Miracles Of Life

When he was a boy, the author of Empire of the Sun lived the fall of Shanghai in grisly and excruciating detail. Now he has described the horrors he could not write about earlier. The Spectator describes JG Ballard and his last book, Miracles of Life -

No one would be allowed to have J. G. Ballard’s career nowadays. When you consider the life of the average English novelist, what Cyril Connolly called the poverty of experience seems almost overwhelming, as the budding writer moves from school to university to a creative writing MA and on to the two-book contract. It is as thin a body of lived experience as the average Labour Cabinet minister possesses.

Reading J. G. Ballard’s autobiography, you sometimes need to pause to remind yourself just how young he was at the time of many of the atrocious events described. At the point where most English autobiographies are just beginning, as the subject leaves university, enough horror has been lived through by Ballard to supply a lifetime’s imaginative transformations.

. . . It is worth noting, too, that Ballard’s career would simply not happen in the same way now. His transformations of genre fiction were, in part, made possible by the existence of a market for genre short stories — science fiction magazines in the 1950s and 1960s published a remarkable number of stories by what now seem classic writers. Those have all disappeared today, and it’s hard not to think that the future of English literature will be poorer as a result. Many of the great masterpieces of the English short story are genre stories — by Conan Doyle, M. R. James and P. G. Wodehouse, for example — and one can’t imagine where they would be published now. Ballard is the last of this distinguished line.

This is a remarkable autobiography, treating events which most of us can barely imagine with tranquil dignity and exactness. It is, Ballard says, his last book; he is terminally ill with cancer, and it ends with a moving tribute to the doctor who has made this final work, with its highly un- Ballardian title, possible. It has been a great career, and despite the wildness and provocations of many of his books, Ballard has carried out Matthew Arnold’s imprecation to ‘see life steadily and see it whole’. This is an unforgettable farewell.