J.G. Ballard: Kingdom Come
I love J.G. Ballard.
I’m not talking about the J.G. Ballard who wrote Empire of the Sun, transformed into a family-friendly classic by the king of cheese, Steven Spielberg. I’m talking about the J.G. Ballard who, for whatever devious reason, used his own name for the protagonist of the outrageous, profoundly shocking Crash, made into what I would describe as a cerebral horror film by auteur diabolique, David Cronenberg.
There are so many reasons to admire Ballard. He seems like such a nice, sane, intellectual Englishman who turns around and writes a book called The Atrocity Exhibition. I think that very early on, Ballard occurred to me to be the ideal writer in the same way that Robert Plant, or Jeff Buckley, is the ideal lead singer; regardless of his posture, or his mystique, the actual instrument of the voice itself is magnificent, and his credibility stems from there.
I once heard the novelist Joyce Carey described as a ‘lord of language’, and that epithet always applies to Ballard. And that’s what an artist should be; first and foremost, their level of skill repels criticism. It means that no matter how alarming or distasteful the subject, you have to take it seriously because it’s presented in its own terms, which is the privilege of a refined talent.
In this way, J.G. Ballard is irrefutable.
He’s one of those writers who just kept popping up around the place when I was a teenager, asserting himself through his spectacular linguistic gifts. I remember reading Ballard’s endorsement on the back cover of a biography of the Marquis De Sade:
‘The Marquis De Sade is the man of letters invited in from the cold only to leave footprints of human blood on the welcome mat.’
Ballard is the friend you invite over to cook a gourmet banquet and once it makes its way to the dining table, you’re not entirely sure if he’s going to try and feed you one of your pets, or possibly even one of your children.
While Ballard cut his teeth writing science fiction, and became most famous for the autobiographical Empire of the Sun, the story based on his own experience of being interred in a concentration camp during the Second World War, he eventually wrote dystopian science fiction that gave me the creeps in a way nothing ever had.
I think the first thing I read was probably Running Wild. It’s a detective story about a massacre in a gated community where all the rich, middle-class parents were killed and all of the children had vanished. The parents had been cruelly tortured by way of various booby traps, some of which had been used by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War.
What you realise, or what the detective investigator discovers, is that the weird, synthetic comforts and privileges of modern life were inherently toxic and the children had rebelled against them in the most extreme manner possible.
Reading this as a teenager made it especially poignant. I suspect Ballard had written it to frighten other adults, but when I was a teenager, Running Wild reared up like a darkling mirror with some kind of poisonous, yet perversely thrilling aspect of my own nature roiling within its depths.
And I think this is why I’d posit most of what I’ve read by Ballard as horror. Most of the time, the antagonist in a generic horror story is a force that threatens the protagonist whose the true moment of horror is when that evil becomes an infection. In Ballard’s stories, it’s not infectious: evil is an inherent aspect of their own nature that is stimulated and awakened by technology, or circumstance, or both.
I’ve been struggling with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain over the last little while, and it feels like trying to climb a glacier on my lips; it is one very fucking boring book about one very boring little cunt. I wanted to read something that didn’t feel like trying to swim through wet cement before going to bed, and given I had recently seen a retrospective of Ballard at one of my favourite corners of the internet, the website Five Books, I realised I’d never read his novel Kingdom Come.
Theme Park at its Darkest 
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