Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography

Although, as the title suggests, Miracles of life. Shanghai to Shepperton. An autobiography is the autobiography of J.G. Ballard's whole life, and a large part of the book deals with various, later episodes of his life, the focal point of the book is on his earliest youth. One third of the book is

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devoted to Ballard's youth, growing up in Shanghai, and a large part of that is devoted to life in the concentration camp created by the Japanese occupation forces during the Second World War. This traumatic experience is described together with other traumatic events observed by the author at a young age, such as atrocities commited by Japanese soldiers in China. Together with the apparently random fate of people, and properties, these experiences may form the basis for Ballard's authorship. One such baffling experience is the young Ballard's walk from the liberated concentration camp to his former family home. On the way he witnesses how Japanese soldiers torture and murder a Chinese peasant. Arriving in his street he finds that the home of a neighbouring youth friends has been completely destroyed, however, his own family home has been completely preserved, so he can walk in, lie on his old bed and, as it were, walk from the horror of the day into the space-an-time capsule of his "untouched" bedroom of nearly two years before. An experience of miraculous proportions.

Although the short book, of about 300 pages deals with subsequent years and the author's life during the 1960s and 70s, the focus remains on the original influence of his life in China. The final chapter and photos document the author's recent visit to China, discovering what has become of the places he grew up.

With nearly 100 pages devoted to his youth growing up in pre-war and war-time Shanghai, Miracles of life. Shanghai to Shepperton. An autobiography is not only an autobiographical document about the author's life, but also an historical source about the modern history of China, and Shanghai in particular.

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I read this in one sitting. This is a superb memoir as Ballard recollects aspects of his life The passage about the death of his wife is moving without being sentimental and what is particularly lovely is that as much as Ballard reveals he conceals - it is clear that his children are important to

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him, but he doesn't feel the need to reveal all about them.

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J.G. Ballard is one of the great imaginative writers, on a par with Franz Kafka and Jorge Louis Borges in his orginality. His writing career began in the science fiction magazines of the 50's, moved on to surreal disaster novels in the mid-60's and evolved into the avant-garde and transgressive

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works of the Atrocity Exhibition and Crash in the late 60's and early 70's. He is most famous for Empire of the Sun, a fictionalised account of his boyhood experiences in wartime Shanghai, bringing him to the attention of the literary establishment and filmed by Steven Spielberg. He has gone on to write four detective novels, far more concerned with the psychopathologies of late capitalism then the cliches of the genre. His themes and obsessions have been constant over the years coming to define the term Ballardian; the psychological effect of the landscapes of the modern world-the media, high-rise buidings, car crashes, consumer society-on their isolated inhabitants. All this filtered through the unique alchemy of J.G. Ballard's visionary imagination.

The Miracles of Life will be his last book. He was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 2006 which prompted him to write his autobiography. It's a slim volume written in a straightforward conversational style but with flashes of Ballardian brilliance, the largest part dealing with his childhood in China. Of course for the enthusiasts this will be a must-read (although the story told will be familiar) but others will enjoy this account of his life and maybe encourage them to read more of the author's work. You come away with the feeling that not only is Ballard a literary genius but a decent human being; genuinely modest and with the right priorities.

On a personal level I felt a great sense of loss when I finished the last chapter , Homeward Bound. J.G. Ballard is my favourite writer, someone I have been reading since my late teens, so the thought he will no longer be there in his small and ordinary Shepperton house (only a 15 minute drive from my own) shining a vivid light on the hidden strangeness of my everyday world, is a very sad one.

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This is an interesting, well-written and thoughtful autobiography starting with Ballard’s life in Shanghai (he was born there in 1930), through his experience in the Japanese internment camp (outside Shanghai at Lunghua….at least, outside 1943-1945, but now well within the city of Shanghai)

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with his parents, sister and other foreigners (the Shanghai experiences recounted in his novel Empire of the Sun), through to his return to a post-war England that he could never quite grasp with its strata of haves and have-nots (more important, in his view than any “class” distinctions), worn out from the war but with too many trying to hang on to faded and exhausted glories of the British empire, through his brief stint as a medical student, his early efforts as a writer, trying to find his voice and his genre, his brief experience in Canada as an RAF pilot in training, his return to England and the beginnings of a writing career always on the edge of “mainstream” literature with his own particular type of science fiction.

The book is interesting for Ballard’s views on society, for his thoughts on literature and what is important in writing, and what led him to develop his writing in the field of science fiction. In the latter, he was greatly influenced by psychoanalysis (particularly Freud) and surrealism: “I strongly felt, and still do, that psychoanalysis and surrealism were the key to the truth about existence and human personality, and also a key to myself”. His search for a new style and content of ficiton was very much driven by a desire to explore these “truths” through writing. As he says: “…surrealism and psychoanalysis offered an escape route, a secret corridor into a more real and more meaningful world, where shifting psychological roles are more important than the ‘character’ so admired by English school-masters and literary critics, and where the deep revolutions of the psyche matter more than the social dramas of everyday life, as trivial as a tempest in a tea cosy.”

Ballard’s experiences in Shanghai strongly shaped his life and approach to his writing, or what he considered should be important and explored in writing. He describes wandering through a deserted casino in the late 1930s when Shanghai was under Japanese occupation:

“Everywhere gold glimmered in the half-light, transforming this derelict casino into a magical cavern from the Arabian Nights tales. But it held a deeper meaning for me, the sense that reality itself was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment, and that no matter how magnificent anything appeared, it could be swept aside into the debris of the past.
I also felt that the ruined casino, like the city and the world beyond it, was more real and more meaningful than it had been when it was thronged with gambles and dancers. Abandoned houses and office buildings held a special magic and on my way home from school I often paused outside an empty apartment block. Seeing everything displaced and rearranged in a haphazard way gave me my first taste of the surrealism of everyday life, hough Shanghai was already surrealist enough.”

I think this sums up nicely Ballard’s approaches in his novels, his eye for extrapolating from the ordinary into the extraordinary and even the horrific, inventiveness firmly rooted in elements of present social and economic “realities” as we understand them, everyday connections that seem commonplace until they are explored or stood on their heads, and with social commentaries and criticisms swathed in the extreme. The quote above about the ruined casino resonates perfectly with his description of the mad world of an artificially maintained Las Vegas in the midst of an abandoned USA in Hello America

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A lovely interesting autobiography. I felt the final third a bit less interesting (though there is a kicker) but the beginning sections, from his childhood in Shanghai and in the Japanese war camp, through his return to England and school, through the death of his wife, are all absorbing, whether

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or not the reader is familiar with Ballard's fiction. The reader of Ballard's fiction might be surprised by the simplicity and calm of this tale (though that isn't true of the elements of the tale) but will spot the origins of many of the tropes, images and themes of Ballard's fiction.

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Ballard's final book, alas. Quite a bit different than his fictional autobiography, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women. Some details that stick out in my mind: He was the most radical of the New Wavers but didn't partake of 1960s craziness because he was raising 3 kids as a single dad. He

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did indeed have a grand old time in the Japanese interment camp, where one of the other kids was future cult TV actor Peter Wyngarde.

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