Someday, I hope to review this book. Having now read it for the second time after decades, I struggle to put my thoughts together, all for the sake of a few stray comments.
-- There are fantasies of consolation and fantasies of vision. Vision has always been less popular, less applauded, than consolation, perhaps because visions, like dreams, are essentially amoral and have no concern for politeness or propriety:
"I was convinced that there was no evil, and that even the most plainly evil impulses were merely crude attempts to accept the demands of a higher realm that existed within each of us. By accepting these perversions and obsessions I was opening the gates into the real world, where we would all fly together, transform ourselves at will into the fish and the birds, the flowers and the dust, unite ourselves once more within the great commonwealth of nature."
-- Ballard's hero, Blake, is at heart a selfish, destructive man, a sex maniac, perhaps even a psychopath, and throughout this book he alludes constantly to his troubling intentions. At the end, however, what he does is quite different; this makes the final chapters moving and haunting in ways I had not anticipated.
"I was the first living creature to escape death, to rise above mortality to become a god."Again I thought of myself as an advent calendar -- I had opened the doors of my face, swung back the transoms of my heart to admit these suburban people to the real world beyond. Already I suspected that I was not merely a god, but the first god, the primal deity of whom all others were crude anticipations, clumsy metaphors of myself...."
-- If gods actually existed, would they learn to overcome themselves? Would they develop beyond their own worst impulses, and move beyond fantasies of unlimited power toward acts of human compassion?
"Already I knew that I was guilty of many crimes, not only against those beings who had granted me a second life, but against myself, crimes of arrogance and imagination. Mourning the young woman beside me, I waited as my blood fell from the air."
-- As a stylist, Ballard is not always elegant, but he has an almost Elizabethan genius for simile and metaphor. Every page offers quotable passages that seem strikingly new and logically familiar. Ballard looks at the world that we all inhabit, but like the best of poets, he sees what we often overlook, often forget.
"My frozen veins were pencil leads in my arms."
-- The book is too long, and until the final chapters, lacks any of the conflict that propels most other stories. The wheel-spinning middle section remains readable and even compelling because of Ballard's genius for metaphor, but it does repeat the same ideas, the same implications. To its credit, the book then develops these ideas for an ending of emotional power.
"My blood lifted from my open heart in black crepes, streamers that trailed through the darkening forest. A strange fungus coated the feeble trees, feeding on the nitrogenous air. A foul miasma hung over the park and deformed the dying blossoms. I sat in the aircraft in a cockpit of dead birds. On all sides I was surrounded by a garden of cancers."
-- Consolation, or vision? Many read fantasy to discover an alternative world that, unlike ours, could actually make sense. Other fantasies can smash our world apart, scatter the fragments like shards of stained glass onto a concrete floor, then stare at the play of reflected blues, reds, greens, and purples on a grey stone wall.
A fantasy of vision can remain true to life, but finds more fascination in the down-to-earth ordinary than we allow ourselves to perceive. We often turn aside from beauty when it gets in the way of business, but J. G. Ballard goes on staring at the broken glass.
"To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage."[William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence."]
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