on its stylistics, the mode seems to be the usual mode of a certain deadbeat realism. (‘He smiled sympathetically at Powers across the desk, wondering what to say to him.’) And yet the reader looking for the usual story and backstory will soon find the conventional fictional perspectives subtly altered. Some names are strange – like Kaldren, and Coma. While the backstory that is hinted at – and this is one of Ballard’s constant techniques – is vast with inexplicability: not just isolated details (‘the derelict gold-panning equipment abandoned over eighty years ago’), but also the blank precision of the vocabulary, the strange ‘camera towers’ and ‘glass polyhedrons’ of this landscape, and the intricacy of the scientific terms, which go way beyond the usual assumptions of a reader’s everyday knowledge: ‘the protein lattices in the genes were building up energy in the way that any vibrating membrane accumulates energy when it resonates …’
It is a future that could also be a present – everything is scrambled – and the reason for this confusion is the meaning of the story. Its surface plot seems to be about the strange discoveries which Whitby, a biologist, has been making in the field of silent gene activation. His colleague, Powers, is dying – and in the time he has left he is trying to think through the implications of Whitby’s experiments, where an organism’s latent future comes to life. And the answer seems to be contained in an odd undertaking of Whitby’s in the summer before his suicide: ‘the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool. An inch deep and twenty feet long, interlocking to form an elaborate ideogram like a Chinese character …’ Eventually, Powers decides to build a version of Whitby’s diagram, in concrete, in the middle of a salt lake. When it is finished, it is revealed as a ‘mandala’ – a miniature diagram of the universe. And Powers walks out to its centre. ‘Above him he could hear the stars, a million cosmic voices that crowded the sky from one horizon to the next, a true canopy of time.’
For this story’s theme is entropy. And therefore its perspective is not just the entropy of the human body, but also of the dying stars, and the dying planet. Which is why the story’s unwobbling pivot is this strange mandala. As Powers dies, ‘the image of the mandala, like a cosmic clock, remained fixed before his eyes …’
4
No wonder Ballard felt he was beyond the usual retrospective psychology! In his list of favourite books, there are predictable literary precursors – the short stories of Hemingway, Alice in Wonderland, Naked Lunch – but two items stand out for their strange abstraction: recordings of cockpit conversations retrieved from the black boxes of airplanes; and the Los Angeles Yellow Pages. The LA Yellow Pages, he once wrote, was the only book he had ever stolen – and then he added: ‘What is interesting about the LA Yellow Pages is the picture it gives of real life in Los Angeles, so different from the glitzy world of film premieres, stars and directors. There are more psychiatrists listed than plumbers, and more dating bureaus than doctors, and more poodle parlours than vets. Like the classified advertisements in newspapers, which provide a picture of the readership, the Yellow Pages of any great city reveals its true underside. The Los Angeles Yellow Pages is richer in human incident than all the novels of Balzac.’
What is a character? Or what is a motivation? The usual human motivations still exist in Ballard’s stories, but only nostalgically – in the background, like herms or hilltop cities in the old landscapes. And the reason for this relegation was a phenomenon which Ballard named the Death of Affect – the twentieth century had invented such large atrocities, not only Hiroshima and the Holocaust, but also the virtual worlds of computers and high finance, that the old human categories were no longer relevant. To argue over the rightness of such a theory is not the point. The point is that it allowed Ballard to invent fictions of a startling originality. In his strangely formal prose, he described what character might look like when all the traditional formalities had disappeared.
Rather than subjects, Ballard has a system of recurring tropes. And so in ‘The Voices of Time’, the reader will discover reworked versions of previous stories: an obsession with sound and soundwaves that is also present in ‘Venus Smiles’, or ‘The Sound Sweep’; the new planets of ‘The Waiting Grounds’; the sleeplessness of ‘Manhole 69’. But in each case, the tropes are rearranged to create a new original. You can call this system mythic, but I think the truth is stranger. It might be more precise to say: the basis of previous fiction was the isolated self, and its various particularities of politesse and ego, whereas in Ballard’s fiction the protagonists turn out to be much larger entities – the impossible and ignored coercions of society, or the environment. For this is, according to Ballard’s redefinition, how the contemporary self now lives: always blurring into a herd, or crowd. And that’s why comparing him to Borges or Kafka or Poe is not quite useful. The texture of his writing is much more deliberately contemporary than theirs – and therefore is always grainy with a faint satirical tone. Famously he claimed that he was not writing about the future but about the ‘visionary present’ – and it is the urgency of that present moment which makes his metaphysical writing so disturbing. If he resembles anyone, I sometimes think, it is the great visionary Jules Verne. In both writers, the chic and the modern – submarines, space ships, X-rays, gene theory – is revealed to be glowing with a much larger, more sinister significance.
Every writer of fiction invents the places they describe, whether ostensibly real or not. ‘It had taken me some forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe,’ wrote Nabokov in his afterword to Lolita, ‘and now I was faced by the task of inventing America.’ And Ballard is one of the great inventors of places in fiction. This ferocious analyst of the totalitarian was one of the experts in fiction’s own totalitarian nature: the way it so easily can dictate its own terms. Imperiously, Ballard invents unexplained acronyms, or distorts vocabulary – a technique already baroquely visible in the first story collected here, ‘Prima Belladonna’: ‘Before he came to Vermilion Sands he’d been a curator at the Kew Conservatoire where the first choro-flora had been bred …’
But his success at this place-invention is so striking because he is always, simultaneously, describing our own habitat. He is a writer of collective motivation, collective character, precisely because existence in the twentieth century was in the process of transforming itself into larger atmospheres: not just the general conditions of nature, but also the pervading clouds of advertising, stock exchanges, computerised reality. He is the great describer of the lawning of our era – the embankments and swathes of abstract space that compose our giant suburbs. Such everyday abstraction, the absence of particulars, is Ballard’s chosen locale – whether it is incarnated in a concrete beachfront with palmettos, an extra planet, or the laboratories of future technological advances.
Although I think it’s also important to point out that, for all the international roaming of his fiction, from the Apartamentos California to Cannes, the true location is always, somehow, Britain. Just think, even, of ‘The Voices of Time’: that entropy is cosmic, sure, but it is also the entropy that Ballard discovered in the postwar suburbs of a dying empire. Britain, in fact, was the most modern country on earth, precisely because it was the world-leader in entropy – and therefore also the leader in ressentiment, rancour, sadness, twilight, concrete. Dystopia! You only needed to look around you: among the flyovers and multi-storey car parks in the rain.
In his later stories, this strange form of visionary politics became more and more pronounced, culminating in the late novels, beyond the chronology of this collection: his studies of financial hyper-reality in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, then the bourgeois darknesses of Millennium People and Kingdom Come. And it came with a technical shift. The interest in vocabulary formation that had marked his early stories gradually became a more overt interest in the general culture’s linguistic deformations. Ballard became the impresario of official registers: a story could be a simple exercise in style – like the punk brilliance of ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, which he wrote in 1968, soon after Reagan became Governor of California. The story is a carnival of vocabularies – the medical, the psychoanalytic, the opinion poll – gleefully stuffed with impermissible fantasy: ‘Multiple-track cine-films were constructed of “Reagan”