The Breathing Machine

For many years I was aware of J.G. Ballard, but I had never read anything by him. I'm a lazy reader, and usually don't bother with literature. I prefer academic books. But when so many artists I enjoy find profound meaning in Ballard's literature it's hard to overlook. Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire and Gary Numan were significantly inspired by Ballard. Cronenberg adapted his novel Crash for the silver screen and there is even a Doctor Who episode inspired by one of his books. (Paradise Towers from 1987. Charming in its own eighties way.) Even Hawkwind. There's more too...

Anyway. I found High Rise sitting on shelf and picked it up, and for some reason I left it sitting on a new shelf for a couple of years before I read it. But when I finally did. Wow. In a lifetime you'll only have a few experiences where your world is permanently altered, and this was one of those. I vividly remember the brutal in medias res opening where the main character barbecues his neighbor's alsatian, before the book goes on to recount his experiences before and after this savage unsentimental meal.

The novel brought together so many elements in a story that sounds preposterous but works like a charm. The brutalist Erno Goldfinger architecture of the high rise itself conspires with the futuristic cityscape in which it lies and the modernist search for meaning and power. It was a beautiful book, and I found myself viewing the world in a different way. I immediately sprang to tackle the next book, Atrocity Exhibition, upon which Joy Division based their song of the same title - and arguably his least accessible work. The short textual fragments coalesced to form a whole that affected my perception of reality in a profound way, with their oblique mythical contents. At this time I used to ride the subway to work, and I remember sitting on the subway station listening to the sounds of automatic billboards periodically switching posters. It sounded like the city itself was on a respirator, gasping for breath in the summer heat. For a moment of clarity the humans around me stopped being people and became symptoms. The spit on the ground was a festering pool of potential evolution.

Ballard's fascination with landscapes as an extension of the human will, and vice versa, his use of medical references, his sterile lack of exposition or exaggerated back stories and his modernity all click with me, and he rapidly became one of my favorite authors of all time. Up there with Gibson, Mishima, Burroughs and quite possibly Delany (by whom I have only read one book of as of yet). Ballard's reality is our reality without clothes. His religious/erotic portrayals of life in the city and interhuman relations in the city are eye popping.

I certainly don't see cars or highway intersections the same way anymore. They are both frightening and sexy to me now. And I'm not alone in that...

I leave you with this: The Normal - Warm Leatherette