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The Unlimited Dream Company
From the author of the Sunday Times bestseller 'Cocaine Nights' comes an acclaimed backlist title -- in which suburban London is transformed into an exotic dreamworld -- now reissued in new cover style. When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to have come back from the dead. Within hours everything in the dormitory suburb is strangely transformed. Vultures invade the rooftops, luxuriant tropical vegetation overruns the quiet avenues, and the local inhabitants are propelled by the young man's urgent visions through ecstatic sexual celebrations towards an apocalyptic climax.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1979
84 people are currently reading
2,336 people want to read
About the author
J.G. Ballard
426 books3,948 followersJames Graham "J. G." Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Ballard came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard focused on an eclectic variety of short stories (or "condensed novels") such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which drew closer comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Burroughs. In 1973 the highly controversial novel Crash was published, a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism; the protagonist becomes sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car crashes. The story was later adapted into a film of the same name by Canadian director David Cronenberg.
While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army. Described as "The best British novel about the Second World War" by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg.
The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".
While many of Ballard's stories are thematically and narratively unusual, he is perhaps best known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War as it came to be occupied by the Japanese Imperial Army. Described as "The best British novel about the Second World War" by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg.
The literary distinctiveness of Ballard's work has given rise to the adjective "Ballardian", defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 205 reviews
June 1, 2017
How much semen is too much for one book to contain? The answer is none. There is none too much semen.
For proof of this, proceed directly to The Unlimited Dream Company. I couldn’t name a book more semen-spangled if you held a loaded dick to my head. Even the word ‘semen’ has to hold some kind of per-page record here. If you can make your way past all the goo, this is actually quite a lovingly endearing story—perhaps in spite of the fact that the predominance of it concerns a guy ejaculating flowers and shooting snakes out of his penis. Sci-Fi, so much to answer for. That said, the passages on flora and animalia alone merit inclusion on your reading list.
I know Ballard gets tagged with the lazy ‘transgressive’ ribbon all the time (or at least used to; I’m sure his descendants have outpaced him) and that he’s notoriously hit-or-miss. Here, he’s mostly ‘hit.’ Barring a bit of repetition that could have been tightened-up (did I mention semen?), the majority of Dream Co. is stunningly well-written. The core of the plot is a tricky beast; one is never sure which direction Ballard is going to end the whole shebang in but, for my money, he absolutely nails the landing. It’s a beauty and, yeah, true loves eats itself.
OR
If you’ve ever longed to read a book where a guy transforms into a deer and fucks everything in sight while flinging cum over an entire town, then immediately pass GO.
Enjoy!
For proof of this, proceed directly to The Unlimited Dream Company. I couldn’t name a book more semen-spangled if you held a loaded dick to my head. Even the word ‘semen’ has to hold some kind of per-page record here. If you can make your way past all the goo, this is actually quite a lovingly endearing story—perhaps in spite of the fact that the predominance of it concerns a guy ejaculating flowers and shooting snakes out of his penis. Sci-Fi, so much to answer for. That said, the passages on flora and animalia alone merit inclusion on your reading list.
I know Ballard gets tagged with the lazy ‘transgressive’ ribbon all the time (or at least used to; I’m sure his descendants have outpaced him) and that he’s notoriously hit-or-miss. Here, he’s mostly ‘hit.’ Barring a bit of repetition that could have been tightened-up (did I mention semen?), the majority of Dream Co. is stunningly well-written. The core of the plot is a tricky beast; one is never sure which direction Ballard is going to end the whole shebang in but, for my money, he absolutely nails the landing. It’s a beauty and, yeah, true loves eats itself.
OR
If you’ve ever longed to read a book where a guy transforms into a deer and fucks everything in sight while flinging cum over an entire town, then immediately pass GO.
Enjoy!
June 4, 2024
Although highly unlikely, but let's just say for the sake of delving into the realms of fantasy this was a movie; it would be like some weird collaboration between Terry Gilliam, Studio Ghibli, and Davids Attenborough and Cronenberg. It would also likely have to be a warped skin-flick, because the narrator (like on a cocktail of viagra and hallucinogens) roams around in his birthday suit with a constant erection masturbating over anything and everything.
This was just completely nuts, and I actually quite enjoyed it!.
Come fly with me, we'll fly, we'll fly away!.....nope, not to that bar in far Bombay, but rather hovering in the skies over Shepperton, England as a winged creature. Mr Ballard, draws on science-fiction methods to create a magical but disturbing modern fantasy, that could also be seen as a sort of satire. Fused with surrealism, suburbia, erotica, and...er...exotic plantlife, J.G. showcases he was a writer of enormous intentive prowess.
The Unlimited Dream Company is simply like nothing I have read before, a flight into a world of dreams and desire. And it is truly a book dominated by wild and vivid imagery. A failed medical student (Blake) becomes obsessed with the idea of flying, and sets out to steal a plane from a London airport, but it's not long before he crash-lands in the Thames at Shepperton. Trapped under water, he somehow miraculously and mysteriously survives, and on the banks of the river is met by a doctor, her madcap mother, and a priest, all whom try and take possession of him. So begins his dream-like journey where the other residents of Shepperton seem to have been waiting for his arrival. They believe him to be a messiah, someone with strange mythical powers. He sets out to perform wonders throughout the area, sprouting jungle vegetation, huge birds, animals and fishes. He also heals the sick, teaches people how to fly, and with a perverse heightened sexual energy, tries to have sex with the whole town, before an apocalyptic mirage of heaven and hell descends on this corner of the earth. All the while, the submerged aircraft shimmers in the water, containing a body.
This is no doubt heady stuff, a dreamy netherworld where Ballard you feel just lets himself off the leash. Even though I liked it, and not for a page was I ever bored, it does have it's problems though. At times it felt like the writer was someone trying to imitate Ballard, incorporating just too much in what was only a short novel. From the midway point everything felt clustered and suffocating with little time to take it all in. It also contained an uncomfortable moment involving handicapped children, which left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
I never thought I would get to read a novel with Vultures circling over the skies of London, but then, it's not that unbelievable really, seeing as there is a great big vulture cage right in the heart of the Capital. I know it as the Houses of Parliament.
November 19, 2011
I find it difficult to know how to talk about this book. I loved the vibrant writing and surreal story, but could not recommend this to 95% of the readers I know.
Why? Well, you see... Blake is a bit of a loser. He steals a plane and crashes it into the Thames at Shepperton, and that's when everything goes a bit strange. He develops strong desires for everyone and everything in the town (see 95% comment earlier). Just like in dreams, relationships have no consequences, people can fly and commune with the sea and forest creatures. Blake becomes like a pagan dream god - even spreading his semen around grows a tropical rainforest.
And yes, I said the word semen. Trust me, if you can't take it the two times in this review, this is not the book for you.
But maybe you are a reader who can push aside all of your senses of moral violation to enjoy the writing, the description, the dreamy world of this book. If you can, you should. I couldn't put it down. The aerial wedding scene is particularly memorable.
"When they had gone, I walked alone through the late afternoon, my damp suit covered with a coat of rainbows, a confetti of petals, celebrating my marriage with the meadow."
I've marked this as sci-fi/fantasy, and it isn't really... more absurdist/surrealism. In a brief interview in the back, Ballard says he started writing sci-fi. I am hooked and want to read more. There is a beautiful recent volume of complete short stories that might be the next thing I hunt down.
Why? Well, you see... Blake is a bit of a loser. He steals a plane and crashes it into the Thames at Shepperton, and that's when everything goes a bit strange. He develops strong desires for everyone and everything in the town (see 95% comment earlier). Just like in dreams, relationships have no consequences, people can fly and commune with the sea and forest creatures. Blake becomes like a pagan dream god - even spreading his semen around grows a tropical rainforest.
And yes, I said the word semen. Trust me, if you can't take it the two times in this review, this is not the book for you.
But maybe you are a reader who can push aside all of your senses of moral violation to enjoy the writing, the description, the dreamy world of this book. If you can, you should. I couldn't put it down. The aerial wedding scene is particularly memorable.
"When they had gone, I walked alone through the late afternoon, my damp suit covered with a coat of rainbows, a confetti of petals, celebrating my marriage with the meadow."
I've marked this as sci-fi/fantasy, and it isn't really... more absurdist/surrealism. In a brief interview in the back, Ballard says he started writing sci-fi. I am hooked and want to read more. There is a beautiful recent volume of complete short stories that might be the next thing I hunt down.
April 15, 2018
"For all we know, vices in this world may well be metaphors for virtues in hte next."
- J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company
A man named Blake crashes his plane in a small British town. He is transformed into a demigod in the town. Or perhaps, he is dead and this is some weird limbo he is stuck in. Or perhaps he is just mad. Anyway, Blake isn't a very reliable narrator. The story keeps getting weirder and weirder, breaking out of any form of simple narrative and becoming fractured, recursive, fractaled, contradictory. As this book begins to "take flight" and enters into fertile vision territory, it begins to seed and grow into some funky William Blake inspired story. In a lot of ways, this novel is a "retelling/reincarnation" of Blake's poem Milton (just as in Milton, Blake was reinterpreting/retelling/reincarnating Milton's masterpiece 'Paradise Lost'). Confused? That is OK. This book shouldn't even be thought of as dystopian or science fiction. In reality is a surreal fantasy, a vision-based parable, a verdent exploration of death, sex, and life. Read it like you would look at a painting Salvador Dalí might have done if he was exploring the art of William Blake.
- J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company
A man named Blake crashes his plane in a small British town. He is transformed into a demigod in the town. Or perhaps, he is dead and this is some weird limbo he is stuck in. Or perhaps he is just mad. Anyway, Blake isn't a very reliable narrator. The story keeps getting weirder and weirder, breaking out of any form of simple narrative and becoming fractured, recursive, fractaled, contradictory. As this book begins to "take flight" and enters into fertile vision territory, it begins to seed and grow into some funky William Blake inspired story. In a lot of ways, this novel is a "retelling/reincarnation" of Blake's poem Milton (just as in Milton, Blake was reinterpreting/retelling/reincarnating Milton's masterpiece 'Paradise Lost'). Confused? That is OK. This book shouldn't even be thought of as dystopian or science fiction. In reality is a surreal fantasy, a vision-based parable, a verdent exploration of death, sex, and life. Read it like you would look at a painting Salvador Dalí might have done if he was exploring the art of William Blake.
June 9, 2016
This book gets off to a good start, with one of those great, swift openings of Ballard's that throws you right in the deep end (early chapter title: "I Steal the Aircraft"). But his vision dims after awhile and the book gets taken over by an overactive cloaca.
October 31, 2014
The fact that I have finished this book makes me feel like drinking champagne, dancing in the rain, throwing a party, bouncing on a trampoline.... Why? Because I LOATHED this book and continuing to read it was worse than the time I got three detentions at school on my birthday, worse than waiting for the results of a medical test that might prove you have a horrible disease, worse than being trapped in a train compartment with an interminable bore. I just needed it to be OVER.
So why did I continue to the end, and not throw the book in the dustbin, or flush it down the loo or donate it to the nearest organised Bonfire Night event? Because I was hoping that at some point I would discover some coherence or meaning to make the awfulness of wasting my life on this book worthwhile. This was a forlorn hope.
When I was young, I devoured science fiction novels so fast that I had read almost all they had in my local library by the time I was about 15. And yet, I never read anything by J G Ballard, supposedly one of the giants of this genre. I know that there have been many attempts by many people, most of them cleverer than me, to define SF. I don't know what SF is, but I can say with certainty, this wasn't it. There was no science here, no logic. It was like the demented, rambling outpourings of a sex maniac on LSD.
I have never thought that I was a prude, but I prefer my reading not to have semen on every page (if Ballard was paid for every time he used the word, he must have been very well paid). Other people's sex is boring and his vision of sex, paedophilia, incest, semen, shit, blood and pus was stomach churningly disgusting.
I suspect this was intended to be some sort of Eden parable since the whole unclothed population of Shepperton "did not know they were naked". I was bored the second time this was mentioned, never mind the 3rd, 4th, 5th and nth.
You might have gathered that I didn't much like this book! The best thing I can say about it is that it was not badly written, in fact, J G Ballard is probably quite a good writer. It's a pity, therefore, that he wasted his talent on this load of meaningless drivel.
So why did I continue to the end, and not throw the book in the dustbin, or flush it down the loo or donate it to the nearest organised Bonfire Night event? Because I was hoping that at some point I would discover some coherence or meaning to make the awfulness of wasting my life on this book worthwhile. This was a forlorn hope.
When I was young, I devoured science fiction novels so fast that I had read almost all they had in my local library by the time I was about 15. And yet, I never read anything by J G Ballard, supposedly one of the giants of this genre. I know that there have been many attempts by many people, most of them cleverer than me, to define SF. I don't know what SF is, but I can say with certainty, this wasn't it. There was no science here, no logic. It was like the demented, rambling outpourings of a sex maniac on LSD.
I have never thought that I was a prude, but I prefer my reading not to have semen on every page (if Ballard was paid for every time he used the word, he must have been very well paid). Other people's sex is boring and his vision of sex, paedophilia, incest, semen, shit, blood and pus was stomach churningly disgusting.
I suspect this was intended to be some sort of Eden parable since the whole unclothed population of Shepperton "did not know they were naked". I was bored the second time this was mentioned, never mind the 3rd, 4th, 5th and nth.
You might have gathered that I didn't much like this book! The best thing I can say about it is that it was not badly written, in fact, J G Ballard is probably quite a good writer. It's a pity, therefore, that he wasted his talent on this load of meaningless drivel.
May 28, 2022
Bizarre Suburban Messiah Death Fantasy, with Loads of Symbolism
Depending on how open you are to very ambiguous, uncomfortable, subtly ironic, and flat-out bizarre stories, you will probably rate this very highly or give up after a few chapters. As a long-time Ballard fan, I know enough to expect all of the above, and take pleasure in the strangeness of it all. The story outline is easily described (check some book blurb), but the reading must be experienced to understand it. There is just no way to predict how any given reader will react - its a love/hate thing. Oh, and there is a load of sperm flying about, literally, metaphorically, metaphysically, so if you are faint of heart or easily offended, you've been warned! You will struggle to interpret what it all means, even after finishing it, but I guarantee you won't forget it. I might revisit again someday, it's short enough, and has plenty of psychological depths to plumb.
Depending on how open you are to very ambiguous, uncomfortable, subtly ironic, and flat-out bizarre stories, you will probably rate this very highly or give up after a few chapters. As a long-time Ballard fan, I know enough to expect all of the above, and take pleasure in the strangeness of it all. The story outline is easily described (check some book blurb), but the reading must be experienced to understand it. There is just no way to predict how any given reader will react - its a love/hate thing. Oh, and there is a load of sperm flying about, literally, metaphorically, metaphysically, so if you are faint of heart or easily offended, you've been warned! You will struggle to interpret what it all means, even after finishing it, but I guarantee you won't forget it. I might revisit again someday, it's short enough, and has plenty of psychological depths to plumb.
May 5, 2016
Top-tier Ballard, in the same realm as The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, and High-Rise, despite each of those books being so different from one another. Blake's frenetic and hallucinatory rebirth after death wavers from euphoria to outright horror, sometimes in the same moment, and while dreamlike, the events are consistently relayed through Ballard's sharp and smart prose. The overall effect is frequently mystifying and joyous, occasionally boring, but always fiercely original.
May 28, 2019
Senryu Review:
Semen-spattered thighs
take snoozing Shepperton citz
to aerial bliss
Semen-spattered thighs
take snoozing Shepperton citz
to aerial bliss
September 15, 2023
Ballard geç kapitalizmle derdi olan sürekli romanlarında işleyen bir yazar. Okuduklarım içerisinde edebi olarak beni en çok etkileyen bu roman oldu. Gerçekle düş tamamen birbirine karışıyor. Diğer romanlarına kıyasla şiddet, vahşet daha az olsa da tedirginlik seviyesi kurgu ilerledikçe artıyor.
Bilim kurgu olsa da türün bildik özelliklerinden sıyrılmış olan roman bir uçak kazasıyla başlıyor. Karakterin gözünden tanık oluyoruz her şeye. Çaldığı uçak ile bir nehre düşüyor. Kazadan sağ kurtulmuştur ama Blake emin değildir bundan. Uçmaya bir tür takıntısı olan Blake kaza ile çeşitli güçler kazanmıştır. Ballard karakteri gibi okuru da şüpheye itiyor. Diğer romanlarında birkaç sefer işlediği gibi karakter bulunduğu yeri terk edemiyor. Daha önce Beton Ada’yı okurken de bu his yüzünden rahatsız olmuştum. Sıkışmışlık atmosferini ciddi anlamda iyi yaratan bir yazar. Ama bu romanda sıkışmışlığa garip güçlerin de eklenmesi çok farklı bir durum yaratmış. Blake artık uçarken herhangi bir vasıtaya ihtiyaç duymadığı için bir tür hayaller diyarındadır aslında. Her konuda sınırsız bir şehir yaratmış. Uçmak isteyen uçuyor, tüm tutkular doyuma ulaşıyor. Okuru ahlaki olarak pek çok ikileme sürüklüyor. Çok sevdiğim bir roman oldu.
Ütopyayı tedirginliklerle donatarak sarsıcı bir roman ortaya çıkarmış. Hayranlığım gittikçe artıyor.
Bilim kurgu olsa da türün bildik özelliklerinden sıyrılmış olan roman bir uçak kazasıyla başlıyor. Karakterin gözünden tanık oluyoruz her şeye. Çaldığı uçak ile bir nehre düşüyor. Kazadan sağ kurtulmuştur ama Blake emin değildir bundan. Uçmaya bir tür takıntısı olan Blake kaza ile çeşitli güçler kazanmıştır. Ballard karakteri gibi okuru da şüpheye itiyor. Diğer romanlarında birkaç sefer işlediği gibi karakter bulunduğu yeri terk edemiyor. Daha önce Beton Ada’yı okurken de bu his yüzünden rahatsız olmuştum. Sıkışmışlık atmosferini ciddi anlamda iyi yaratan bir yazar. Ama bu romanda sıkışmışlığa garip güçlerin de eklenmesi çok farklı bir durum yaratmış. Blake artık uçarken herhangi bir vasıtaya ihtiyaç duymadığı için bir tür hayaller diyarındadır aslında. Her konuda sınırsız bir şehir yaratmış. Uçmak isteyen uçuyor, tüm tutkular doyuma ulaşıyor. Okuru ahlaki olarak pek çok ikileme sürüklüyor. Çok sevdiğim bir roman oldu.
Ütopyayı tedirginliklerle donatarak sarsıcı bir roman ortaya çıkarmış. Hayranlığım gittikçe artıyor.
June 3, 2020
Critically acclaimed intense novel focussing on a super powered messiah crashing in Shepperton… yes you read that right! To me somewhat dated with all the pseudo-sexual drama and seemingly intentional aim to shock. 3 out of 12
April 24, 2022
A Ballardian fairy tale that is equal turns magical, lovely, and completely sinister.
February 20, 2015
if you wanted to know what the inside of a crazy rapist cult leader's mind looked like it would be this. this literary pieces of garbage is what happen when you give lsd to a crazy person and they think that what they see and feel is true and serves only them. if i had to describe the tone of this book it would be pee mixed with the pulp of old news paper. to sum it up if you like rape, pedophilia, and pseudo cannibalism presented as the world's salvation then read this book!
The main thing i think this book does well is how the world around the main character changes in relation to his mood. it does help to hammer the main character's god complex home. so to sum up the concept was cool but it wasn't my cup of tea. to each's own.
The main thing i think this book does well is how the world around the main character changes in relation to his mood. it does help to hammer the main character's god complex home. so to sum up the concept was cool but it wasn't my cup of tea. to each's own.
August 13, 2016
I recommend this book to anyone who loves the word "semen" and constant references to it. I wanted to like this book, I really did, but it was just too over the top and obvious with its metaphors trying to be spiritual, philosophical, deep, but instead just seemed hackneyed, repetitive and silly. I will read more of Ballard's books to see if this is just a one off but it really didn't do anything for me as I dislike the word semen.
October 30, 2023
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote
Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse
Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation)
2023 reads, #83. So, the last time we were discussing my completist read of the entire oeuvre of JG Ballard, after just finishing the most famous book of the author's career, 1975's High-Rise (my review), I mentioned how I would likely be skipping Ballard's next book after this, 1979's The Unlimited Dream Company, because of it being just so obscure as to almost not even exist anymore; the paper version is long out of print, with no Kindle version ever having been made, no BitTorrented version inside the fairly complete Pirate Bay file on Ballard's works, and most importantly with not even a single copy available through the Chicago Public Library, such an unusual occurrence that it always causes attention to itself the rare times it happens. (For those who don't know, Chicago has the third largest public library system not just in America but the entire world, and so for the most part typically has at least one copy of pretty much every pre-Amazon novel you can even name.)
But instead, this lack of accessibility made me even more curious about the book than before -- for what's the point in even doing a completist challenge if you're not going to read the most obscure titles of that author's career, the kind of stuff that pretty much no one else will go to the trouble of tracking down themselves? So, that's exactly what I did, going on eBay and actually purchasing a rare first edition of the book (for more money than I care to admit) so that I could add it to my own rare-book collection afterwards and partly justify the expense, with my copy eventually arriving a little earlier this year. Unfortunately, though, I quickly discovered this week why this book is so obscure, when I finally sat down to read it; for while High-Rise right before it is arguably Ballard firing on all cylinders, perhaps not the absolute best book of his career although with no one denying it's in the top three, the one after it is unambiguously the worst book of his career up to that point, a sloppy and self-indulgent mess that Ballard only seems to have gotten away with because of this coming straight after his unexpected bestseller and instant cultural touchstone, and with him therefore having the power to be as masturbatory as he wanted to be. And sister, believe me when I say that he wanted to be very, very masturbatory.
And indeed, I suspect an important thing to remember here is that, far from being a slow-burning cult sleeper, High-Rise was hugely popular from almost its release among a certain hip crowd "in the know," with there having been serious plans to make a Hollywood adaptation starting literally weeks after the book was first published, which would've been directed by famed trippy countercultural filmmaker Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth -- ah, what might've been!). That I expect has a large part to do with why Ballard set this follow-up book in Shepperton, center of England's film industry because of Pinewood Studios (where most of the original "Star Wars" trilogy was filmed, in exactly the same years Ballard first wrote this), because you can sort of squint at this book sideways and kind of see that it's partly about the pressures of an indie artist trying to fit into mainstream respectability (after our book's antisocial, perpetually horny, often physically violent "hero" Blake impulsively steals a small aircraft in London one day for no particular reason, ends up crash-landing it in Shepperton, then seemingly can't escape that town once he's there no matter what he tries, in that the highways all improbably end up leading back to the city when he tries driving down them, etc.).
But it's this facile description of the book's plot that's also an example of everything wrong with it, because Ballard seems to have codified his book's themes in such an impenetrably dense and personal way that it often feels like he's describing a dream he once had (among other developments, the entire city's population all turn into birds at one point, Blake spends most of the novel not knowing whether he's alive or dead, and an unsettlingly high amount of the citizenry seem to be convinced that he's the Messiah). And as most people can tell you, being forced to listen to someone describe one of their recent dreams is literally one of the most tedious experiences all of us have on a regular basis, because there's nothing inherently compelling about dream logic -- anything can happen, no actions have any stakes or repercussions, the laws of physics themselves can be conveniently ignored whenever the author wants, and in general it's much like trying to get emotionally invested in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, by which I mean it's not only impossible but a genre designed specifically to make it impossible.
That leads to a highly unsatisfying reading experience, one in which just weirdo random things arbitrarily happen on a page-by-page basis, with you never knowing whether Ballard's ever going to come back and reference that turn of events again, whether it's important to our story or not, or even whether it's supposed to have "really" happened within the collective fictional reality of the world this story inhabits. In other words, in a book where dreams are apparently real, this book continues to feature dreams on top of that which aren't supposed to be a "real" part of the "dream world" where this book takes place, which gets so metafictional so quickly that it just left me with a giant headache before I had even gotten 50 pages into it.
That's a shame, because after eight books of his now, I've come to realize that Ballard needed a lot of boundaries artificially placed on him for his writing to truly shine, such as when his career first started out and the only people who would publish him were traditional science-fiction presses who wanted traditional Mid-Century Modernist sci-fi tales from him. When the countercultural revolution of the 1970s erased this need for Ballard to deal with artificial limits placed on his unlimited imagination, the results started becoming extremely hit and miss, and for every brilliant book like High-Rise or Concrete Island (my review), he also put out a sloppy, stream-of-consciousness mess like today's book or the similarly frustrating Crash (my review).
That's of course the entire point of doing a completist read of a specific author, to get a really deep sense of what made them tick as both a person and an artist, divorced from just the handful of "greatest hits" that will be the only books of theirs read by 99 percent of future audience members after that author's death; but while that's a worthwhile endeavor, it's sometimes not a fun one, as I was reminded of with this book I eventually just had to hold my nose and slog down as quickly as I could, like bitter medicine being force-fed to me by some bitter Ballardian nurse with a cruel streak and a loaded gun pointed straight at me. That's kind of what this book feels like, Ballard essentially punishing you for daring to be a fan of his writing, and it's easy to see why the book quickly died on the vine when it first came out and then was promptly and completely forgotten by society at large. Let's see if things get any better with the next book in the list, 1981's Hello America, whose synopsis at least promises more of the same.
JG Ballard books being reviewed for this series: The Drowned World (1962) | The Burning World (1964) | The Crystal World (1966) | The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) | Crash (1973) | Concrete Island (1974) | High-Rise (1975) | The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) | Hello America (1981) | Empire of the Sun (1984) | The Day of Creation (1987) | Running Wild (1988) | The Kindness of Women (1991) | Rushing to Paradise (1994) | Cocaine Nights (1996) | Super-Cannes (2000) | Millennium People (2003) | Kingdom Come (2006)
Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse
Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation)
2023 reads, #83. So, the last time we were discussing my completist read of the entire oeuvre of JG Ballard, after just finishing the most famous book of the author's career, 1975's High-Rise (my review), I mentioned how I would likely be skipping Ballard's next book after this, 1979's The Unlimited Dream Company, because of it being just so obscure as to almost not even exist anymore; the paper version is long out of print, with no Kindle version ever having been made, no BitTorrented version inside the fairly complete Pirate Bay file on Ballard's works, and most importantly with not even a single copy available through the Chicago Public Library, such an unusual occurrence that it always causes attention to itself the rare times it happens. (For those who don't know, Chicago has the third largest public library system not just in America but the entire world, and so for the most part typically has at least one copy of pretty much every pre-Amazon novel you can even name.)
But instead, this lack of accessibility made me even more curious about the book than before -- for what's the point in even doing a completist challenge if you're not going to read the most obscure titles of that author's career, the kind of stuff that pretty much no one else will go to the trouble of tracking down themselves? So, that's exactly what I did, going on eBay and actually purchasing a rare first edition of the book (for more money than I care to admit) so that I could add it to my own rare-book collection afterwards and partly justify the expense, with my copy eventually arriving a little earlier this year. Unfortunately, though, I quickly discovered this week why this book is so obscure, when I finally sat down to read it; for while High-Rise right before it is arguably Ballard firing on all cylinders, perhaps not the absolute best book of his career although with no one denying it's in the top three, the one after it is unambiguously the worst book of his career up to that point, a sloppy and self-indulgent mess that Ballard only seems to have gotten away with because of this coming straight after his unexpected bestseller and instant cultural touchstone, and with him therefore having the power to be as masturbatory as he wanted to be. And sister, believe me when I say that he wanted to be very, very masturbatory.
And indeed, I suspect an important thing to remember here is that, far from being a slow-burning cult sleeper, High-Rise was hugely popular from almost its release among a certain hip crowd "in the know," with there having been serious plans to make a Hollywood adaptation starting literally weeks after the book was first published, which would've been directed by famed trippy countercultural filmmaker Nicolas Roeg (Walkabout, Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth -- ah, what might've been!). That I expect has a large part to do with why Ballard set this follow-up book in Shepperton, center of England's film industry because of Pinewood Studios (where most of the original "Star Wars" trilogy was filmed, in exactly the same years Ballard first wrote this), because you can sort of squint at this book sideways and kind of see that it's partly about the pressures of an indie artist trying to fit into mainstream respectability (after our book's antisocial, perpetually horny, often physically violent "hero" Blake impulsively steals a small aircraft in London one day for no particular reason, ends up crash-landing it in Shepperton, then seemingly can't escape that town once he's there no matter what he tries, in that the highways all improbably end up leading back to the city when he tries driving down them, etc.).
But it's this facile description of the book's plot that's also an example of everything wrong with it, because Ballard seems to have codified his book's themes in such an impenetrably dense and personal way that it often feels like he's describing a dream he once had (among other developments, the entire city's population all turn into birds at one point, Blake spends most of the novel not knowing whether he's alive or dead, and an unsettlingly high amount of the citizenry seem to be convinced that he's the Messiah). And as most people can tell you, being forced to listen to someone describe one of their recent dreams is literally one of the most tedious experiences all of us have on a regular basis, because there's nothing inherently compelling about dream logic -- anything can happen, no actions have any stakes or repercussions, the laws of physics themselves can be conveniently ignored whenever the author wants, and in general it's much like trying to get emotionally invested in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, by which I mean it's not only impossible but a genre designed specifically to make it impossible.
That leads to a highly unsatisfying reading experience, one in which just weirdo random things arbitrarily happen on a page-by-page basis, with you never knowing whether Ballard's ever going to come back and reference that turn of events again, whether it's important to our story or not, or even whether it's supposed to have "really" happened within the collective fictional reality of the world this story inhabits. In other words, in a book where dreams are apparently real, this book continues to feature dreams on top of that which aren't supposed to be a "real" part of the "dream world" where this book takes place, which gets so metafictional so quickly that it just left me with a giant headache before I had even gotten 50 pages into it.
That's a shame, because after eight books of his now, I've come to realize that Ballard needed a lot of boundaries artificially placed on him for his writing to truly shine, such as when his career first started out and the only people who would publish him were traditional science-fiction presses who wanted traditional Mid-Century Modernist sci-fi tales from him. When the countercultural revolution of the 1970s erased this need for Ballard to deal with artificial limits placed on his unlimited imagination, the results started becoming extremely hit and miss, and for every brilliant book like High-Rise or Concrete Island (my review), he also put out a sloppy, stream-of-consciousness mess like today's book or the similarly frustrating Crash (my review).
That's of course the entire point of doing a completist read of a specific author, to get a really deep sense of what made them tick as both a person and an artist, divorced from just the handful of "greatest hits" that will be the only books of theirs read by 99 percent of future audience members after that author's death; but while that's a worthwhile endeavor, it's sometimes not a fun one, as I was reminded of with this book I eventually just had to hold my nose and slog down as quickly as I could, like bitter medicine being force-fed to me by some bitter Ballardian nurse with a cruel streak and a loaded gun pointed straight at me. That's kind of what this book feels like, Ballard essentially punishing you for daring to be a fan of his writing, and it's easy to see why the book quickly died on the vine when it first came out and then was promptly and completely forgotten by society at large. Let's see if things get any better with the next book in the list, 1981's Hello America, whose synopsis at least promises more of the same.
JG Ballard books being reviewed for this series: The Drowned World (1962) | The Burning World (1964) | The Crystal World (1966) | The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) | Crash (1973) | Concrete Island (1974) | High-Rise (1975) | The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) | Hello America (1981) | Empire of the Sun (1984) | The Day of Creation (1987) | Running Wild (1988) | The Kindness of Women (1991) | Rushing to Paradise (1994) | Cocaine Nights (1996) | Super-Cannes (2000) | Millennium People (2003) | Kingdom Come (2006)
July 16, 2022
3.5 stars. An unusual, imaginative, fantastical, surreal novel. Blake steals a light aircraft and crashes in the Thames at Shepparton. Blake struggles to the surface, alive, though witnesses thought he had died as Blake had been underwater for at least ten minutes. Within hours the sleepy suburb of Shepparton has been transformed. Luxuriant tropical flora and fauna appears all over Shepparton. Blake seems to be some sort of a god, taking over peoples bodies, walking naked through the streets, spreading his semen.
The novel has a dreamlike narrative with Ballard’s usual sharp, smart, vibrant writing style. It is a zany reading experience with no obvious narrative logic.
Ballard fans should find this book an interesting, worthwhile reading experience. Readers new to Ballard should firstly try ‘Crash’ and ‘Empire of the Sun’.
This book was first published in 1979.
The novel has a dreamlike narrative with Ballard’s usual sharp, smart, vibrant writing style. It is a zany reading experience with no obvious narrative logic.
Ballard fans should find this book an interesting, worthwhile reading experience. Readers new to Ballard should firstly try ‘Crash’ and ‘Empire of the Sun’.
This book was first published in 1979.
February 23, 2019
Ballard’ın herşey ile “birlikte olma” alter egosunun manifestosu niteliğinde. Bir tür “uçma hali”, kafanın “berrak” ve saflık içeren bütünlüğünün bozulmuşluğu. Çok sevemedim. Belki de okuma zamanım şu an değildi.
April 6, 2019
This is quite a disturbing novel and suitably wired for the lovers of Ballard.
I particularly liked the three pages of the first chapter, which are actually the end of the novel but placed at the beginning. You are presented with a bizarre situation. A man has stolen a plane, crashed it into the river Thames and is now walking around the deserted town of Shepperton. The reader has no idea what is going on, but the town is overrun with strange birds that are out of place in the English countryside – flamingoes, frigate-birds, falcons and albatross. A harpy eagle sits on top of a post box and condors circle above. All the people have gone. Toys have been dropped mid-game by children just an hour before. Strange tropical plants are growing everywhere and there are helicopters circling overhead looking for something. This solitary man in his ragged flying suit is the only person there, but is talking about leaving. He foresees that the same depopulation will start to happen all around the world. He talks about escaping both his death and his life. All that in three pages, it is bewildering and bizarre.
Then we step backwards and complete the full story. We learn about this man called Blake, who is not a pilot at all but just a thief. He dies in the plane crash and then is resurrected as some sort of pagan fertility deity, bringing abundance to the town of Shepperton. He literally spreads his semen everywhere, in people, plants and animals. He absorbs people into his body and thrives on their life force. Under his direction, Shepperton become an Amazonian paradise, and people are cured of their diseases and learn to fly. I wonder how much the use of Blake as his name was related to the visions of William Blake the English poet.
I do like the fact that Ballard has picked on Shepperton, which was his home for nearly fifty years, and is known chiefly for the fact there are film studios there. Ballard describes it thus; “…I strode past the war memorial and the open-air swimming pool. The town centre consisted of little more than a supermarket and a shopping mall, a multi-storey car-park and filling station. Shepperton, known to me only for its film studios, seemed to be the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere.”
I particularly liked the three pages of the first chapter, which are actually the end of the novel but placed at the beginning. You are presented with a bizarre situation. A man has stolen a plane, crashed it into the river Thames and is now walking around the deserted town of Shepperton. The reader has no idea what is going on, but the town is overrun with strange birds that are out of place in the English countryside – flamingoes, frigate-birds, falcons and albatross. A harpy eagle sits on top of a post box and condors circle above. All the people have gone. Toys have been dropped mid-game by children just an hour before. Strange tropical plants are growing everywhere and there are helicopters circling overhead looking for something. This solitary man in his ragged flying suit is the only person there, but is talking about leaving. He foresees that the same depopulation will start to happen all around the world. He talks about escaping both his death and his life. All that in three pages, it is bewildering and bizarre.
Then we step backwards and complete the full story. We learn about this man called Blake, who is not a pilot at all but just a thief. He dies in the plane crash and then is resurrected as some sort of pagan fertility deity, bringing abundance to the town of Shepperton. He literally spreads his semen everywhere, in people, plants and animals. He absorbs people into his body and thrives on their life force. Under his direction, Shepperton become an Amazonian paradise, and people are cured of their diseases and learn to fly. I wonder how much the use of Blake as his name was related to the visions of William Blake the English poet.
I do like the fact that Ballard has picked on Shepperton, which was his home for nearly fifty years, and is known chiefly for the fact there are film studios there. Ballard describes it thus; “…I strode past the war memorial and the open-air swimming pool. The town centre consisted of little more than a supermarket and a shopping mall, a multi-storey car-park and filling station. Shepperton, known to me only for its film studios, seemed to be the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere.”
February 14, 2024
This tale of the messiah of Shepperton is both deeply strange and really engaging.
March 7, 2012
I picked this up on the basis of an unusual and interesting premise but until near the end I didn't know what to make of it. Full of Ballard's verbose and symbolic imagery, this story explores some very adult themes and is not for the easily offended. As the protagonist increasingly believes that the "sins of this world are metaphors for virtues in the next", he proceeds to break down taboos in the town of Shepperton as the reader is left to ponder the meaning of this idea.
As we follow Blake's transformation into some kind of messianic figure, biblical metaphors abound and the town of Shepperton becomes a kind of garden of Eden until realisation of his and humanity's ultimate destiny finally dawns on him.
My high rating of this book reflects more my intellectual appreciation of what the author was trying to do more than my emotional response and personal enjoyment which otherwise would have led me to rate this book lower. Take from that what you will.
As we follow Blake's transformation into some kind of messianic figure, biblical metaphors abound and the town of Shepperton becomes a kind of garden of Eden until realisation of his and humanity's ultimate destiny finally dawns on him.
My high rating of this book reflects more my intellectual appreciation of what the author was trying to do more than my emotional response and personal enjoyment which otherwise would have led me to rate this book lower. Take from that what you will.
November 3, 2014
Terrible. Just, terrible. There's really no character interaction. The dialogue is minimal and mostly meaningless. There's no character development, and the story arc is one big fat flat line. At best, this is a 30 page short story, but instead it's 235 pages of endless description of bullshit, over-the-top, uninteresting "miracle" after "miracle" told in the first person by a charmless "messiah". On and on and on. I started speed reading 150 pages in and it was still fucking torture to get thru the last 85 pages. After having just read CRASH and CONCRETE ISLAND I was hoping the book would redeem itself somehow, but it just got worse instead of better. I should have quit about 70 pages in, probably. So it goes!
December 24, 2018
There is nothing quite like this in Ballard oeuvre; consisting of equal parts fantasy, satire, hallucination and surrealist odyssey. I can only compare it maybe to Anna Kavan's "Ice" set in Samuel Delaney's "Dhalgren" but maniacal, ecstatic and devoid of the need for narrative drive. What I love the most about it, is how unlike anything Ballard has published, it is certainly depraved and weird, but in neon, and about plenum versus the strict confines of say "Crash" or "High Rise" - it really feels as if it could continue as a sort of perverted nature in reverie. Just great work, so glad I finally got around to it and so glad Ballard never repeated it like he did with many of his other works. This is a singular work.
July 27, 2011
Pure surrealism. Ballard's vision of paradise. Very Blakean. A friend of mine made the point that once you've read one Ballard novel you've read them all, and that's true to some extent. They are all variations on a theme, like Woody Allen's films. I like Ballard, and he is very unique, but he is very samey.
February 8, 2021
A surrealist fantasy with a few shocking moments. Interesting to read, overall.
May 29, 2023
Really unusual novel about a pilot who crashes a stolen prop plane in a river outside a small village. After emerging from the wreckage, the pilot becomes a sort of deity based on his healing powers and ability to walk away from a plane crash. Or did he?
August 10, 2021
The horrors that Ballard’s novel narrates are partly a revenge on consumer complacency - the frustrated and festering desires of the suburban subconscious. And in another part seem to exude from the authors early experience of colonial violence.
JG Ballard wrote the ‘Unlimited Dream Company’ in 1978 and it was first published in 1979. He had established an underground reputation as Britain pre-eminently distinctive modern writer more than ten years before. When Unicorn bookshop, in Brighton, was raided by the police in January 16th 1968 Jim Ballard’s ‘Why I want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ was one of the seized publication selected to go on trial for obscenity. Ballard’s comment at the time was that he had intended the book to be obscene - that was the point. As it happened, as no money had exchanged hands, so the title was removed from the prosecution list.
Four years later Unicorn published my Survival Scrapbooks, Shelter, Food and Energy, so there was a kind of personal connection there in spite of never meeting Ballard. I had lived in Shepperton from 1959 to 1966 without being aware of his presence in the village. For my mother, Shepperton was a dream suburb, a step up in life, but for me it was often a suffocating and isolating place. A recurrent theme in the book is of an ‘escape from Shepperton’; easy to crash-land into but not so easy to get away from. I felt like that in the early Sixties… My offer of a place in Portsmouth College of Technology, after almost failing my A levels, was an escape route that I grasped with both hands.
There is actually no swimming pool but Ballard reveals what what was under the placid surface of the Shepperton suburb and his own psyche. Unlimited Dream Company is a chilling horror story but it seemed to have been misrepresented by the cognoscenti of the literary world. When it came out it was described as an ‘exuberant fantasy’ or even ‘magical’ (Malcolm Bradbury, NY Times)
I want to show in this review how Ballard’s vivid and pared down eloquence is a vehicle with which he unveils a horrific undertow in the fractured communities of the suburban dream. There are questions about how our consumer aspirations are distracting us from our lower middle-class pyschosis. The deadening effect of unspoken accumulated collective trauma.
The novel is set in the mortgaged-to-the-hilt bricks and mortar suburb of Shepperton, not in the riverside plotland chalets, in which there was real community. The riverside houses shown in my book show a flip side of Shepperton which was inspired by a life of leisure. A dream achieved without the shackles of a mortgage and through a community forging process of homemaking. They managed to make the idyllic holiday ideal an everyday reality, without making a deal with the devil of debt. (see my 'Plotlands of Shepperton'. 2021)
It’s not that I’m particularly interested in just showing that the judgement of the establishment is awry, my interest, rather, is in the extent to which Unlimited Dream Company is a forensic rendition of the bricks and mortar suburban subconscious. Not so much the mythical ‘middle class suburban village’ as described in (Wikipedia et al) but more the small town that Ballard and I experienced: retired soldiers with shooting sticks (p.73), amateur actors in Shakespearean costume (p.84), garage mechanics (p.102), a train driver, secretaries and typists, dark-suited executives carrying their briefcases receptionists, teachers, shopkeepers, (p.106), newspaper delivery boys, postmen, office cleaners, milkmen, housewives, film actors (p.128/30), ‘artisans and bank cashiers, car salesmen and dubbing mixers’(p.140); film technicians, butcher, mechanics in greasy overalls, village policeman (p.157 ), account executives, shoe salesmen, computer programmers and secretaries (p.179), bank clerks (p.186)
These are the people that Ballard experienced in the Shepperton he lived in - I recognise them! Mostly decent people, of course, but with an overweaning timidity, an over-anxious awareness of the boundaries of the status quo, and a leaden adoption of the boundaries of good taste.
Is there something of Ballard’s own feeling here!?
Shepperton was a special case in that not only was it a typical consumer suburban ‘paradise’ at the terminus of a railway line from Waterloo; but, as well as being in the shadow of Heathrow, it is in in the path of a motorway that sliced through the community; has one of the countries main dream factories in its famous film studios; hosts one of the biggest gravel mining industries in the country which had left the landscape pock-marked with deep water-filled pits at the time this novel was written. The whole area is also below the waterline of one of the largest London reservoirs. The massive 707 acre Queen Mary reservoir to the north of Shepperton was built in 1925. Its 14 meter high embankments elevate the horizon in the direction of Heathrow. It is supplied from the Thames with 200 million gallons of water per day. This historic part of the river Thames Valley is also liable to flooding. These elements all help to crowd the oppressive framing of his dark fantasy.
Basically this is the story of a maniac who, escaping after a murderous attack on his fiancé, steals a Cessna light aircraft from London Airport, manages to take-off but soon crashes into the river at Shepperton. He emerges from the wreck of the plane to prey on the local community in a surreal post-apocalyptic nightmare.
The suburban idyll comes a scene of horror that is clothed in such imaginative sub-tropical lushness and mythic invention that we sometimes can forget that the (anti) hero is a psychopath. Is this is Ballard’s point. Blake is a human poet of the imagination, like his namesake, however revolting he is in this incarnation. Does this forgive him his crimes? No, not at all. (But the establishment reviewers kind of imply it does… because they avoid the difficult questions posed by Ballard’s obscene tale.) So the ingenuity of Blakes fantasy and the sheer originality with which it is described can be enjoyed in literary form as a disinterested reader, but his crimes at the same time are completely unpalatable. Blake mashes together his imagined ability to channel nature’s amoral power to try to convince you that he has some valid goal. This can make it seem that it is nature that propels him to do what he does. We, as assiduous readers, have to unpick the literary poetics from the repulsive psychopathology. Is this a conceptual game set by Ballard to test us?
The Reviews
In the New York Times review Malcolm Bradbury makes no mention of his murderous side. He uses the phrase ‘a new world of polymorphous perversity’ to cover all the allusions to sexual abuse. Later he calls the story ‘a dreamy pastoral’. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...
John Gray Guardian review on 4th April 2014. “His work has at its core an experience of inner transformation and renewal… The mood that pervades The Unlimited Dream Company is joyful and rhapsodic.” It is “something beautiful and life-affirming”
“Ballard’s most optimistic book.” Time Out (quoted on the back cover of my 2008 paperback edition)
'Out of the Night and into the Dream' in his book length treatise on Ballard Gregory Stephenson describes Blake as “the first truly whole, truly heroic figure in Ballard’s oeuvre”, who undergoes a “peaceful, affirmative and finally joyous metamorphosis.” https://www.ballardian.com/home-and-a...
The machismo of the literary establishment retains its sans froid - refusing to feel anything and deal with the obscenity of it all as it retreats into textual allusions and resonances with classical and world mythologies. That response irritated me because I felt I had been taken in by it.
Further down the page Blake tells himself that that “was no evil.” He goes from kindness and generosity to murderous abuse with the speed and ease of a light switch, imagining himself as a devouring god who will go on to devour (ie kill /rape) everyone to ‘help them’. p.176
As someone brought up a Catholic his way of absorbing the people’s bodies into his own reminds me of taking Holy Communion in which we ‘had to’ believe that this ‘really was’ the body of Jesus Christ that we were taking in wafer form. It was a challenge to the small child’s control of her imagination that this did not become a canabalistic ritual.
Like communion we might pass off the descriptions of carnal absorption as being spiritual rather than plain abuse, especially when the victims are ‘released into the air’, but Ballard won’t let us slip out of his noose so easily. In the story, two young children and a teenager are not ‘released’, and in spite of the pleading of their mothers, Blake is unmoved. He thinks he needs to keep them in his body ‘to keep him alive’. p.191
Pyschoanalytics
The non-critical adulatory reception seemed symptomatic of all that is wrong with the literary establishment. That is before I read Mike Holliday’s review of the UDC from 2007 in which argues the book can be read as fascistic. His is the most psychoanalytic approach and the most critical. He labels Blake as a ‘the delusional paranoiac’. But he notes:
“Blake’s personality and behaviour have strong similarities to the mind-set of fascism: for example, the megalomania, the paranoid delusions about others, the exclusion or demonization of doubters or those with alternative points of view. In particular, the fascist requires that everything must cohere together as one – and Alistair Cormack has pointed out that this is well described by a line written by the namesake of Ballard’s protagonist, William Blake: “One command, one joy, one desire; One curse, one weight, one measure; One King, one God, one Law” (The Book of Urizen).”
“There is no ‘reflection in both directions’, to use Adorno and Horkheimer’s phrase. The one exception occurs after Blake is shot by Stark, when he ‘cures’ the three small children of their mongolism, blindness, and lameness; one of the children responds by saying: “Blake, thank you … Can I help you?” Reciprocity briefly makes its presence felt, only for the dream of transcendence to resume, culminating in Blake’s rhapsody about the union of the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate.”
http://www.holli.co.uk/udc/text.htm
Holliday’s starting place is to call Blake a ‘delusional paranoiac’. He is, but to me it is made clear early on (page 14) that he is basically a psychopath. He attacks and nearly kills his fiancé and this is the reason for his escape by stealing a Cessna light aircraft from the nearby London Airport. Blake is not just delusional, he is a maniacal and violently sadistic psychotic. The sexual violence is not pre-meditated but seems to erupt out of his control without warning.
Blake adopts the local priest Father Wingate as his idealised father. So that character has to then support him whatever he does. Mrs St Cloud is his idealised mother, she does likewise. But he has violent sex with Mrs St Cloud and has a vision of mating with every person and animal in Shepperton (even the flies!) in order to “fuse us together as a new being.” p.64
The disturbing thing is that there are times when his narration is beguiling. for example the aerial marriage with Mrs St Clouds daughter Doctor Miriam in her fantastic wedding dress.
A beautiful image, and there is no reason why a psychotic shouldn’t construct such beautiful scenes to obliterate the pain caused by the deficiencies or absence of the real parents which had given them the life sentence of forever being separated from other humans. We have been told that Blake’s father had disowned him and his mother had died in a car crash in which he had been injured.
Ballard’s Blake is an ‘unreliable narrator’. In that he dresses his abusive acts up in lush poetic costumes. Ballard did himself witness and suffer from unbelievable cruelty as a child. Speaking about his childhood in Shanghai during the Sino-Japanese war, Ballard says:
“Death was everywhere, in a way that’s almost impossible to imagine. We lived in a suburban house — beggars died on our doorstep. And it’s impossible to imagine, living in Shepperton for example, or Tunbridge Wells in a comfortable house with nine or ten servants, and some elderly beggar, leaning against the wall in a drive and quietly dying, without anyone coming to his aid. Unbelievable, here, but it was all too believable then, I mean, it was routine.”
“A couple of bored Japanese sergeants ride a rickshaw all the way from Shanghai, quite a journey, and then decide they don’t want to pay; more than that, they decide they’ll have a little fun, kick the poor rickshaw coolie’s only source of livelihood into matchwood and then they turn on him, kick him to death. I witnessed such an event.”
https://www.ballardian.com/marinaded-...
Maybe writing UDC was a psychic release for him. Was he a child who had been tortured the rest of his life by trying to fathom the inhumanity that was in the head of the abusers he witnessed? There is an ambiguous tension between Ballard’s own memories of his own trauma and his rational analysis of suburban consumerism.
This reminded me of the white colonial Mr Marley, Bob’s father who, like Blake, had flagrantly sprayed his semen around - impregnating whomsoever took his fancy in the exotic islands he rode through on his horse. I think of Bob Marley singing his beautiful ‘Redemption Song’ whilst being unable to spend much loving time with his own children. There is more than an echo of that colonial past in here.
While the drive of the writing may be the trauma of Ballard’s early experiences and his revulsion at the vapidity of consumerism, there was also real violence under the surface of respectable Shepperton at the time of his writing. The underlying sexual violence in and around Shepperton in the period of the book is evidenced by such characters as:
The notorious child murderer Levi Bellfield, who operated in this area about his time, and Jimmy Savile, who was a regular visitor to The Duncroft Approved School for Girls nearby in Staines. These characters have the amorality of Blake.
A less famous sexual predator lived in Shepperton, literally around the corner from Ballard. Stanley Moore abused young people from 1969 to 2013.
https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surr... This story reminds me of allegations of abuse by the headmaster at the secondary school I attended. His nickname was ‘Slug’.
Is Ballard picking up on the underlying violence that is still around him? I know that these sorts of horror stories become embroiled in the psyche of anyone who hears them. And especially so if they occur locally. Are such acts the tips of unresolved iceberg of communal trauma?
Final word from Ballard:
“Nothing is ever terminal, thank God. As we hesitate, the road unrolls itself, dividing and turning. But there is something deeply suffocating about life today in the prosperous west. Bourgeoisification, the suburbanisation of the soul, proceeds at an unnerving pace. Tyranny becomes docile and subservient, and a soft totalitarianism prevails, as obsequious as a wine waiter. Nothing is allowed to distress and unsettle us. The politics of the playgroup rules us all.” from a 2004 interview with JGB by fax by Jeannette Baxter. https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...
References
Duncroft Approved School and Jimmy Saville (and Shepperton Film Studios)
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2...
James Robertson Justice “was not introduced to the school by the attending psychiatrist's husband, but by Pamela Mason herself. Dr. Mason's husband was a movie producer at Shepperton, and of course they knew James (and John Gregson) socially, but Dr. Mason was the person who approved James and Gregson visiting. Both James and John Gregson died in the early 70s.”
https://rockphiles.typepad.com/a_life...
Pamela Mason, was a psychiatrist who supported the drugging of ‘problem children’.
https://goodnessandharmony.wordpress....
Stanley Moore of Crescent road, Shepperton abused young people from 1969 - 2013. Convicted in 2018 he was sentenced to 21 years. Crescent road is just around the corner from Ballard’s semi-D. The point is that that this was going on in the area about that time. I’m not suggesting that Ballard knew of Moore and his activity.
https://tedteamsite.wordpress.com/201...
Adams, Terry. ‘Bill Butler and the Unicorn Bookshop’, The Best Scene Press, 2020
Stephenson, Gregory. 'Out of the Night and Into the Dream a thematic study of the fiction of JG Ballard.’ 1991
Mike Holliday’s review http://www.holli.co.uk/udc/text.htm
See also my 'Plotlands of Shepperton' on Goodreads
JG Ballard wrote the ‘Unlimited Dream Company’ in 1978 and it was first published in 1979. He had established an underground reputation as Britain pre-eminently distinctive modern writer more than ten years before. When Unicorn bookshop, in Brighton, was raided by the police in January 16th 1968 Jim Ballard’s ‘Why I want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ was one of the seized publication selected to go on trial for obscenity. Ballard’s comment at the time was that he had intended the book to be obscene - that was the point. As it happened, as no money had exchanged hands, so the title was removed from the prosecution list.
Four years later Unicorn published my Survival Scrapbooks, Shelter, Food and Energy, so there was a kind of personal connection there in spite of never meeting Ballard. I had lived in Shepperton from 1959 to 1966 without being aware of his presence in the village. For my mother, Shepperton was a dream suburb, a step up in life, but for me it was often a suffocating and isolating place. A recurrent theme in the book is of an ‘escape from Shepperton’; easy to crash-land into but not so easy to get away from. I felt like that in the early Sixties… My offer of a place in Portsmouth College of Technology, after almost failing my A levels, was an escape route that I grasped with both hands.
“I strode past the war memorial and the open-air swimming pool. The town centre consisted of little more than a supermarket and a shopping mall, a multi-storey car-park and filling station. Shepperton, known to me only for its film studios, seemed to be the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere.”
There is actually no swimming pool but Ballard reveals what what was under the placid surface of the Shepperton suburb and his own psyche. Unlimited Dream Company is a chilling horror story but it seemed to have been misrepresented by the cognoscenti of the literary world. When it came out it was described as an ‘exuberant fantasy’ or even ‘magical’ (Malcolm Bradbury, NY Times)
I want to show in this review how Ballard’s vivid and pared down eloquence is a vehicle with which he unveils a horrific undertow in the fractured communities of the suburban dream. There are questions about how our consumer aspirations are distracting us from our lower middle-class pyschosis. The deadening effect of unspoken accumulated collective trauma.
The novel is set in the mortgaged-to-the-hilt bricks and mortar suburb of Shepperton, not in the riverside plotland chalets, in which there was real community. The riverside houses shown in my book show a flip side of Shepperton which was inspired by a life of leisure. A dream achieved without the shackles of a mortgage and through a community forging process of homemaking. They managed to make the idyllic holiday ideal an everyday reality, without making a deal with the devil of debt. (see my 'Plotlands of Shepperton'. 2021)
It’s not that I’m particularly interested in just showing that the judgement of the establishment is awry, my interest, rather, is in the extent to which Unlimited Dream Company is a forensic rendition of the bricks and mortar suburban subconscious. Not so much the mythical ‘middle class suburban village’ as described in (Wikipedia et al) but more the small town that Ballard and I experienced: retired soldiers with shooting sticks (p.73), amateur actors in Shakespearean costume (p.84), garage mechanics (p.102), a train driver, secretaries and typists, dark-suited executives carrying their briefcases receptionists, teachers, shopkeepers, (p.106), newspaper delivery boys, postmen, office cleaners, milkmen, housewives, film actors (p.128/30), ‘artisans and bank cashiers, car salesmen and dubbing mixers’(p.140); film technicians, butcher, mechanics in greasy overalls, village policeman (p.157 ), account executives, shoe salesmen, computer programmers and secretaries (p.179), bank clerks (p.186)
These are the people that Ballard experienced in the Shepperton he lived in - I recognise them! Mostly decent people, of course, but with an overweaning timidity, an over-anxious awareness of the boundaries of the status quo, and a leaden adoption of the boundaries of good taste.
“I was irritated by these timid people in their well-pressed suits and flowered dresses, with their polite religion.” p.71. “Elements of strong ceremonies and bizarre rituals were taking shape in my mind.” p.77. “My conviction that I would one day slaughter all these people”. p.122.
Is there something of Ballard’s own feeling here!?
Shepperton was a special case in that not only was it a typical consumer suburban ‘paradise’ at the terminus of a railway line from Waterloo; but, as well as being in the shadow of Heathrow, it is in in the path of a motorway that sliced through the community; has one of the countries main dream factories in its famous film studios; hosts one of the biggest gravel mining industries in the country which had left the landscape pock-marked with deep water-filled pits at the time this novel was written. The whole area is also below the waterline of one of the largest London reservoirs. The massive 707 acre Queen Mary reservoir to the north of Shepperton was built in 1925. Its 14 meter high embankments elevate the horizon in the direction of Heathrow. It is supplied from the Thames with 200 million gallons of water per day. This historic part of the river Thames Valley is also liable to flooding. These elements all help to crowd the oppressive framing of his dark fantasy.
Basically this is the story of a maniac who, escaping after a murderous attack on his fiancé, steals a Cessna light aircraft from London Airport, manages to take-off but soon crashes into the river at Shepperton. He emerges from the wreck of the plane to prey on the local community in a surreal post-apocalyptic nightmare.
The suburban idyll comes a scene of horror that is clothed in such imaginative sub-tropical lushness and mythic invention that we sometimes can forget that the (anti) hero is a psychopath. Is this is Ballard’s point. Blake is a human poet of the imagination, like his namesake, however revolting he is in this incarnation. Does this forgive him his crimes? No, not at all. (But the establishment reviewers kind of imply it does… because they avoid the difficult questions posed by Ballard’s obscene tale.) So the ingenuity of Blakes fantasy and the sheer originality with which it is described can be enjoyed in literary form as a disinterested reader, but his crimes at the same time are completely unpalatable. Blake mashes together his imagined ability to channel nature’s amoral power to try to convince you that he has some valid goal. This can make it seem that it is nature that propels him to do what he does. We, as assiduous readers, have to unpick the literary poetics from the repulsive psychopathology. Is this a conceptual game set by Ballard to test us?
The Reviews
In the New York Times review Malcolm Bradbury makes no mention of his murderous side. He uses the phrase ‘a new world of polymorphous perversity’ to cover all the allusions to sexual abuse. Later he calls the story ‘a dreamy pastoral’. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim...
John Gray Guardian review on 4th April 2014. “His work has at its core an experience of inner transformation and renewal… The mood that pervades The Unlimited Dream Company is joyful and rhapsodic.” It is “something beautiful and life-affirming”
“Ballard’s most optimistic book.” Time Out (quoted on the back cover of my 2008 paperback edition)
'Out of the Night and into the Dream' in his book length treatise on Ballard Gregory Stephenson describes Blake as “the first truly whole, truly heroic figure in Ballard’s oeuvre”, who undergoes a “peaceful, affirmative and finally joyous metamorphosis.” https://www.ballardian.com/home-and-a...
The machismo of the literary establishment retains its sans froid - refusing to feel anything and deal with the obscenity of it all as it retreats into textual allusions and resonances with classical and world mythologies. That response irritated me because I felt I had been taken in by it.
“Lying back in the flower-decked limousine, I remembered the frightening compulsions that had filled my last years. I dreamed of crimes and murders, unashamed acts of congress with beasts, with birds and the soil. I remembered my molesting of small children.” p.175
Further down the page Blake tells himself that that “was no evil.” He goes from kindness and generosity to murderous abuse with the speed and ease of a light switch, imagining himself as a devouring god who will go on to devour (ie kill /rape) everyone to ‘help them’. p.176
As someone brought up a Catholic his way of absorbing the people’s bodies into his own reminds me of taking Holy Communion in which we ‘had to’ believe that this ‘really was’ the body of Jesus Christ that we were taking in wafer form. It was a challenge to the small child’s control of her imagination that this did not become a canabalistic ritual.
Like communion we might pass off the descriptions of carnal absorption as being spiritual rather than plain abuse, especially when the victims are ‘released into the air’, but Ballard won’t let us slip out of his noose so easily. In the story, two young children and a teenager are not ‘released’, and in spite of the pleading of their mothers, Blake is unmoved. He thinks he needs to keep them in his body ‘to keep him alive’. p.191
Pyschoanalytics
The non-critical adulatory reception seemed symptomatic of all that is wrong with the literary establishment. That is before I read Mike Holliday’s review of the UDC from 2007 in which argues the book can be read as fascistic. His is the most psychoanalytic approach and the most critical. He labels Blake as a ‘the delusional paranoiac’. But he notes:
“Blake’s personality and behaviour have strong similarities to the mind-set of fascism: for example, the megalomania, the paranoid delusions about others, the exclusion or demonization of doubters or those with alternative points of view. In particular, the fascist requires that everything must cohere together as one – and Alistair Cormack has pointed out that this is well described by a line written by the namesake of Ballard’s protagonist, William Blake: “One command, one joy, one desire; One curse, one weight, one measure; One King, one God, one Law” (The Book of Urizen).”
“There is no ‘reflection in both directions’, to use Adorno and Horkheimer’s phrase. The one exception occurs after Blake is shot by Stark, when he ‘cures’ the three small children of their mongolism, blindness, and lameness; one of the children responds by saying: “Blake, thank you … Can I help you?” Reciprocity briefly makes its presence felt, only for the dream of transcendence to resume, culminating in Blake’s rhapsody about the union of the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate.”
http://www.holli.co.uk/udc/text.htm
Holliday’s starting place is to call Blake a ‘delusional paranoiac’. He is, but to me it is made clear early on (page 14) that he is basically a psychopath. He attacks and nearly kills his fiancé and this is the reason for his escape by stealing a Cessna light aircraft from the nearby London Airport. Blake is not just delusional, he is a maniacal and violently sadistic psychotic. The sexual violence is not pre-meditated but seems to erupt out of his control without warning.
Blake adopts the local priest Father Wingate as his idealised father. So that character has to then support him whatever he does. Mrs St Cloud is his idealised mother, she does likewise. But he has violent sex with Mrs St Cloud and has a vision of mating with every person and animal in Shepperton (even the flies!) in order to “fuse us together as a new being.” p.64
The disturbing thing is that there are times when his narration is beguiling. for example the aerial marriage with Mrs St Clouds daughter Doctor Miriam in her fantastic wedding dress.
“Lifting Miriam gently, I propelled us into the sky. We paused above the car-park, waiting as her train settled itself. The sunlight irradiated the panels of her wedding dress, illuminated wings that carried us across the sky.” p.150
A beautiful image, and there is no reason why a psychotic shouldn’t construct such beautiful scenes to obliterate the pain caused by the deficiencies or absence of the real parents which had given them the life sentence of forever being separated from other humans. We have been told that Blake’s father had disowned him and his mother had died in a car crash in which he had been injured.
Ballard’s Blake is an ‘unreliable narrator’. In that he dresses his abusive acts up in lush poetic costumes. Ballard did himself witness and suffer from unbelievable cruelty as a child. Speaking about his childhood in Shanghai during the Sino-Japanese war, Ballard says:
“Death was everywhere, in a way that’s almost impossible to imagine. We lived in a suburban house — beggars died on our doorstep. And it’s impossible to imagine, living in Shepperton for example, or Tunbridge Wells in a comfortable house with nine or ten servants, and some elderly beggar, leaning against the wall in a drive and quietly dying, without anyone coming to his aid. Unbelievable, here, but it was all too believable then, I mean, it was routine.”
“A couple of bored Japanese sergeants ride a rickshaw all the way from Shanghai, quite a journey, and then decide they don’t want to pay; more than that, they decide they’ll have a little fun, kick the poor rickshaw coolie’s only source of livelihood into matchwood and then they turn on him, kick him to death. I witnessed such an event.”
https://www.ballardian.com/marinaded-...
Maybe writing UDC was a psychic release for him. Was he a child who had been tortured the rest of his life by trying to fathom the inhumanity that was in the head of the abusers he witnessed? There is an ambiguous tension between Ballard’s own memories of his own trauma and his rational analysis of suburban consumerism.
This reminded me of the white colonial Mr Marley, Bob’s father who, like Blake, had flagrantly sprayed his semen around - impregnating whomsoever took his fancy in the exotic islands he rode through on his horse. I think of Bob Marley singing his beautiful ‘Redemption Song’ whilst being unable to spend much loving time with his own children. There is more than an echo of that colonial past in here.
While the drive of the writing may be the trauma of Ballard’s early experiences and his revulsion at the vapidity of consumerism, there was also real violence under the surface of respectable Shepperton at the time of his writing. The underlying sexual violence in and around Shepperton in the period of the book is evidenced by such characters as:
The notorious child murderer Levi Bellfield, who operated in this area about his time, and Jimmy Savile, who was a regular visitor to The Duncroft Approved School for Girls nearby in Staines. These characters have the amorality of Blake.
A less famous sexual predator lived in Shepperton, literally around the corner from Ballard. Stanley Moore abused young people from 1969 to 2013.
https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surr... This story reminds me of allegations of abuse by the headmaster at the secondary school I attended. His nickname was ‘Slug’.
Is Ballard picking up on the underlying violence that is still around him? I know that these sorts of horror stories become embroiled in the psyche of anyone who hears them. And especially so if they occur locally. Are such acts the tips of unresolved iceberg of communal trauma?
Final word from Ballard:
“Nothing is ever terminal, thank God. As we hesitate, the road unrolls itself, dividing and turning. But there is something deeply suffocating about life today in the prosperous west. Bourgeoisification, the suburbanisation of the soul, proceeds at an unnerving pace. Tyranny becomes docile and subservient, and a soft totalitarianism prevails, as obsequious as a wine waiter. Nothing is allowed to distress and unsettle us. The politics of the playgroup rules us all.” from a 2004 interview with JGB by fax by Jeannette Baxter. https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...
References
Duncroft Approved School and Jimmy Saville (and Shepperton Film Studios)
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2...
James Robertson Justice “was not introduced to the school by the attending psychiatrist's husband, but by Pamela Mason herself. Dr. Mason's husband was a movie producer at Shepperton, and of course they knew James (and John Gregson) socially, but Dr. Mason was the person who approved James and Gregson visiting. Both James and John Gregson died in the early 70s.”
https://rockphiles.typepad.com/a_life...
Pamela Mason, was a psychiatrist who supported the drugging of ‘problem children’.
https://goodnessandharmony.wordpress....
Stanley Moore of Crescent road, Shepperton abused young people from 1969 - 2013. Convicted in 2018 he was sentenced to 21 years. Crescent road is just around the corner from Ballard’s semi-D. The point is that that this was going on in the area about that time. I’m not suggesting that Ballard knew of Moore and his activity.
https://tedteamsite.wordpress.com/201...
Adams, Terry. ‘Bill Butler and the Unicorn Bookshop’, The Best Scene Press, 2020
Stephenson, Gregory. 'Out of the Night and Into the Dream a thematic study of the fiction of JG Ballard.’ 1991
Mike Holliday’s review http://www.holli.co.uk/udc/text.htm
See also my 'Plotlands of Shepperton' on Goodreads
May 13, 2021
What is this? Social comment? A lampooning of the author's home town (and/ or a kick up it's collective middle-class arse)? Utterly unfettered whimsy? A bible for uber-librals? A celebration of true freedom in story and writer expression?
It is, of course, all of them. And daring, a little bit dangerous, quite beautiful.
Unhinged nobody, Blake, steals a light aircraft and promptly crashes it into the Thames at Shepperton. Perhaps he survives. Perhaps he is resurrected. Perhaps he is undead. Perhaps he experiences the ultimate fever dream or an eternal instance before death. Whatever the parentheses for what follows are, they allow and encourage something wonderful.
Blake succumbs to his own ego, believing everything in Shepperton to revolve around his desires and whims. He is overcome by lust, for women, for men, for children, for animals, plants, even the ground at one point. He believes he is in practice for, or in a kind of anteroom to, something transcendental; and only by exorcising every societal and cultural moral can he achieve this state or place... or grace.
The thing is, he may be right.
He becomes a whale in the Thames, now bursting with tropical fish; in an orgiastic night-time flight he and the whole of Shepperton's sleeping population transform into birds of every kind; he wanks the Amazonian jungle into existence through the town's streets and across its roofs; and in one rather lovely sequence, everybody learns to fly.
TUDC is a breathless, haunting read. Possibly, it's the ultimate Ballard. Already, I want to read it again.
It is, of course, all of them. And daring, a little bit dangerous, quite beautiful.
Unhinged nobody, Blake, steals a light aircraft and promptly crashes it into the Thames at Shepperton. Perhaps he survives. Perhaps he is resurrected. Perhaps he is undead. Perhaps he experiences the ultimate fever dream or an eternal instance before death. Whatever the parentheses for what follows are, they allow and encourage something wonderful.
Blake succumbs to his own ego, believing everything in Shepperton to revolve around his desires and whims. He is overcome by lust, for women, for men, for children, for animals, plants, even the ground at one point. He believes he is in practice for, or in a kind of anteroom to, something transcendental; and only by exorcising every societal and cultural moral can he achieve this state or place... or grace.
The thing is, he may be right.
He becomes a whale in the Thames, now bursting with tropical fish; in an orgiastic night-time flight he and the whole of Shepperton's sleeping population transform into birds of every kind; he wanks the Amazonian jungle into existence through the town's streets and across its roofs; and in one rather lovely sequence, everybody learns to fly.
TUDC is a breathless, haunting read. Possibly, it's the ultimate Ballard. Already, I want to read it again.
June 25, 2017
Such a disappointment--I was expecting a classic, and instead received a sloggy surrealist bore--but if you're going to go that route, you'd better shore up your book with interesting characters, or an exciting plot. But this novel, semen-filled, repetitive, tiresome ... after halfway through, I was done.
Things that annoyed me:
Everyone kept saying "Blake," like he was a character on a soap opera, when talking to him. Nobody does that in real life.
The constant harping on sex, sex with children, sex with deer, sex with birds, sex with parents, etc.
How often the author kept repeating (maybe with slightly different words) the point he had just made a few pages ago. Or the same incident. (Look! A flower!) Sigh.
I adored the dreamlike The Unconsoled by Ishiguru, and the frankly surrealist The Hearing Trumpet by Carrington, but this work did nothing for me. It and I are on opposite ends of some scale, to the extent that I will view with suspicion any recommendation from someone who reveals they liked it!
(Note: 5 stars = rare and amazing, 4 = quite good book, 3 = a decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. There are a lot of 4s and 3s in the world!)
Things that annoyed me:
Everyone kept saying "Blake," like he was a character on a soap opera, when talking to him. Nobody does that in real life.
The constant harping on sex, sex with children, sex with deer, sex with birds, sex with parents, etc.
How often the author kept repeating (maybe with slightly different words) the point he had just made a few pages ago. Or the same incident. (Look! A flower!) Sigh.
I adored the dreamlike The Unconsoled by Ishiguru, and the frankly surrealist The Hearing Trumpet by Carrington, but this work did nothing for me. It and I are on opposite ends of some scale, to the extent that I will view with suspicion any recommendation from someone who reveals they liked it!
(Note: 5 stars = rare and amazing, 4 = quite good book, 3 = a decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. There are a lot of 4s and 3s in the world!)
February 8, 2010
This book has more the quality of a psychedelic vision unfolding before the readers gaze than did the earlier Ballard novels I have recently read. Here there is no Conradian voyage upriver, as in The Crystal World or The Drought. (Of course the river is dry in the latter.) The theme is still one of transformation, of discovering one's true self in a changed world, although here the main character is mad or possibly dead. I also suspect that for British readers there is something intrinsically funny about the Shepperton location that is largely lost Stateside.
October 24, 2007
Blech! I like some of Ballard's short fiction okay, but this is one of the most godawful things my mind had ever ingested. The worst kind of hippie crap. It's like he's trying to be Robert Heinlein or something. I mean, even Heinlein's not trying to be Heinlein - he was just born that way or something. Again, blech!
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