Griset sees the real focus of Concrete Island as being on the flotsam of urban Man Fridays (or should that be ‘Men Friday’?) living in the interstices of modern cities: the invisible masses we observe daily from behind the safety of the windscreen or the office window. In the novel Maitland, an affluent architect who crosses this invisible barrier, decides to remain on the concrete island, having triumphed over its obstinate vagrants. Yet Griset suggests that if the Maitland who first arrived on the island dies and is transformed into a new, stronger version of himself, he also remains afraid to recognise his own true nature. In a brilliant insight into Ballard’s metafictional method, Griset implies that this transformation of the protagonist is intended to provoke a similar transformation in the reader. Concrete Island is less concerned with awakening a new moral knowledge than with demonstrating the ways in which the mirror-world of own native brutality is just on the other side of the windscreen.
The following brief interview was printed alongside Griset’s review. Mostly concerned with the novel Ballard was then in the early stages of writing, High-Rise (which Hupp seems to believe would be called The Towers), it contains an intriguing reference to Ballard conducting research on the relation between criminal behaviour and the urban environment. It is an important nugget, because it seems to have started a line of enquiry that became a central topos of his writing, leading from Concrete Island through High-Rise to Running Wild and the loose tetralogy bookended by Cocaine Nights and Kingdom Come. [DOH]
HUPP: You’re in the process of writing a new novel called The Towers.
BALLARD: In fact I still haven’t found a title. It’s a book about what in England and the USA are called ‘high-rises’, these residential towers which can have forty or fifty floors or more. I saw a film about Poland last week, in which one complex of apartments had twenty floors and was a kilometre in length! I’ve been interested for several years now in new lifestyles which permit modern technology; skyscrapers have always attracted me. The life led there seems to me very abstract, and that’s an aspect of setting with which I’m concerned when I write – the technological landscape.
HUPP: Have you read The World Inside by Robert Silverberg? It’s a novel in which people live in groups of 800,000 in vertical cities. And Silverberg, instead of simply planting the people of today in a futuristic setting, is concerned with showing how their mentality and their social life would be affected.
BALLARD: I haven’t read that book, but what interests me is the present. I don’t want to extrapolate too far – there’s the risk of becoming detached from reality. Although I did write a story a few years ago, ‘Build-Up’, in which one city occupied the entire universe. It’s a quite fascinating subject.
HUPP: You’ve already examined housing schemes?
BALLARD: I did research before sitting down to write. For example, in cities, the degree of criminality is affected by liberty of movement; it’s higher in culs-de-sac. And high-rises are culs-de-sac: 2,000 people jammed together in the air …
HUPP: Entirely isolated.
BALLARD: Cut off from the rest of the world. In this kind of situation, all sorts can happen. Above all I’d like to examine the psychological modifications which occur without the knowledge of the inhabitants themselves, to see to what degree the mind of someone who drives a car or lives in a concrete high-rise has been altered. In the course of my investigations, I observed that there now exists a new race of people who are content in their little prisons, who tolerate a very high level of noise, but for whom the apartment is nothing more than a base allowing them to pass the night in comfort, as they’re absent during the day.
HUPP: Will this new novel be as symbolic as Crash and Concrete Island?
BALLARD: I think it will be in the same vein, although this time I’m no longer concentrating on one single character.
HUPP: And after that, will you further continue your series on the ‘technological landscape’?
BALLARD: No. I don’t have an idea for a novel, but I’d very much like to write several stories that I haven’t had the time to write these last few years. And it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything in the way of imaginative narratives, romances …
1975: James Goddard and David Pringle. An Interview with J.G. Ballard
Excerpted from the original published in James Goddard and David Pringle (eds), J.G. Ballard: The First Twenty Years, Hayes: Bran’s Head Books, 1976
Anyone studying Ballard’s work owes a debt of gratitude to David Pringle. For over forty years, he has excavated almost everything there is to know about Ballard’s career and the forces that shaped his writing. From 1975 to 1995, Pringle conducted seven interviews with him. With James Goddard, another respected SF editor and critic, who had previously interviewed Ballard in 1970 for his fanzine Cypher, he edited the first book-length publication on the author’s work, J.G. Ballard: the First Twenty Years (1976). It included an expanded version of the interview excerpted here.
Pringle published two further books on Ballard, Earth is the Alien Planet: J.G. Ballard’s Four-Dimensional Nightmare (1979) and the exhaustive J.G. Ballard: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1984), which contained another long interview. From 1981 to 1996, he produced twenty-five editions of JGB News, a Ballard newsletter with frequent input from Ballard himself. He compiled the material for Ballard’s non-fiction collection, A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996), and produced special Ballard editions of the journal Foundation and the science fiction magazine Interzone (he was editor of both at different stages). In 1982, based on a conversation of several hours’ duration, he pieced together Ballard’s remembrances about Shanghai, the pressures of war and his first years in England, resulting in an oral biography, ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’, published in Foundation 24. At the time, it was Ballard’s longest meditation on his war years, a taste of what was to come in Empire of the Sun.
This interview, conducted at Ballard’s Shepperton home on 4 January 1975, takes place just after Ballard had written High-Rise and covers much ground: the Shanghai years, the mystery of ruins and abandoned buildings, Ballard’s aversion to being branded an ‘experimental’ writer, his tenure in the RAF, the leisure class of the future, the habits of French drivers and the death of the Space Age. [SS]
GODDARD: Do you think your period of internment under the Japanese has had any effect on the kind of fiction you produce?
BALLARD: I would guess it has. The whole landscape out there had a tremendously powerful influence on me, as did the whole war experience. All the abandoned cities and towns and beach resorts that I keep returning to in my fiction were there in that huge landscape, the area just around our camp, which was about seven or eight miles from Shanghai, out in the paddy fields in a former university. There was a period when we didn’t know if the war had ended, when the Japanese had more or less abandoned the whole zone and the Americans had yet to come in. All of the images I keep using – the abandoned apartment houses and so forth – must have touched something in my mind. It was a very interesting zone psychologically, and it obviously had a big influence – as did the semi-tropical nature of the place: lush vegetation, a totally waterlogged world, huge rivers,