This novel, which is utterly realistic, despite the bizarre settings and incidents, seemed a betrayal of the Ballard cult. He had very little interest in human beings in the conventional sense (and no ear for dialogue) he is remorselessly visual.Įmpire of the Sun - his greatest success - came as a kind of blow to his faithful admirers. Ballard is beleaguered by his obsessions. It is animated by an obsession with the sexuality of the road accident and reminds you that the word obsession derives from the Latin obsidere, which means 'to lay siege to'. Crash is the more typical of Ballard's novels. It is interesting that his two most famous novels were both filmed: Empire of the Sun by Steven Spielberg (an essentially optimistic artist who is never afraid of dark historical themes), and Crash by David Cronenberg (a much darker artist himself, and one who specialises in filming unfilmable novels). He said 'people in the social democracies have no idea of the daily brutality of parts of the east.

He told me that he'd seen coolies beaten to death at a distance of five yards from where he was standing, and every morning as he was driven to school in an American limousine there were always fresh bodies lying in the street. But it wasn't just the camp that formed him - it was the very low value attached to human life, something he saw throughout his childhood. He was 13 at the time and took to the life in the camp as he would 'to a huge slum family'. His imagination was formed by his wartime experience in Shanghai, where he was interned by the Japanese. Funnily enough, he was an unusually lovable man, despite the extraordinary weirdness of his imagination.

But I was always delighted to see Jim later on. The friendship between the two did not survive Ballard's increasing interest in experimentalism, which my father always characterised as 'buggering about with the reader'.

Ballard was a beautiful man, with a marvellously full, resonant face and hot eyes, and talked in the cadences of extreme sarcasm with very heavy stresses - he wasn't being sarcastic, merely expressive. He was a friend of my father's, and my father championed his early work, calling him 'the brightest star in postwar SF' (all purists call science fiction SF, and have nothing but contempt for 'sci fi'). I first came across Ballard when I was a teenager.

Cocaine Nights by J.G. Ballard