But his fascination with our stranger fascinations, his perverse preoccupation with our perversions, is what makes him one of the most psychologically acute writers of the twentieth century.
Maitland, being a latter-day Robinson Crusoe, starts off alone on his island: the only time he speaks is when he mimics the voices of his wife and mistress, imagining what they would say to him as he struggles to survive on water from his car, and the bottles of white Burgundy he had in the back.īallard is often regarded as odd because of his interest in the weird fetishes, hang-ups, and obsessions we have as human beings: being turned on by wounds received in car crashes, to offer the best-known example. As Martin Amis has observed, Ballard is not overly interested in human relationships – his dialogue is only ever purely functional – but perhaps no post-war English novelist has written better about human solitude. It’s a deliciously straightforward idea, and writing a ‘ Robinsonade’ (as such books are known) for the modern age plays wonderfully to Ballard’s strengths as a writer. This flyover was also the place where the video for the Cool Notes’ 1985 song In Your Car was shot, which seems fitting given Ballard’s love of the car.) Fittingly, given Ballard’s interest in television, you can see the old BBC Television Centre at Wood Lane from the flyover. (Over on the fansite Ballardian, Mike Bonsall has done some detective work and discovered the real-life Westway flyover which Ballard almost certainly had in mind. In the 1970s novels, it is not some post-apocalyptic future but instead the here-and-now that is transformed into dystopia: Crash focuses on the link between sexual fetish and car accidents, High-Rise on the psychopathology of life in an urban tower block, and Concrete Island on what happens when a man, an architect named Robert Maitland, becomes ‘marooned’ on an island – a traffic island, that is, in London, on a busy motorway junction, after he crashes his car through a temporary barrier one afternoon. In Ballard’s first four novels, published in the 1960s, the world is destroyed by catastrophe: by a freak wind ( The Wind from Nowhere), by water ( The Drowned World), by heat ( The Drought), and by crystal ( The Crystal World). Certainly, his novels and stories frequently have the clarity and simplicity of concept that we see in Wells’s fiction, just as the narratives driven by these concepts proceed to undo that simplicity by showing the complications that inevitably ensue. Wells and William Burroughs, in so far as he can be likened to anybody. Ballard has always struck me as a curious mixture of H.
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