to have him.
Moorcock: Jimmy [Ballard] had been through that Japanese prison camp. I had been through the Blitz. These were, if you like, extreme experiences, yet seemed to us to have a lot to do with how it was in the world we lived in. Neither of us were bothered by the H-Bomb, for instance, as such. Jimmy felt it had saved his life, probably. I saw it as keeping the peace; Brian Aldiss, too, saw the Bomb as having saved him being involved in the invasion of Japan. We were both impatient with the themes of the chattering classes of our day.
- Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard by Mike Holliday, 9 July 2007