Unsplash: Denys Nevozhai - The Ballardian Landscape
Blog No. 15
By Marcus Coates, @homeinriyadh, 18th March 2021
For the Love of an Audio Book
Increasingly, I find myself listening to audiobooks. It makes sense: I have a long commute to and from work each day, freeing up my ears to listen to a wide range of audio content blasted out on the car speakers as I use my eyes to navigate rush hour traffic. Audio content is also an ideal companion for many of my other pastimes, too: working out at the gym, walking for exercise, tanning by the pool, and lying on my bed staring at the ceiling have now all qualified as multi-tasking activities since putting on headphones and tapping into audible files.
The Benefits of Doing It Aurally
Listening to audible content has benefitted me enormously: I made it through Melville’s Moby Dick in treacherous traffic. I have made it further through Ulysses than I ever did on my half a dozen other attempts. And I’m pretty confident that I’ve edged from A1 to A2 Spanish after listening to numerous ‘Learn Spanish in the Car’ lessons.
These accomplishments are minor, though: my most fabulous audio moment has been discovering The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard - a collection of 98 dystopian oddities providing sixty-three hours and twenty-one minutes of Ballardian brilliance. If you’re the kind of person who loves to binge on Netflix boxsets and loves the dark spaces of reality and beyond, then I’d recommend you immerse yourself in Ballard.
Short Story Persuasion
I’d never really been a big fan of the short story before J. G. Ballard. The only two short story collections that left an impression on me pre-Ballard were Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979) and Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981). Until reading these collections, the novel was the only form for me: I viewed short stories as, well, practice for writing books; a bit like a runner doing shortish, then increasingly longer runs to build up for the actual ‘proper’ run, the Marathon. Reading Carter, Carver - and now Ballard - has changed my mindset.
J. G. Ballard – The Long-Form Ouvre
Before I listened to Ballard’s short stories, I’d read his ‘New Wave’, post-apocalyptic science fiction, The Drowned World (1962). I’d also read his dark, dystopian books: High Rise (1975), Cocaine Nights (1996), and its companion piece, Super Cannes (2000). These were dark tales of luxury housing residents that descend into depravity and places where occupants of elite gated communities resort to violent forays into town to alleviate their boredom.
J.G. Ballard – The Short Story
These dark, long-form works are a great read; yet for me, it’s the short stories that grab the imagination - particularly those featured in Vermillion Sands (1971) - where desert resort towns are inhabited by insane heirs; eccentric artists create cloud sculptures using biplanes; forgotten movie starlets lounge by empty pools in welding goggles; and psychologically damaged wanderers try to escape the searing heat of globally-warmed towns, trying to find meaning in their existence.
I never thought I’d come across a writer whose short stories are more immersive than their long-form stories, yet this is what Ballard achieves.
Ballard’s distinct style and themes have made him an adjective ‘Ballardian’ and earned him an entry into the Collins English Dictionary: “Resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopia modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.”
Vermillion Sands and all of Ballard’s other dystopian short stories are available in one collection. When listened to back to back, they take you to that strange Ballardian world quite like no other. I commuted, heard, and lurched through stories of human cannabilism, singing orchids, ‘secret histories of WW3’, tropical forests - where genetically modified vegetation overtook countries - and wound up in scorched desert towns filled with nihilists: is there a theme Ballard hasn’t touched on?
J. G. Ballard – The Location
Yet, for a writer with such a dark and creative output, he lived a bland existence in a small, semi-detached house in Shepperton, Surrey, for nearly half a century and once described himself to an interviewer as “a man of complete and serene ordinariness” (The Guardian, Obituary: JG Ballard, 2009). Shepperton happens to be my hometown and the place I spent my youth.
For me, Shepperton was a dull place with an end-of-the-line station, the M3 motorway dissecting through the middle, and a high street filled with Pound and Charity shops. I’d probably walked past Ballard’s house on a thousand occasions in my youth and was not aware of the pedigree of literary talent that lived behind such a simple façade!
Ballard, known by locals as ‘The Seer of Shepperton’, (Wikipedia) could have moved to somewhere fancy and upmarket if he chose; he just decided not to. Ballard was a successful novelist: and his Booker Prize short-listed novel The Empire of The Sun (1984), based on his childhood in Shanghai, was turned into an acclaimed movie by Steven Spielberg, and his controversial novel Crash (1973) – about car crash fetishists - (based in Shepperton about the M3 no less!) became a film by David Cronenberg.
Ballard had cash but decided he liked his semi-detached in bland Shepperton. After his demise from prostate cancer, the house Ballard inhabited from 1960 to 2009 went on sale in 2011 for a mere 320,000 pounds: a trifling sum for a piece of literary history. Particularly when you consider that Enid Blyton's Buckinghamshire cottage sold in 2008 for nearly two million pounds and Agatha Christie's Chelsea pad fetched nearly two and a half million in 2013 (Katy Guest, 2016).
J.G. Ballard – Thank You
Ballard also got me thinking about who else of repute might live or have lived in my hometown. What I found out was surprising: Rider Haggard, Thomas Love Peacock, George Meredith and even Percy Bysshe Shelley spent their summers in residence, and Canaletto (1754) and Turner (1805) both painted the bridge across the Thames that connects Shepperton with neighbouring Walton (Wikipedia, Shepperton).
And there’s more … H. G. Well’s dedicated chapter twelve of his War of the Worlds (1898) to the destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton – something I often fantasised about on dull, rainy days growing up!
Unfortunately, Shepperton hasn’t honoured its key literary talent or capitalised on Ballard’s, Turner’s or even Shelly’s presence. There are no blue plaques or statues of them anywhere – not even a B&B or café named after them - or marginally related - such as ‘The Writer's Retreat’, ‘The Poet’s Arms’ or ‘The Painter’s Rest’.
If I’d known Shepperton was packed full of poets, writers and painters, maybe I’d have viewed Shepperton in a more favourable light and stuck around longer. Shelly’s Inn, Turner’s Pound Shop, Peacock’s House of Buns, Canaletto’s Curry House, H.G. Well’s & Co Pest Prevention, Haggard’s Frozen Foods, Meredith’s Pawn Shop, The Ballardian Café. Come on, Shepperton people, where’s your marketing strategy? Stratford upon Avon only had Shakespeare - and look how well those folks have capitalised on the bard’s having spent time there.
Oh, and before I digress further into the puzzling appeal of my hometown, Shepperton, and its unsung heroes, let’s get back to the topic. The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard - a collection of 98 dystopian oddities providing sixty-three hours and twenty-one minutes of Ballardian brilliance available on audible. Immerse yourself in Ballard, and you might never be the same again!
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This blog is a ballad to Ballard
Thanks for the lovely content Marcuss