A Son of the Rock

Harper Collins, 1991

I couldn’t believe on checking the date when this book was published that I’d had it on my shelves for nearly twenty years. Somehow other books to be read have always shoved themselves to the front of the pile. That is perhaps a reflection of my ambivalent attitude towards Ballard’s writing. I can recognise and admire his technical ability but I’ve never really warmed to his prose.

This is the sequel to the more famous Empire Of The Sun and like that book can be read as semi-autobiographical. However, that would be to deny the authorial artifice that went into its construction. The Kindness Of Women is undoubtedly fictionalised, clearly novelistic, rather than a straight-forward autobiography. Like Empire Of The Sun it is also more engaging than a lot of Ballard’s fiction even if, taken together, the two books undo the mystique of his other fiction, make his work more mundane.

The usual Ballardian tropes are in evidence; drained swimming pools, the Kennedy assassination, car crashes, Marilyn Monroe, the Runymede memorial and so on, but they seem to arise naturally out of the narrative. More mercifully there are not many instances of the trademark Ballardian “some” as an adjective and the usually crucial word “already” is noticeably restricted. As a result the distancing effect of Ballard’s normal prose style is for the most part absent and empathy with the narrator (as in Empire Of The Sun, named Jim) enhanced. Partly this may be the effect of a first person narrator. Or is it because I am older and more patient? I did note, however, that “desultory” does make its obligatory appearance.

There is, too, an awful lot of sex in this book. It almost seems as if every woman in the novel has sex with Jim at one time or another. But then the novel is called The Kindness Of Women. In that Ballardian way the sex is nearly always curiously detached, almost as if the narrator hadn’t taken part in the acts described.

Reading this so close to the Julie Myerson kerfuffle did induce feelings of unease about the content. It is so personal, skates so close to real events in Ballard’s life that it inevitably led to wondering just how much of his own past Ballard had mined for this particular novel. But unlike with Myerson Jim’s children are never the centre of the narrative. In this regard, however, the origins of his tropes are, to an extent, laid bare.

Yet all this could be a mighty authorial joke. Near the end Jim tells us of the layers of artifice involved when a movie company is making a film, near his house at Shepperton, of his novel which was set in wartime Shanghai. He remarks to his companion that he may write a sequel one day, a sequel which I, of course, was reading. (Artifice like this is, of course, true of any worthwhile novel.) Then again that incident may be a double bluff to point us away from personalisation. Short of reading Ballard’s actual autobiography I cannot tell how much is remembered, how much imagined. Though even that work will be less than free from artifice.

In The Kindness Of Women the shadow of death always hangs over the narrative. Early on Jim witnesses the asphyxiation of a Chinese man by several Japanese soldiers on a deserted railway platform and this incident recurs like a tocsin through the book. In addition Jim’s wife (like Ballard’s) dies when his children are relatively young, and the man who brought them together, in a late chapter.

The coda seems to suggest that Jim has finally come to terms with his boyhood experiences and offers resolution of a sort.

As an introduction to Ballard, this book, along with Empire Of The Sun, would make a good starting point.