Memoir: Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography By JG Ballard Fourth Estate, 278pp. £14.99Few can tell a story like JG Ballard, and here he tells the remarkable story of his own life.
James Ballard was born to English parents in Shanghai, a city that enthralled him with its sensuous bedazzlements, as readers of his masterpiece, Empire of the Sun, will know. His father was manager of the China Printing Company "in the days when loyalty meant something". While not actually a colony in the literal sense, Shanghai was an outpost of the usual expatriate modes. The Ballards lived at a house with the not notably Chinese address of 31 Amherst Avenue.
Young James grew up in an enclave of well-protected privilege, surrounded by servants and other amenable menials whose names - being, for some inexplicable reason, Chinese - his parents found unpronounceable. The inconvenience was countered with a brilliant solution whereby they referred to them as "Number One Coolie", "Number Two Cook" and so on.
What the servants called their masters is not recorded, alas, but I can think of a few terms myself. The neighbours were all British, very nice but they drank, perhaps to dissuade the mosquitoes or to murder inhibitions, or possibly to inhibit murders.
If knocking back the sauce was the pastime of choice, it didn't always broaden the mind. Local culture or customs were not much studied in this gin-sozzled Surrey of the East. Even Chinese food was regarded as beyond the pale, as were Chinese ways of any sort.
We can probably think of one of Albion's more westerly protectorates where the oppressor at least came with his notebook as well as his blunderbuss, being avid for the faery-lore and the ancient bardic emissions, but not south of the equator, apparently.
It was a blur of roast beef on Sundays, the four martini lunch, the loyal toast, the tightening cummerbund, the sunset on the veranda as the natives snipped your topiary, and a certain kind of English self-delusion. There was golf, bridge, all the usual stuff, and riding was immensely popular, in both senses of that verb. To paraphrase a remark of the great Anthony Cronin, archetypical British expats of the colonial era may not look, to our eyes, as though they bonked like bunnies. But then again, neither do bunnies.
YOUNG BALLARD, A curious and amiable-seeming boy, turned to literature as a sort of escape. He read Dickens, Charles Kingsley, many Victorians and the Bible, often winning medals for religious knowledge despite being "the greatest heathen in the class". If he wanted to freak his schoolmates, he would tell them he was a Communist, a claim you can't help feeling, if made in front of his parents, would have led to the smelling-salts or worse.
Frequently ordered by an idiotic schoolmaster to copy pages from a novel as a punishment, and we can all think of novels where such a chastisement would be cruel and unusual, he realised pretty quickly that the teacher wasn't checking them, so he began to stick in chunks of his own youthful prose, more or less to fill up the space. It's an immensely lovable part of this pleasantly readable book. You feel yourself cheering him on.
With the Japanese invasion, everything changed. The good times were over, the cocktail shakers stilled, the swimming- pools drained, the zippers done up, and there was a new daily spectacle, previously unimaginable to young Ballard and his friends: "the sight of English adults under stress". There is powerfully moving writing here - if for this reader not quite enough of it - about the boy watching his father trying to adjust. "I wanted to encourage my father, whom I knew to be a thoughtful and brave man, but nothing in his experience had prepared him for the Japanese military . . . and its demands of absolute submission." What a telling, haunting, harrowing sentence. The novel beginning thus could be unforgettable.
Internment began soon, selectively at first, with the Japanese confining expatriates under a system of house arrest. In this, architecture and social imperialism had conspired to collaborate. Many British residents lived in opulent compounds, utterly shielded from the natives. "These well-guarded residential estates made ideal internment camps," we are told, in a passage that may disquiet prospective purchasers in Dublin 4 or 6. "The security measures that kept intruders out worked just as well at keeping their residents in." Now that's what I call a property crisis.
In 1943, full-scale internment commenced, with civilians being moved into prison camps. Ballard provides an extraordinarily vivid and even funny account of life behind the wire: its daily routines, its small solidarities, the ghastliness of the sudden denial of alcohol to a population long accustomed to almost perpetual scutteredness.
The children of the internees, while living as prisoners, had a certain amount of freedom to roam. But here Ballard lapses into a nostalgia gone so regrettably far as to become almost Pythonesque in its insistences. "I enjoyed my years in [ the prison camp] and on the whole felt buoyant and optimistic, even when the food rations fell to near zero, skin infections covered my legs [ and] malnutrition had prolapsed my rectum." It is hard to believe every word in that sentence is true, but if so, the problem is surely greater; for the distancing effect is so intense as to estrange any reader who can't invest scabies with wistfulness.
The book gets back on recognisable ground when Ballard comes to Britain. "Winter numbed, England froze." He meets his grandparents for the first time, is shunted off to boarding school, horrified by the dereliction of the war-scarred country, and lives, in a phrase as remarkable for its tact as its precision, "several miles below the sea level of mental health".
He finds it impossible to credit that the traumatised who lurch through the streets have actually been the winners of the war. Like devils materialising suddenly on a chocolate box cover, doubts claw at young James's certainties. "It came home to me that the England I had been brought up to believe in - AA Milne, Just William, Chums annuals - was a complete fantasy."
There follows a stationing in Canada, where he devotes himself to fiction, and there is enjoyable material later about his take on the 1960s, as well as moving, careful, hesitatingly wise prose on his life as a single father following the early death of his wife.
Ballardistas, and there are millions of them, will relish this scrupulously written memoir of the life and times of a genius. Others may find it very occasionally colourless, like someone impersonating John Major. ("Family life has always been important to me." "The Cannes Film Festival is an extraordinary media event.") But when the sentences zing with truth, as they do remarkably often, you are struck by the power of JG Ballard to tell a story as few others can.
Joseph O'Connor's novel Redemption Fallsis published by Harvill Secker