GF Ballard

I took a break from the financial crisis to read JG Ballard's autobiography, "Miracles of Life", a recommendation from my friend Victor Pimstein. Who is JG Ballard? American, so I thought, or British, as it turned out? Young or old? What else had he written? I approached the book with a blank mind and proceeded to race through it, totally caught up in his story, which starts in Shangai in 1930, proceeds to England in the grim afterwar years and ends now, in the hospital ward. With deft touches and sly humour, in a wonderfully direct and unaffected style, Ballard brings to life cosmopolitan Shangai before the war ("a city 90% chinese and 100% americanized"), the internment camp where he spent part of his adolescence, where he was close to his parents as never before and  yet drifted away from them, his return to England, where "everything was rationed", including "hope itself", his career as a writer, which he approached from a slightly weird angle which brought him eventual success.  Writing of the 1950's, he says: "already I sensed that a new kind of popular culture was emerging that played on the latent psychopathy of its audiences, and in fact needed to elicit that strain of psychopathy if it was to work". Hence Crash, the Atrocity Exhibition, the Drowned World, some of the books that made his reputation. At 77, saner than any of us, Ballard tells his story as he prepares to die. It's moving, it's enthralling, it's great.