Graham Greene once wrote that a writer's childhood is the bank at which, in later life, he will cash his creative checks. In another exploration of the writer's inspiration, he also declared, in A Sort of Life, that novelists write out of "a desire to reduce a chaos of experience to some sort of order." If the extraordinary life and work of JG (Jim) Ballard is a case study of these observations, then Miracles of Life, his autobiography, is a detached commentary on a life foretold.
Between the ages of 13 and 33, the young Ballard suffered the kind of experience that perhaps only the 20th century could provide. The child of expat parents in Shanghai, he was interned in a Japanese prison camp in 1943. Having survived, and even thrived, in some grueling conditions, he came home to a country devastated by the war.
Here, in late adolescence, he was packed off to school (where, he notes, "the food was worse" than in camp), studied medicine at Cambridge university, dropped out, joined the RAF, was stationed in Canada and married Mary, settling down to family life in Shepperton just outside London. He was just beginning to make a name for himself as a new-wave science fiction writer, while raising three young children, when Mary died prematurely abroad, from a savage and inexplicable pneumonia.
That, in summary, is the meat of this autobiography. Vanity is the curse of successful writers, but Miracles of Life is impressively free from all forms of show (no name-dropping; no index; scarcely any photographs). Moreover, what this brief, modest and occasionally shattering book only glances at is the extraordinary body of work that has flowed from this remarkable life.
For many readers, Ballard is the author of the controversial novel Crash (1973), a surreal exploration of sexuality and the motor car. But before Crash, and before his wife's death, Ballard's novels had begun to shape a unique suburban dystopia. In its time, this vision was categorized as science fiction. Now we can see it more clearly as deeper, darker and more prophetic.
To fans of this early work, Miracles of Life will be at once disappointing and fascinating. The disappointment is intrinsic to Ballard's achievement. He has mined this material so often and so brilliantly in the past that he can hardly have much that's new to say. Read the 30-odd pages devoted to Lunghua Camp: remarkable enough, but not a patch on Empire of the Sun, the best-selling novel that transformed that experience into art.
Still, there are numerous compensating fascinations. Successful writers in old age are often reluctant to discuss their inspiration for fear of betraying the mystery of their art. Ballard, the former medical student who loved to dissect and has always stood out as an iconoclast, has no trouble with exposing some of his secrets.
Growing up in Shanghai, "the wickedest city in the world," he admits: "I would see something strange and mysterious, but treat it as normal," a juvenile manifesto for his surreal imagination. Ballard writes that his boyhood project was "to find the real in all this make-believe." But then, as a young man in post-war Britain, he found himself in "a world that was almost too real." Hence, he says, his adult determination to treat England, "as if it were a strange fiction."
A few years later, now at King's College, dissecting cadavers in the 1950s Cambridge of Crick and Watson, Ballard decides that "psychoanalysis and Surrealism were a key to the truth about existence and the human person-ality and also a key to myself."
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