film birds are enemies of humankind, but for Blake they are his kin. Flitting around the edges of the human world and soaring above it, they evoke the freedom of spirit that comes when the normal sense of selfhood, with its anxieties and repressions, is forgotten and left behind. The companionship of birds features in a short story teasingly entitled ‘The autobiography of J. G. B.’, which appeared in the New Yorker a few weeks after Ballard died in April 2009 but was published originally in French in 1981 and then twice reprinted in an English version in British science-fiction magazines.
The story describes the protagonist ‘B’ waking up to find Shepperton devoid of human beings. Driving to London he finds the city equally deserted, with not even a cat or dog in the streets. It is only when he reaches London Zoo that he finds sentient life – birds trapped in their cages, which seem ‘delighted to see him’ but fly off as soon as he frees them. The story ends with B making his way back to Shepperton where he settles contentedly into his new life, quickly forgetting his former human neighbours. His only visitors are the birds, and soon Shepperton turns into ‘an extraordinary aviary’. The closing sentence of the story reads: ‘Thus the year ended peacefully, and B was ready to begin his true work.’
As anyone who knew him can confirm, Ballard was a warm and convivial man who enjoyed deep and enduring human relationships. Though he presented himself to the press as reclusive, this was mostly a performance. But a part of him prized solitude. He resisted the idea that social interaction is always the most important part of life, and this impulse found expression in his work.
In welcoming the dissolution of his socially conditioned personality, Blake is like many of Ballard’s protagonists. The Unlimited Dream Company was published in 1979, but in what he regarded as his first novel, The Drowned World, the central character pursued a similar quest. Working his way into the sweltering depths of the jungle that has covered Britain, he leaves a final message he knows no one will ever read: ‘Have rested and am moving south. All is well.’ A few days later, he is ‘completely lost, following the lagoons southward through the increasing rain and heat, attacked by alligators and giant bats, a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun’.
In the course of his life Ballard creatively deployed a remarkably wide range of different styles and genres, but nearly all of his novels and most of his short stories seem to me to explore a single theme. Whether the subject is an apocalyptic shift in the environment as in The Drowned World (1962) and The Drought (1964), mental breakdown and transgressive sex in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and Crash (1973), urban collapse in Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975), the therapeutic functions of crime in Cocaine Nights (1996) and Super-Cannes (2000) or the black comedy of Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006), Ballard is showing how the personal identity we construct for ourselves is a makeshift, which comes apart when the stability of society can no longer be taken for granted. Empire of the Sun (1984) – the autobiographical novel that Spielberg brought to a wider audience – explores the same theme: it is in extreme situations where our habit-formed identities break down that we learn what it really means to be human. A drastic shift in the familiar scene may be the entry-point to a world that is closer to our true nature.
The paradox that is pursued throughout Ballard’s work is that the surreal worlds created by the unrestrained human imagination may be more real than everyday human life. According to William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.’ The dishevelled pilot who appears at the start of this book wants to escape the cavern completely. Blake’s Shepperton is the world as it could be if the doors of perception were ripped from their hinges. The world Blake sees is shaped by unfettered human desire, a creation of the imagination in which the imperatives of society and morality count for nothing.
For Ballard himself these surreal landscapes may have had a healing function. His traumatic childhood left him with the conviction – fully corroborated by events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – that order in society has no more substance or solidity than a rackety stage set. Together with the scenes of cruelty he witnessed after he left the camp where he had been interned with his parents, the spectacle of desolation in the empty city of Shanghai must have left deep scars.
Ballard spent twenty years forgetting what he had seen during his childhood years, he said more than once, and another twenty remembering. His fiction was a product of this process, an inner alchemy that turned the dross of senseless suffering into something beautiful and life-affirming. Nowhere is the result more compelling than in The Unlimited Dream Company.
London, 2014
In the first place, why did I steal the aircraft?
If I had known that only ten minutes after taking off from London Airport the burning machine was to crash into the Thames, would I still have climbed into its cockpit? Perhaps even then I had a confused premonition of the strange events that would take place in the hours following my rescue.
As I stand here in the centre of this deserted riverside town I can see my tattered flying suit reflected in the windows of a nearby supermarket, and clearly remember when I entered that unguarded hangar at the airport. Seven days ago my mind was as cool and stressed as the steel roof above my head. While I strapped myself into the pilot’s seat I knew that a lifetime’s failures and false starts were at last giving way to the simplest and most mysterious of all actions – flight!
Above the film studios helicopters are circling. Soon the police will land on this empty shopping mall, no doubt keen to question me about the disappearance of Shepperton’s entire population. I only wish that I could see their surprise when they discover the remarkable way in which I have transformed this peaceful town.
Unsettled by the helicopters, the birds are rising into the air, and I know that it is time for me to leave. Thousands of them surround me, from every corner of the globe, flamingos and frigate-birds, falcons and deep-water albatross, as if sprung from the cages of a well-stocked zoo. They perch on the portico of the filling-station, jostle for a place on the warm roofs of the abandoned cars. When I lean against a pillar-box, trying to straighten my ragged flying suit, the harpy eagle guarding these never-to-be-collected letters snaps at my hands, as if she has forgotten who I am and is curious to inspect this solitary pilot who has casually stepped off the wind into these deserted streets. The barbarous plumage of cockatoos, macaws and scarlet ibis covers the shopping mall, a living train that I would like to fasten around my waist. During the past few minutes, as I made sure that none of my neighbours had been left behind, the centre of Shepperton has become a spectacular aviary, a huge aerial reserve ruled by the condors.
Only the condors will remain with me to the end. Two of these great vultures are watching me now from the concrete roof of the car-park. Fungus stains the tips of their wings, and the pus of decaying flesh glints between their talons, carrion gold shining in the claws of restless money-changers. Like all the birds, they give the impression that they might attack me at any moment, excited by the helicopters and the barely healed wound on my chest.
Despite these suburban pleasantries, I wish that I could stay longer here and come to terms with everything that has happened to me, and the consequences for us all that extend far beyond the boundaries of this small town fifteen miles to the west of London. Around me the streets are silent in the afternoon light. Toys lie by the garden gates, dropped in mid-game by the children when they ran away an hour ago, and one
