Obituary: JG Ballard
JG Ballard, who has died aged 78, once described himself as "a man of complete and serene ordinariness" (to the disbelief of his interviewer). In fact, he was one of the most strikingly original English writers of the past half-century. Esteemed for his wayward imagination and his ability to create a distinctively Ballardian world, his fiction moved through various phases while remaining instantly recognisable.
Although best known for his 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun, his first fame, in the early 1960s, was as a science fiction writer, hailed by slightly older peers such as Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss. But within a decade or so his reputation had modulated into that of an avant garde provocateur, admired by visual artists and punk rockers. Another decade on and he reemerged as a great novelist of the second world war experience with Empire of the Sun, shortlisted for the Booker prize and winning his widest-ever public. Yet another decade on and he seemed to redefine himself as a special kind of crime writer – one with a peculiar, sinister vision of late 20th-century modernity that appealed particularly to the younger end of Britain's literary and arts scene.
And yet the "serene ordinariness" that he claimed for himself was manifest in his personal life and modest circumstances: he lived in the same small, semi-detached house in Shepperton, Surrey, for nearly half a century; he rarely travelled in his later decades, and he very seldom participated in literary festivals or jamborees.
Jimmy Ballard was the eldest child of James and Edna Ballard, who had emigrated in 1929 from Manchester to Shanghai, where he was born. His father rose to be managing director of a British-owned textile factory there, and the young Ballard grew up in the upper middle-class, quasi-colonial style of a large house in Amherst Avenue, tended by Chinese servants and Russian governesses. A younger sister, Margaret, was born in 1937, the same year that Japan invaded China. The family, like most European expatriates, were able to carry on a normal, prosperous existence, despite shells occasionally whizzing over their house in the International Settlement.
This endured until December 1941 when, immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces entered the settlement. After a year of uncertainty, in early 1943 all "enemy civilians" were interned in camps which surrounded the city. The Ballards were confined to Lunghua civilian assembly centre where they remained until August 1945.
The young Ballard grew from a naive 12-year-old to a perhaps prematurely wise 14-year-old during his time in the camp. He was never separated from his parents and sister, and the physical privations were not especially severe. Nevertheless, the contrast with their previous lifestyle was extreme, awakening in the boy a lifelong sensitivity to dislocations, sudden reversals, paradoxes, and ironies. A few months after the Japanese surrender, he was repatriated to England, a country he had never seen, together with his mother and sister (his father did not finally return to the west until after the Communist takeover of China in 1949).
From early in 1946 he was a boarder at The Leys school, Cambridge, where, when he entered the sixth form, he concentrated on scientific subjects. While there, he won an essay prize but did not contribute to the school magazine. In 1949 he moved up the road to King's College, Cambridge, where he read medicine for two years but left without taking a degree. However, the experience of dissecting cadavers left its mark on his imagination.
His reason for dropping out was the desire to become a writer. In May 1951 he was co-winner, with a piece called The Violent Noon, of a short story competition held by Varsity, the Cambridge student newspaper. (The other winner was DS Birley — later to become Sir Derek Birley, eminent educationalist and author of some classic cricket books.)
Ballard's father suggested that if he wanted to be a writer, he should resume his higher education at the University of London, reading English. This he did, but again he dropped out, after just one year. As he strove to become a writer, submitting stories unsuccessfully to literary magazines, he earned a living by various short-term jobs: Covent Garden flower market porter, advertising copywriter, door-to-door encyclopedia salesman.
Then, in 1954, he volunteered to join the RAF as a trainee pilot, despite being exempt from national service. It was a romantic impulse that sustained him for just one year, largely spent at a frozen airfield in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. The experience of flying (aircraft had been an obsession since boyhood) fed his imagination, but perhaps the most significant aspect of his time in Canada was his discovery, in the servicemen's canteen, of American science fiction magazines. Back home in 1955, awaiting discharge from the RAF, he wrote his first sci-fi story, Passport to Eternity, in emulation of US writer Jack Vance. It was eventually published in 1962.
Also in 1955 he married Mary Matthews, whom Ballard declared to be a great-niece of Cecil Rhodes. Their first child, a son, was born the following year, soon followed by two daughters. The family moved from digs in Notting Hill, west London, to a flat in Chiswick and then on to Shepperton, where they had settled by 1960. Ballard worked as a librarian and as a scriptwriter for a scientific film company.
His newfound enthusiasm for science fiction – particularly of the American, Galaxy magazine school – fed into his writing, and soon he was selling short stories to British sci-fi magazines. The first to appear was Prima Belladonna in Science Fantasy (1956).
At the same time, Ballard developed a strong interest in the visual arts, especially surrealism and the nascent pop art represented by the This is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, which he visited shortly after it opened in 1956. The editor of New Worlds, Ted Carnell, who was to become his literary agent for the first 10 years of his career, helped him obtain a new job, as assistant editor of The Baker, from which he soon moved on to the assistant editorship of a weekly science journal, Chemistry and Industry.
For four or five years, Ballard was a short story writer, a period that climaxed in 1960 with the publication of his remarkable tale, The Voices of Time. Set amid desert landscapes, in a moodily-depicted near-future world situated in a larger, declining universe, it introduced its readers to what Amis was later to call "the inner reaches of Ballard-land". After more than 20 magazine short stories, his first four books arrived in a burst in 1962 – The Wind from Nowhere and The Drowned World, and the collections The Voices of Time and Billenium, all published as 50 cent paperbacks by Berkley Books of New York.
The Drowned World appeared as a hardback in Britain early in 1963 to wide acclaim, along with the two follow-up collections issued by Gollancz, especially The Terminal Beach (1964). On the strength of this, and as the stories continued to spill out, Ballard became a full-time writer. Then tragedy struck. On a family holiday in Spain in September 1964, his wife contracted an infection and swiftly died of galloping pneumonia. As Aldiss was later to say: "It unhinged Jimmy for some while." He wrote nothing for about six months and drank too much. Nevertheless, resisting suggestions that he farm them out, he continued to care for his three children. "It was an extremely happy childhood," his daughter Fay said later. "Daddy sacrificed everything to bring us up. We had a lady who came in to change and wash the sheets every Friday, but apart from that he did everything, and he did it brilliantly. Our home was a nest, a lovely, warm family nest."
Gradually emerging from that nest in 1965-66, Ballard joined in the swinging 60s. His novels The Drought and The Crystal World appeared (both largely written before his wife's death); he became prose editor of the poetry magazine Ambit; and his friendship with the new, young editor of New Worlds, Michael Moorcock, led to fashionable parties, occasional drugs and new women friends. He was encouraged to experiment in his writing, beginning a "non-linear" phase with his story You and Me and the Continuum. He became something of a guru to a circle of younger sci-fi writers, some of them visiting Americans such as Thomas M Disch and Pamela Zoline. One of Moorcock's editorials was entitled Ballard: The Voice.
Stories appeared in Encounter, The Transatlantic Review and various small magazines. But no new novel would appear for seven years. His next significant book was The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), a collection of the nine so-called condensed novels plus half a dozen brief prose satires (the latter included his most infamous title, "Why I Want to **** Ronald Reagan").
His next novel, Crash (1973), was written in a state of what he later described as "willed madness". Enlarging on a theme first broached in the preceding book – the psycho-sexual role of the motor car in all our lives – it was to be his most extreme work, a Jean Genet-like rhapsody on all the conceivable erotic overtones of the car crash. (It was written as a motorway extension was being built past the end of his street in Shepperton.)
A fortnight after he delivered the manuscript, in February 1972, Ballard experienced his first car crash while coming home late one night from central London – "a case of life imitating art," as he said later. Fortunately, he was not badly hurt (and no one else was involved), but he was banned from driving for a year, during which he was inspired by this event and its aftermath to write another car crash novel, Concrete Island (1974). Crash itself received poor reviews in the British press but was acclaimed abroad and more than two decades later, it formed the basis of a provocative film directed by David Cronenberg.
Life seemed to quieten down for Ballard from the mid-1970s. He saw his children through school and university. He did not remarry, although he had a long-lasting relationship with Claire Churchill Walsh, whom he had first met in the late 1960s. His novels, High-Rise (1975), The Unlimited Dream Company (1979), and Hello America (1981), were well received, as were the short stories he had resumed writing.
But none of this prepared his readers for the surprise that was to come in 1984 when he published his largest novel to date, Empire of the Sun. It became a UK bestseller, gained him a new readership, and won the Guardian fiction prize. It failed to win the Booker prize, despite being the bookies' (and reviewers') favourite. A heavily fictionalised version of his childhood in Shanghai, it was hailed as a major war novel and it is likely to be the book upon which much of his reputation will rest. Ballard revisited North America for the first time since his RAF days to attend the Los Angeles premiere of the Steven Spielberg film of the novel in December 1987.
A quasi-sequel followed, The Kindness of Women (1991) – more of a sequence of short stories than a novel, based on his life story from 1937 to 1987. Like Empire of the Sun, it represented a fantastication of his autobiography and was a powerful and moving book, gaining high praise from British critics. To promote its launch, and at the behest of the BBC, he undertook another of his rare travels, his first visit to Shanghai since childhood, where interviews with him were shot for a memorable BBC Four Bookmark programme in 2004 entitled Shanghai Jim.
Other late novels included The Day of Creation (1987), a psychological fantasy set in an imaginary Africa; Rushing to Paradise (1994), a not entirely successful satire-cum-horror story set in the South Seas; Cocaine Nights (1996), the first of his crime and detection stories, set in the south of Spain; and Super-Cannes (2000), a crime novel set in a huge business park on the Riviera. The last was the best – sly, witty and extraordinarily inventive in its attack on eve-of-millennium complacency.
His Complete Short Stories appeared as a 1,200-page volume in 2001 and must rank as one of his greatest books. Had he never written a novel, this would still make Ballard a major writer. But there were to be no more short stories after the mid-1990s, and his last two novels, Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006), showed failing powers.
His last book, the short but intensely moving memoir Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton (2008) – in which he revealed the news of his terminal illness to the world – was received with acclaim.
• James Graham Ballard, novelist, born November 15 1930, died 19 April 2009guardian
