Empire of the Sun

JG Ballard

You can't read everything. Trying to would be like visiting every village in Norfolk -- you'd stop hanging around for long, you'd concentrate on passing through as quickly as possible. Then someone would show you a map of England, and your heart would sink. Then you'd find an atlas of the world. Scary.

And because you can't read everything, you have to spend some brainpower deciding what to invest your time in. Certain genres are ruled out, at the probable cost of many great books; certain authors sound oddly appealing, others are intuitively ignored. Specific books are tried, and the rest of the author's canon may depend on the success or failure of that book.

So when I found myself frustrated by Ballard's The Drought, I naturally asssumed it was curtains for the rest of his ouvre, regardless of the beautiful covers and unique reviews. But another complicating factor came into play: blog comments. Ballard was ardently defended by his fans, in the face of my criticisms. And as I had Empire of the Sun sitting on my shelf, a second chance for JG didn't seem entirely out of the question.

Well. I am now a fully paid-up member of The Second Chance Club (except for the paid-up part). Empire of the Sun paints a vivid picture of the incoherent, chaotic and arcless nature of a world at war, and the fragments of order held disproportionately dear to those caught in the middle; and it shows all that by being all that. As Jim slowly adapts himself to the war world, the book follows. Its own past becomes irrelevant, its own future becomes a tool to keep heads up in the present.

The symbollism that so bothered me in Ballard's earlier novel is here a more succesful, subservient player. Jim's vain struggle for sense in the senseless world is aptly illustrated by patterns and parrallels that are not really there, that lead nowhere, or that only feedback onto themselves, endlessly.

The lesson here is not only to allow second chances; but to stick up for the authors you love, to argue and insist and enthuse enough that our friends and lovers and colleagues give them another go. I'm left wondering how many friends have left Pratchett by the wayside because they read The Colour of Magic first...

The Drought

JG Ballard

I find myself desperately wanting to like Ballard. Maybe I should never have read his coolly endearing memoir, Miracles of Life. Maybe I should stop listening to blurbs that use words like 'unique' and genius' so freely and convincingly.

The fact is, however hard I tried to like The Drought, I couldn't quite manage it. It's impressive, yes. The imagery is untouchably weird, the (bad) feelings it evokes are heady and authentic. His writing has natural authority and a certain completeness of vision.

But...

It's not very pleasant.

(If that makes me sound like a narrative coward, I should at this point explain that I am very much a narrative coward. I can't even watch comedy shows on my own these days, because I will chicken out and change the channel the moment things necessarily go bad for the protagonist.)

Ballard's world, effective and unique though it clearly is, is not enjoyable. It's bleak, disconnected, distant, free of relatable characters. Distant strangers do distant things and there's nothing much to suggest I should be interested. I don't think I ever believed -- not really-- in the existence of unrelatable main characters, before this.

Here's an example. This book is about what happens to humanity, and a man called Ransom, when the water supplies we take for granted disappear (hence the name). Ransom spends every second of this book driven by water. Water would solve all his problems. Water would make him in control. Water could do a lot of things for him, yet not once while reading The Drought -- not once! -- did I ever feel thirsty.