Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton by J.G. Ballard

From there to his most recent novel Kingdom Come, about the violent tensions beneath suburban shopping-centre Britain, Ballard has written about the consumer society, the blurring of politics and advertising, environmental catastrophe, even the erotic charge of the car accident in Crash (foreshadowing by 20 years our obsession with the death of Diana, Princess of Wales). Even his bêtes noires were ahead of his time. His 1972 experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition was pulped in America for containing a chapter entitled “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” - then still only Governor of California.

As was said recently of William Gibson, the inventor of the term cyberspace, if Ballard’s themes now seem less prophetic, that is because the future has moved towards him, not the other way round.

Yet his best-known novel remains the atypical Empire of the Sun, about his internment in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, which has outsold all his others put together and was shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize, the one flicker of acceptance from the literary establishment.

Miracles of Life, written in characteristic spare, direct prose, lays bare this mutual distrust. When he was “prose editor” of the literary magazine Ambit, Ballard was asked what his policy was. He answered “to get rid of the poetry”. Apart from Kingsley Amis, whom he was “glad to have known before he became a professional curmudgeon”, his literary friendships are with Michael Moorcock, and latterly Will Self and Iain Sinclair, all outsiders sharing a wholly original take on the world.

Ballard’s contempt for the rest of the scene is encapsulated in a vignette of another “cult” writer, B.S. Johnson, “a thoroughly unpleasant figure... one of those literary writers who receive a glowing review in The Times Literary Supplement, believe every word of praise and imagine it will ensure them a prosperous career”.

His refusal - or inability - to fit in is apparent from the opening pages of this book. If he is without honour in his own land, one good reason is the difficulty of pinning down where home is. Ballard was born, in 1930, into the European community in Shanghai, the “wickedest city in the world”, with its White Russian nannies, country-club Europeans, exotic American cars and poverty at the gates of the enclosed community. He never ate Chinese food, he recalls, until coming to England after the war.

When the 16-year-old Ballard was repatriated in 1946, he recalls: “I noticed the streets near the docks were lined with what seemed to be black perambulators, some kind of mobile coal scuttle, I assumed, used for bunkering ships. Later I learned that these were British cars.”

The drabness of postwar Britain presented a vivid contrast to Shanghai, “a magical place, a self-generating fantasy that left my own little mind far behind. There was always something odd and incongruous to see: a vast firework display celebrating a new nightclub while armoured cars of the Shanghai police drove into a screaming mob of rioting factory workers; the army of prostitutes in fur coats outside the Park Hotel...”

In 1937 this adventure playground took on a more sinister aspect with the Japanese invasion. War was fascinating to an inquisitive and intrepid young mind and Ballard describes the thrill of sneaking into an airfield and sitting at the controls of an abandoned Chinese fighter, an experience “more exciting than any funfair ride”.

Life changed in 1943, when the European community was interned in Lunghua camp. Despite the privations, Ballard enjoyed his years in the camp, thriving in the stability and even freedom that it offered, feeling fascination, and even admiration for his captors. In Empire of the Sun, the fictional Jim has no parents and Ballard is frank about the estrangement that he began to feel from his mother and father. He describes stealing coal to fuel a home-made stove, something his father refused to do out of principle, to make tea for his bedridden mother. “I felt I had gained no merit in his eyes,” he writes.

The second half of Miracles of Life recounts life in England, a picaresque career as a Cambridge medical student (he dropped out after the dissection course finished), trainee RAF pilot and door-to-door encyclopaedia salesman, before he could earn a living as a writer.

Ballard was naturally drawn to the emerging counterculture in the 1960s. But a combination of age, inclination and circumstance made him remain an outsider looking in. He was married with three children when his wife, Mary, died of pneumonia. He took the decision - radical for the early 1960s - to bring up the children on his own. There is something admirably incongruous in these descriptions of a man who dropped his children at school in suburban Shepperton every morning writing his subversive novels or planning the “art exhibition” with wrecked cars and a topless model with which he roadtested the ideas in Crash.

Miracles of Life ends with the sad revelation that Ballard has advanced prostate cancer. If this is to be his final book, it is a worthy one, both as the story of a remarkable life and of an outsider trying to make sense of postwar Britain.

Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton by J.G. Ballard
Fourth Estate, £14.99; 288pp

Extract

The Japanese soldier had cut down lengths of telephone wire and had tied the Chinese to a telegraph pole, and was now slowly strangling him as the Chinese sang out in a sing-song voice. I thought of leaving the embankment and walking across the nearby field, but then decided it would be best to walk straight up to the soldiers and treat the grim event taking place as if it were a private matter that did not involve me.

I drew level with the platform and was about to walk past it when the soldier with the telephone wire raised a hand and beckoned me towards him. He had seen the transparent celluloid belt that held up my frayed cotton shorts. It had been given to me by one of the American sailors, and was a prized novelty that no Japanese was likely to have seen. I unbuckled the belt and handed it to him, then waited as he flexed the colourless plastic and stared at me through it, laughing admiringly. Behind him the young Chinese was slowly suffocating to death, his urine spreading across the platform.

I waited in the sun, listening to the sing-song voice as it grew weaker. The Chinese was not the first person I had seen the Japanese kill. But a state of war had existed since 1937, and now peace was supposed to have come to the mouth of the Yangtze. At the same time I was old enough to know that this lost Japanese platoon was beyond the point where life and death meant anything at all. They were aware that their own lives would shortly end, and that they were free to do anything they wanted, and inflict any pain. Peace, I realised, was more threatening because the rules that sustained war, however evil, were suspended.

Ten minutes later, the Chinese was silent and I was able to walk away. The Japanese soldier never told me to go, but I knew when he had lost interest in me. Whistling to himself, the plastic belt around his neck, he stepped over the trussed body and rejoined his companions, waiting for the train that would never come.