THE award-winning novelist and short story writer, best known for Empire of the Sun and the controversial Crash, died on Sunday aged 78.
Friends and colleagues described him as a “brilliant” and “powerful” writer who worked tirelessly throughout his 50-year literary career.
His friend Iain Sinclair, the author, said: “He had the secret. He was an absolutely rigorous craftsman.
His productivity is just astonishing.
He was a major stylist, he had a very clean, clear, forensic style which meant that his work translated into all languages very well. His ideas were way ahead of their time.” Ballard’s agent Margaret Hanbury, who worked with him for more than 25 years, announced his death from cancer with “great sadness”, saying he had been ill “for several years”.
She said: “J G Ballard has been a giant on the world literary scene for more than 50 years. Following his early novels of the 60s and 70s his work then reached a wider audience with the publication of Empire of the Sun in 1984 which won several prizes and was made in to a film by Steven Spielberg... His acute and visionary observation of contemporary life was distilled into a number of brilliant, powerful novels which have been published all over the world and saw Ballard gain cult status.” The son of a managing director of a Manchester textile firm, James Graham Ballard was born on November 15, 1930 in Shanghai, China.
Ballard’s memories of pre-war Shanghai were of “a cruel city”. “If you fainted on the road from lack of food you lay there until you died,” he said.
“There used to be carts going around the city picking up dead bodies.” Ballard recalled that much of his childhood was spent alone or in the company of his nanny. “My father worked,” he remembered, “and my mother played bridge. Every time I went out of the house I was chauffeurdriven with my nanny next to me to stop me being kidnapped.” He was educated at the Cathedral school in Shanghai but his comfortable colonial lifestyle came to an abrupt end in 1942 when, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Ballard was interned with his parents and his younger sister by the Japanese in Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre.
The three subsequent years which he spent in captivity form the basis of his semi-autobiographical 1984 novel Empire of the Sun, which was adapted into a British Academy Award-winning film starring Christian Bale. He returned to Britain in 1946.
During this time he immersed himself in experimental and German Expressionist films of the 1920s, French films of the 1940s, and Hollywood Noir thrillers.
His first novel, The Drowned World, was published in 1962, followed by The Drought, The Wind from Nowhere and The Crystal World, which strengthened his reputation for bleak but beautiful chronicles of a post-Hiroshima age and as a notable figure in the fledgling New Wave movement. He once called himself “an architect of dreams, sometimes nightmares”.
In 1973 Crash was released — a controversial novel exploring the erotic possibilities of car accidents — which Ballard styled “the first pornographic book based on technology”.
He continued to write during his later years with notable successes with his 1996 novel Cocaine Nights, as well as Super-Cannes, and Millennium People. Last year he published his autobiography Miracles Of Life.
Friends, while remembering Ballard as “generous and jovial” also described him as “jolly peculiar” and on occasion “straightforwardly mad”.
Ballard admitted to spending much of his adult life drinking too much.
“It was a great sense of achievement,” he recalled, “when my first drink of the day was not at nine in the morning but at noon and then at eight. Life got much duller as a result.” No doubt as an antidote to boredom he began taking the mind altering drug LSD and recalled “an indulgent over use” of silver spraypaint in decorating his footwear.
Sinclair added: “He was one of the first to take up the whole idea of ecological catastrophe. He was fascinated by celebrity early on, the cult of the star and suicides of cars, motorways, edgelands of cities.” Ballard married, in 1954, Helen Matthews, who died in 1964. He never remarried. He is survived by his three children and by his long-term companion Claire.