In the battle to make sense of things, the "preposterous society" of England was no help. To save himself from "the suffocations of English life," Ballard seized on the great modernists, "Hemingway, Dos Passos, Kafka, Camus, Joyce and Dostoevsky." Slowly and painfully, he began to dissect the pathology of his early life, from Shanghai to Shepperton. His "entire fiction," he says, explores a psychic terrain that runs from "the threat of nuclear war to the assassination of President Kennedy, from the death of my wife to the violence that underpinned the entertainment culture of the last decades of the century."
There, indeed, is the bank at which Ballard has cashed his literary checks. But, because Ballard is never less than ruthlessly honest about what he sees and feels, Miracles of Life also tells quite another story, unconscious and inadvertent, perhaps, but finally brave in a way that elevates it to a level of greatness.
In this book, we discover a little boy who grew up with "patriotic newsreels, suspicious of all British adults," a nine-year-old steeped in GA Henty, Dickens and Charles Kingsley, who transcribes pages of Westward Ho!, and for whom "home" was the England of AA Milne, Just William and Chums. To this child of the British empire, "reality was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment." A lesser character might have been overwhelmed, but that was no problem for "a 12-year-old who thrived on change." Shanghai Jim, as he was known in camp, made the most of internment. It was, he writes, "a prison where I found freedom." When the war was over, he was the boy who "knew that childhood had passed for good."
But, of course, it hadn't. When Ballard began to write, he would be shaped by his inheritance. "At heart," he confesses, "I was an old-fashioned storyteller with a lively imagination." This, perhaps, is the key to Ballard, an outcast of empire who found self-expression scavenging the fertile wasteland of 20th-century modernism. Tellingly, however, as an Anglo-Saxon narrator, he cannot conceal from his readers at the end the devastating news that this may be his last book.
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