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Writer's autobiographies can be divided into two camps: one that is strictly for the fans, the buffs and the scholars; and one that is potentially open to every intelligent reader. JG Ballard's Miracles of Life is a superb example of the latter. There is only a bare minimum of book chat here (the sole thing that Ballard's fans might find disappointing is how seldom he talks directly about his writing), but plenty of fascinating yarns about . . . well, dissecting corpses as a medical student, flying fighter planes, flogging encyclopedias door-to-door, surviving years of brutality as a boy in a Japanese pris-oner-of-war camp. It's like listening to a deliciously worldly raconteur late at night as the level of the spirits bottle gradually drops; only the spare, unostentatious elegance and bite of the prose make you sit up with a start from time to time and remember that these pungent anecdotes are being told by a leading novelist.
Newcomers to Ballard will be surprised to hear about the luxuries and the horrors that young Jim Ballard experienced as a child in Shanghai; Ballard veterans will want to check the strictly autobiographical treatment of his early adventures against the versions that have been reworked into his novels. Much of the first half of Miracles of Life revisits the raw material from his childhood that went into Empire of the Sun, Ballard's breakthrough novel that lifted him into the literary main-stream. Most of the second half, covering 1946-69, will strike similar notes of recognition in those who have read his novel The Kindness of Women.
This leaves only 30-odd pages for the past four decades: but, as Anthony Burgess emphasised in his autobiography, the life of a professional writer is essentially that of days alone at a desk. Ballard has been holed up in the same modest house in Shepperton since the 1960s, happily raising his children and steadily typing out a large and unique body of work. His career as a writer has been a resounding vindication of the maxim that you should be quiet and regular in your daily routines so that you can be wild and anarchic in your imagination. Mr Ballard of Shepperton, a modest, formally dressed chap with an officer-class voice, has dreamt up, by turns, incomparably bleak and harrowing visions of glo-bal apocalypse (the early 1960s period of The Drowned World, The Terminal Beach and so on), revolutionary accounts of what he terms "inner space" (The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash) and mordant satires of the kinds of contemporary pathologies that other writers have barely registered (Cocaine Nights, Millennium People).
Experience does not necessarily act as midwife to a writer (Ballard tells us he was already scribbling away when quite young), but it often determines the nature of what gets written. Hippies who relished his savage internal landscapes in the glory days of New Worlds magazine would ask, admiringly, what he was on, man. The answer, we now find, was whisky: apart from the odd toke, and one dreadful experience with LSD, Ballard remained a traditional British boozer. His muse was not psychedelics, but the shocks and contradictions of that colonial childhood: "The prosperous Chinese businessman pausing in the Bubbling Well Road to savour a thimble of blood tapped from the neck of a vicious goose tethered to a telegraph pole; young Chinese gangsters in American suits beating up a shopkeeper; beggars fighting over their pitches; beautiful White Russian bar-girls smiling at passers-by."
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For a child of wealthy parents, prewar Shanghai was by turns pampered (expensive toys, pony clubs, huge American cars and fridges), horrifying (Jim saw corpses every day, "fresh coffins left by the roadside, sometimes miniature coffins decked with paper flowers containing children of my own age"), emotionally chilly and just plain bizarre: "In Shanghai, the fantastic, which for most people lies inside their heads, lay all around me."
No wonder that the teenage Ballard, back in England at public school in the late 1940s, should have been thrilled and relieved to discover the surrealists. His parents and their friends had been living out the last days of a collective fantasy, barely sustained by gin, bridge, adultery and a hubristic confidence that their tenure would last forever. But the Japanese marched in, the Ballards and their neigh-bours were interned and the spoilt boy on the pony was soon fighting for scraps and enjoying the maggots in his rice mush. When Ballard calls the food served at his Cambridge college "execrable", you can be confident he's not a picky eater.
After the Shanghai years, the narrative pace picks up. Ballard trains as a doctor, quits medicine, joins the Royal Canadian Air Force for a spell, marries, fathers three children, is blissfully contented and then suddenly bereaved. He plods on as a single parent (an experience that makes him profoundly sympathetic to all young women struggling on sink estates), finds new love, becomes one of his country's finest writers. Were this a novel, reviewers would take care not to give away the ending. In this case, the ending, a chapter of barely two pages, is an announcement that Ballard is suffering from advanced prostate cancer and considers himself to be entering his "last days".
He signs off with a tribute to the specialist who now cares for him - a gracious gesture to a practising doctor from a doctor manqué. Even readers new to Ballard's work will surely feel something of a pang of loss at these lines; those of us who have been reading him with admiration for 40-odd years will feel that part of our own lives has been somehow diminished. In an earlier chapter, Ballard suggests that rave reviews in a newspaper amount to no more than the traditional, empty gush "Darling, you were wonderful!" on first nights. I hope he does not really believe this, for in some cases rave reviews can be wholly sincere. Mr Ballard, you are wonderful.
Miracles of life: Shanghai to Shepperton by JG Ballard
Fourth Estate £14.99 pp278