An incisive and moving new critical biography of one of the nuclear age’s greatest visionaries.

THE BRITISH AUTHOR J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) was one of the most brilliant and incisive, but also one of the most perplexing, English-language fiction writers of the past 80 years or so (the period since the end of World War II). He was never part of the literary mainstream. Initially, he was classified and marketed as a science fiction writer; during the 1960s, he was a leading figure of SF’s so-called New Wave, which embraced sexual, psychological, and psychedelic themes, and focused more on the social sciences than on the hard sciences. As Ballard’s career progressed, however, his books increasingly departed altogether from what we usually recognize as science fiction. For instance, there is no exploration of outer space in Ballard’s fiction: there are no robots or supercomputers, and the scientist characters who continue to populate his novels are usually extremist cranks. Ballard’s early novels featured world-shaking apocalyptic scenarios, but his later work was concerned with smaller—more mundane and intimate—disasters.

One common definition of science fiction describes it as the literature of cognitive estrangement—that is to say, it presents us with a reality that deviates in some crucial way from the actual, everyday world we live in, and thereby forces us to abandon our usual assumptions and expectations. Ballard’s mature fiction is indeed estranging or alienating in precisely this way; however, it is set entirely within the present-day world of advanced postindustrial society as we know it. Ballard does not present us with aliens and cosmic mysteries; instead, he writes about the minutiae of middle-class Western society: the world of automobiles, refrigerators, airplanes, and television. But he approaches these familiar elements of our lives and environment as if he were describing an alien planet. Crash (1973), his most famous and controversial novel, treats automobile accidents as pornographic spectacles. That book’s follow-up, Concrete Island (1974), rewrites Robinson Crusoe as the story of a man stranded, not on a distant island, but on a waste area wedged between several motorways. Ballard’s final novel, Kingdom Come (2006), discovers fascism at the heart of a vast postmodern shopping mall and seems to offer a premonitory vision of the state of the United Kingdom today, 20 years later, when the neofascist agitator Nigel Farage has a real shot at becoming prime minister after the next round of elections.

A number of major film directors have made movies out of Ballard’s fiction. In 1987, Steven Spielberg, who manages to be heartwarming even when directing works of horror, did an adaptation of Ballard’s semi-autobiographical 1984 novel Empire of the Sun, with its account of a boy growing up while interned in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. David Cronenberg—whose work, even at its most mundane, is unfailingly icy and perverse—translated Crash’s twisted autoeroticism (with this word’s double meaning as both masturbation and the sexual fetishization of cars) to the screen in 1996. In 2015, Ben Wheatley, known for black comedy and genre twisting, applied his skills to Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise, in which the affluent inhabitants of a 40-story luxury apartment building revert to barbarism and engage in internecine class warfare. Ballard is perhaps the only author whose work could be adapted with equal success by filmmakers of such widely different temperaments.

Christopher Priest and Nina Allan’s new biography The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard is lively and well written, and it should be ideal for readers encountering Ballard for the first time, as well as for those (like me) who have been reading him for decades. The Illuminated Man seeks to trace out the roots of Ballard’s visionary fiction in his life, without reducing the former to the latter. Certainly, the author’s early years were fraught with alienation and tragedy. Ballard was born in Shanghai to English parents. Before World War II, the Western powers—Britain, the United States, and France—had small colonies in Shanghai that were not subject to Chinese legal authority. These colonies were inhabited by wealthy businesspeople and their families. The inhabitants ran businesses that extracted money for the West from the impoverished Chinese masses. Ballard grew up in a sort of bubble, where he never left Shanghai but also never encountered any Chinese people except servants hired by his family. The situation changed during World War II, when Shanghai and other parts of China were occupied by the Japanese army. The young Ballard and his family were imprisoned for two-and-a-half years in an internment camp, released only when the war ended with the defeat of Japan in 1945, after the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This experience marked Ballard as an early witness of the nuclear age.

In late 1945, at the age of 15, Ballard came to Great Britain for the first time. He went to high school and college, briefly enrolled in the UK’s Royal Air Force, and started writing short fiction in his spare time. He got married, had three children, and moved to the town of Shepperton, a nondescript suburb of London, where he remained for the rest of his life. He published his first novels in 1961 and 1962, and was able thereafter to quit his day job and write full-time. Ballard encountered tragedy once again in 1964, when his wife died of pneumonia at the age of 34, leaving him to raise their children on his own. From then on, Ballard’s everyday life—in contrast to his fiction—was fairly sedate and uneventful. He continued writing until just before his death from cancer at the age of 78. Ballard published 18 novels, a memoir, and a large number of short stories, together with book reviews, interviews, and short essays.

The Illuminated Man is informative about the details of Ballard’s life, while at the same time striving to capture—to evoke if not explain—the strangeness of his fiction. It often gives us information about which the writer himself was not forthcoming. Ballard drew extensively upon his own memories and desires as sources for his work, but he tended to mythologize his life, and he often smoothed over or omitted certain crucial events in his past. Indeed, Ballard disputed “the received wisdom of the day that all disturbing or violent experience is inherently damaging,” claiming that he was “not sure that [he] ever suffered irreparable trauma”—not even, he said, from the death of his wife. As for his internment during the war, Ballard even “sometimes said it was the best time of his life.”

Priest and Allan do not directly dispute Ballard’s claim not to have been traumatized by the worst events of his life. Instead, they devote much of their book to tracing the strange alchemy by which Ballard was able to transmute both his personal experience and the often dreadful historical events of the mid- and late-20th century into fantastic fiction. Though Ballard’s view of modern life can only be described as pessimistic and exceedingly grim, the mood of his stories is neither horrific nor even depressed. Ballard writes in a voice that remains objective, distanced, and orderly, even (or especially) when the contents being recounted are obsessional, maniacal, or otherwise irrational. The result is slyly and dryly humorous. There is an ongoing mismatch between the objective events recounted in the novels and the characters’ subjective responses to those events. If the content of Ballard’s fiction provokes cognitive estrangement, then the form and style in which this content is expressed involve a high level of cognitive dissonance. Such incongruity on all levels is the inner principle of Ballard’s fiction, and the source of its continuing fascination. I first encountered Ballard’s fiction when I read his 1964 short story “The Terminal Beach” at the age of 12. This text still haunts me 60 years later. It recounts the hallucinatory experiences of a man wandering through the empty ruins of Eniwetok, a Pacific atoll where the United States performed numerous nuclear tests, including the first explosion of a hydrogen bomb. This vista of destruction seems to leave impalpable remnants behind: traces not so much of what was destroyed as of the palpability of absence itself.

In all his writing, Ballard seems to embrace the opposed extremes of pulp genre conventions on the one hand and avant-garde experimentation on the other, while entirely rejecting the norms of conventional literary fiction that lie between these two extremes. Priest and Allan note that the adjective “Ballardian” often appears in dictionaries, alongside such other writerly appellations as Proustian and Kafkaesque. However, they add that Ballardian is “a mysterious and imprecise word that no one could define but which was readily understood by those who experienced it.” This ungraspable meaning is partly a result of the obsessively repeated images and motifs that recur throughout Ballard’s fiction, and which the authors inventory in a sort of mock-epic catalog:

dense rainforest, vibrant light, shopping malls, river systems, sites irradiated by nuclear blasts, white-haired goddesses of the film world, errant doctors, gated communities of oligarchs and ultra-rich fund managers, psychopaths, the freeways around and across cities, rocket launching zones, flooded cities, beach resorts, drained swimming pools, desert wastes.

These images are oddly flat and literal. They create a mood of desolation and decay. But the most important thing about them is that they are not metaphors. They do not have symbolic resonances or extended meanings beyond themselves. Rather, in their sheer literal presence, they suggest the exhaustion, or the emptying out, of the very possibility of meaning anything at all. Shopping malls are built to be eventually abandoned; swimming pools are always ultimately drained. And celebrities tend to implode into black holes, endlessly referring only to their own mystique. For instance, does the figure of Marilyn Monroe—frequently mentioned by Ballard in hid 1970 collage novel The Atrocity Exhibition, as well as in other art of the period, such as Andy Warhol’s iterated portraits of her—really stand for anything at all anymore? Did her star image ever stand for anything, even back then? And what do we make of her demisurvival, as an image or icon, long past her physical death? Ballard’s fiction is always mulling over this sort of question.

Ballard’s writing insists on finitude and mortality, and yet it also seems to reject finality. There is no triumphant accomplishment but also no sense of anything ever being over and done with, once and for all. This in-between situation is reflected in The Illuminated Man, in the very process of its writing. Christopher Priest and Nina Allan were life partners; they have also both written fiction that (like Ballard’s own) is best described as SF-adjacent rather than as science fiction in the strict sense. The Illuminated Man was originally Priest’s project; he did the research and wrote more than two-thirds of the text. But then he became too ill to proceed, with the cancer that finally killed him. Allan stepped in and wrote the missing sections that Priest had outlined. But in the book, she also includes an account of Priest’s illness and death, of her caring for him as he declined, and of her unassuageable grief. These pages are quite moving. At first, they might seem extraneous to the account of Ballard’s life; though he and Priest were somewhat acquainted, they were never close. But in the long run, the intimacy of Allan’s account of Priest’s death substitutes for the fact that Ballard’s own death is, by necessity, only recounted to us from a much greater distance.

It also highlights, perhaps, Ballard’s own rejection of any such intimacy, though he was close to his wife, to his later life companion Claire Walsh, and to two of his three children. Allan’s account of Priest’s death before he could finish writing the book reminds us that no account of another person (or even of oneself) is ever complete and definitive. The Illuminated Man does not tell us everything about J. G. Ballard, but it tells us a lot. In that way, it brings us back to Ballard’s own fiction, which is starkly limited in scope and yet—in its depth and mystery, and in its insights about modern technologized life—inexhaustible.