J G Ballard - RIP

catalog

Well-known member
just watched this, very good. i like the bit where he said he went on holiday to greece and momentarily forgot where he lived cos it was so nondescript. it strikes me he wouldn't approve of the celebratory brand of psychogeography.

 

version

Well-known member
Read The Crystal World yesterday. Story wasn't the strongest, but the crystal forest was brilliant. Fascinating idea. I'm still not entirely sure how it works, something to do with time being finite and 'leaking' and things being forced to extend themselves in space as a result, but the descriptions of jeweled crocodiles, glittering trees and people encased in diamond armour made an impression.

I wish he'd spent more time on the Jesuit priest and lepers pursuing paradise than the domestic stuff and ongoing duel between Thorensen and Ventress. The mystical/religious angle was much more interesting to me than the two blokes fighting over the woman neither of them should have been involved with in the first place. The light/dark symbolism was a bit on the nose too, literally spelled out at points, and the Heart of Darkness vibe probably wouldn't fly now.

Garland must have read this one prior to doing Annihilation. There's a character called Ventress in both and the shimmering, constantly-expanding zone transforming everything into these strange, beautiful new shapes is essentially the same.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I remember reading Cocaine Nights and finding my enjoyment, or actually, more than that, the amount I was able to engage with the book, severely limited by the fact that I simply didn't agree with the main idea behind it. The basic principle from which everything flowed and which thus ultimately provided the motivation for everything that occurred, seemed completely wrong-headed to me, not just slightly off, but completely out of whack.
And, if I remember correctly, that idea was that towns need crime to be alive; to be a real town there must be an underworld with drug-dealing, the risk that if you walked the wrong way home at night you might get your head kicked in; there must be a chance that your home can be broken into and your valuables stolen, your things vandalised. In fact he doesn't stop there, there must at least be the possibility of murder.
And the setting for this was a retirement town in Spain or something. A place where rich old people retire to to live in the sun. I accepted quite easily that towns filled with retired Tories and Union Jack covered pubs called the British Lion serving fish and chips and proper British food are boring places, I just couldn't accept that the solution is petty crime. So for me the book failed completely.

The other day we were talking about areas in Lisbon, which we would prefer to live in. I was talking about how I liked the grimy back streets round the back of Martim Moniz to somewhere posher. How the dirty streets with dodgy characters plotting some dubious schemes had a life to them that others didn't... and it rang a distant bell. I started thinking about that book I read twenty five years ago and it occurred to me that I was unconsciously making the same argument Ballard had made. And I decided to think about this properly and after a while I understood that gradually, over the ensuing time, my thoughts had evolved quite naturally and organically to the exact position I'd rejected as completely ridiculous when I was young and knew everything.
 

version

Well-known member
 

version

Well-known member
INTERVIEWER
So, how do you write, exactly?


BALLARD
Actually, there’s no secret. One simply pulls the cork out of the bottle, waits three minutes, and two thousand or more years of Scottish craftsmanship does the rest.

 

version

Well-known member
Read Concrete Island over the weekend and about 60 pages into High-Rise now.

Didn't expect the former to pack such an emotional punch. Not something I associate with Ballard, but the stuff with Proctor, the handicapped gymnast, was really sad. Whole book was really. About halfway through I thought it was perhaps a bit too dry and theoretical what with all the stuff about mapping the island to Maitland's body, and I was struggling to picture the island itself, but it all came together by the end.

High-Rise is even better, imo. Writing feels sharper and there's more going on.
 

version

Well-known member
It's interesting how he works through his ideas as he goes along. You get quite a few instances of him presenting something then immediately analysing and putting forward the subtext himself, preempting the theorists.
 

version

Well-known member
The Drowned World was really good, best one I've read. Can't stop thinking about those descriptions of the huge, pulsing sun and burning lagoons. It's another I actually found quite moving, despite the criticism of flat characters and storytelling usually thrown at him. The bit at the end where Kerans finds Hardman and his eyes are so fucked all he can see is the sun is really sad, also Kerans scrawling the note about everything going well before he hobbles off into the jungle, probably to die.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
urgently need to start reading his books for various reasons. is there anything that might be most adjacent to the "mvuent aesthetic"?
 
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