gullybogan

Dear Reader,

As he is currently dying of cancer, this may well be the last book that Ballard ever writes. Which is ironic, since it’s the first book of his that i’ve ever read.

Or, technically, that i’ve ever read cover to cover.

I first met J.G. Ballard at the back of an aisle of my high school library, in the one safe spot that was out of the librarian’s line of sight. It was a den of vice in the blind spot of authority, this particular place, a spot where all the Asterisk and What’s Happening To Me? books were jammed in amongst the histories of South America, and where a compliant girl called Mandy would put on a show some lunchtimes in which she let boys feel the important spots on her summer uniform, and where (when Mandy wasn’t on offer) you could read a naughty book with rude bits in it without too much fear of discovery.

Uh, Oh! A Great Big Crash!

The book with the naughtiest bits was Crash, an incredible find in a high school library, even in the seventies, when we had openly lesbian English teachers and a faculty of Maths teachers that was indiscretely off its collective face on dope pretty much all of the time.

We had no idea how the book had made its way onto the shelves. Surely not because the librarians had actually read it. They probably thought – judging by the title – that it was some sort of boys’ own adventure novel, in which there was a great big crash! OO-er!

It was a bit hard to get the whole idea of the novel from the disjointed selection of pages that i and every other pubescent boy bogan in the school took turns reading while waiting for Mandy to turn up, but i think it’s got something to do with achieving an orgasm while being killed in a car crash. Or maybe only nearly killed.

As i say, my grasp of the whole is sketchy.

I now have a copy of the text on my bedside table that i promise myself i’ll read; now that i’m a grownup and i’ve had both sex and car crashes, i figure it’ll make more sense.

But this text, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, isn’t about ejaculating while being thrown through a windshield. No, it’s about Ballard’s early life, and how he got to be a famous author.

I think it probably could have done with a bit more ejaculation.

Bob Carr, former premier of NSW and First Tuesday Book Clubber, agrees, as do most of the other book clubbers, with the exception of Jennifer herself.

Lunghua

It was with some disappointment that i found his early life was spent in an interment camp in Shanghai. I mean, we’ve done internment camps, haven’t we?

But if you were thinking that this was going to be some sort of Life is Beautiful, with Ballard’s parents promising him a tank at the end of the war if he behaves himself, you’ll be disappointed. His parents were a little distant, shall we say, and no tank was in the offing. His dad was always popping in and out doing some sort of business thing, and his mum was always sitting in her fabric-walled ‘room’ reading Pride and Prejudice over and over while other couples engaged in extramarital affairs all around her, trying to make up for the lack of Gin and Tonics through meaningless exchanges of bodily fluids.

Ballard was so distant from his parents that when he decided to write his novel of the internment camp – Empire of the Sun – he decided to leave grownups out of it as much as possible, setting it instead in the world of a young boy. That is, himself.

Or so he says. I haven’t read the book, so i don’t know.

Cutting Up Docs

After spending a lot of his time in Shanghai gazing at dead and decomposed bodies, Ballard managed to wander away from the ended up war and fall into medical school, and, therein, the anatomy room. Once snugly ensconced within its formalin-scented embrace, he got to cut up a bunch of dead doctors who’d donated their bodies to science. And a good time he had at it, too.

There was one female cadaver, a strong-jawed woman of late middle age, whose bald head shone brightly under the lights. Most of the male medical students gave her a wide berth. None of us had seen a naked woman of our mothers’ age, alive or dead, and there was a certain authority in her face, perhaps that of a senior gynaecologist or GP. I was drawn to her, though not for the obvious sexual reasons; her breasts had subsided into the fatty tissue on her chest, and many of the students assumed she was male. But i was intrigued by the small scars on her arms, the calluses on her hand she had probably carried from childhood, and tried to reconstruct the life she had led, the long years as a medical student, her first affairs, marriage and children. One day i found her dissected head in the locker among the other heads. The exposed layers of muscles in her face were like the pages of an ancient book, or a pack of cards waiting to be reshuffled into another life. (p144)

The obvious sexual reasons? *shudder*

Clearly he was more rightly destined to be a writer than a doctor, and he made this known to his father, who immediately tried his best to cure him of the writing ambition.

…I told my father that i wanted to give up medicine and become a writer. He was dismayed, especially as i had no idea of how to bring this about. He decided that i should study English literature, the worst possible preparation for a writer’s career… (p149)

The Land of Long Lunches

His father’s best intentions failed, though, and Ballard went on to write a lot of soi disant clever and experimental books, Crash among them. Then he spent a lot of his time having long lunches with famous ppl, and he’s more than happy to drop names to prove how well connected he was. After all, no-one less than Speeelberg himself made the movie of Empire of the Sun, dear Reader.

The Book Clubbers felt that his writing was “modest”. I think they mean that he had some amazing experiences that he didn’t explore properly. To me, there was a great deal of immodesty. He spent a few sparse (if emotionally wrought) paragraphs on the death of one of his wives, but went on and on in great detail about a series of dudes he met who later turned out to be someones important.

The name dropping was, i felt, pretty boring, but the second half of the novel is mitigatingly chock full of brilliant insights into the job of being a writer, and the sort of things you need to think about to be successful as a scribbler.

I do this thing where i read with a pad of Post-it™ notes by my side, and i peel one off and stick it to the page when i find something i want to come back to and think about more deeply at a later date. I normally stick maybe two or three notes into the average novel, but with this, i used over a dozen.

The Novel That Thought It Was A TV Series

Some of the things that Ballard said really gelled with me. I’ve been percolating a story in my head for a while now, and my problem was nothing less than how to approach it. Now i know. Thank you, Mr Ballard.

He had a lot of insights, and i’ll no doubt share them with you in the coming weeks, dear Reader. Although you may wish to read them in their original package for yourself. You decide, as ever, what will find you your bliss.

Ballard is the first writer that i’ve read the autobiography of, and it’s proved quite interesting and useful. I might have to read some others.

If you want to read or watch what the FTBC had to say about Ballard, knock yourself out. As usual, there’s the transcript or the vodcast to choose from, dear Reader.

For the next FTBC, i’m going to be reading Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. Just in case you were wondering.

And plus, Marieke gushed sufficiently about Peter Pan that i feel i really should read that, too.

So, Peter Pan, Crash, and Augie March. It’s going to be an interesting month.

I remain eternally yours,
Gullybogan

ISBN 978-0-00-727072-9