book review, J. G. Ballard, the complete short stories

JG Ballard, 2010, The complete stories of JG Ballard, W. W. Norton, New York, ISBN 978-0-393-33929-1, $24.95, very thick paperback, 1199 pages. Ninety eight stories, including two that were not, apparently, previously published.


"The complete stories of J G Ballard" is a big book, and Ballard is a world-class writer. The book and the author are beyond my capacity for literary justice. With that warning, you might still want to read my few comments about the book.

First of all, this is only the 98 short stories. The book doesn't include the novels. If it did, it would be much thicker. As it is, it is so thick it is difficult to read.

Most of these stories are new to me (I primarily knew Ballard through his novels), and they are printed in chronological order. Many of Ballard's characters are not fatalists, but they almost all should be. His novels can get pretty depressing. Dashed hopes and failure are easier to take in small doses! It is not true that every one of his stories ends badly for the viewpoint characters, but happy endings are few and far between.

Ballard returned again and again to several tropes in his writing. Dried-up seas, reefs, insane women (many homicidal), pathetic loser protagonists, and an imaginary place he called "Vermillion Sands," which was not the same in every story, but which among its many incarnations seems to represent different aspects of the same decadent and/or decaying world. In the matter of recurring themes there was a progression. He might write three or four stories that explored different versions of a plot, or perhaps different incarnations of a character. At some point, he would have said everything he wanted to say and would move on to do the same thing with another recurring character or story line. Here is one example.

Back in the 70s Ballard published a series of stories about flying. These were not his only stories in which flying was important, and publication order is not necessarily the same as writing order, but this group of stories illustrates his penchant for reworking themes into multiple stories apparently one right after another. "My dream of flying to Wake Island" was published in 1974. In this story, vast numbers of World War II era planes are buried in sand at an abandoned beach resort. People come to excavate these planes the way others go to Civil War battlefields with metal detectors looking for spent 19th-century bullets. The protagonist is obsessed with flying to Wake Island. It is evident from the beginning he is never going to get there. During the story he indulges in various activities that don't further his goal, has a brief love affair, and loses everything. A typical Ballard story.

The next Ballard story published was "The air disaster," which appeared the following year. In this story, a journalist is on his way to the site of a disaster. He is led astray by some local people who eventually lead him to, not an airliner that just crashed with a thousand people on board, but a small airplane that fell in the high mountains decades earlier. This story operates on several levels and it is not much like the preceding story. The protagonist is not an obsessive loser, but he does have an unseemly desire to find a bunch of freshly killed corpses before anyone else does. Then there is his interaction with the locals. He invades their world with the same disrespectful attitude that representatives of technologically advanced cultures often have in such situations. And finally, the comparison between a few dead air men, lost and forgotten, and a thousand travelers whose families have just begun to grieve for them. This comparison is not explicit in the story, but it is unavoidable. Of course, the dead travelers are not really in the story. Only the journalist and the natives are actually present. They meet and interact, but the journalist doesn't understand the locals and they don't understand him.

That same year, "Low-flying aircraft" was published. This story is very interesting. In some ways it is a typical Ballard work and in other ways it jumps the rails completely. In this story, the human race is dying out. All babies born are unviable mutants. Other mammalian species are similarly affected. In a paroxysm of revulsion, people have been ruthlessly exterminating themselves and the larger mammals, until cattle, sheep, human beings, et cetera are almost gone. The protagonist, Forrester, and his wife Judith, are fertile. She conceives readily, but all the newborns are mutants. They are humanely put to sleep. Still, the Forresters keep trying. At the time of the story Forrester meets a doctor named Gould. Gould is seemingly obsessed with flying his airplane dangerously close to the ground, hence the title of the story. It turns out that Dr.Gould has discovered something very significant about the mutants, human and otherwise. He suggests to Forrester that if a creature seems defective to us, maybe we just aren't looking at it correctly. It may simply be different, or even more fit (in an evolutionary sense). The story ends on a hopeful note. "Low-flying aircraft" reminds me more of R. A. Lafferty than of other Ballardian stories.

This is one kind of thematic iteration employed by Ballard. Aircraft are important in all three of these stories, but in vastly different ways. In one, they are objects of a futile obsession. In the next, aircraft are props used to reflect aspects of humanity. In the last, aircraft appear to indicate mental instability, but turn out to be part of something a lot healthier.

Some of the other clusters of related stories contain stories that are more closely related to one another than these three. Sometimes they even contain some of the same characters. For example, the half dozen or so stories in which changes in the flow of time are central to the plot. People live faster than the rest of the world, they live more slowly than the rest of the world, the entire world slows down physically but the speed of thought does not change, and you get the idea. Ballard returned again and again to the possibilities inherent in changes in our sense of the passage of time, whether objective or subjective.

The last story in the book was published in 1992. This is "Report from an obscure planet," which is only three pages long. The story deals with both virtual reality and Y2K. One of his last stories was simply the schedule of a day's television programs. Through the titles and one-sentence descriptions of the shows Ballard sketches out a world.

I have to recommend this book. The price is incredibly low. Ballard's oeuvre encompasses nearly half of the 20th century, and during much of the time he was an important and influential writer. And the stories are good. Depressing, of course, but you don't have to read them all in one day. But buy the book.


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