J.G. Ballard's THE UNLIMITED DREAM COMPANY

There are few genres of literature I loathe more than the mid-century White Male Narcissist novel, so given that, as much as it is anything, The Unlimited Dream Company is one of those, well,  it's a good thing I went into it cold out I never would have touched it. Especially not a used copy of it, because it would doubtless fluoresce under black light, if you know what I mean.*

That aside, this is still a J.G. Ballard novel, and hey, it's not as "bad" as, say, Henry Miller (whom I also admire even as he makes me roll my eyes a lot). Indeed, one might even point to this book as an example of what a Henry Miller sci-fi/ fantasy novel might have been like had Miller ever bothered to try these genres.

Interestingly, though, what drew me in, and drew me in so far that by the time I realized what I really had on my hands (ewwww), was this novel's resemblance to the work of one of my favorite film directors, Peter Greenway. Specifically, to one of his most eccentric and experimental feature films, The Falls.

This book, which starts off sounding so much like the "Tulse Luper" story "The Cassowary" that I all but screamed, could easily be taken as a description of the Violent Unknown Event which caused all of the effects catalogued in The Falls. The film, you see, is presented as a series of biographical sketches of VUE victims, with attention to their physical symptoms, their new languages, their dreams and new obsessions, all resulting from, it's generally understood, their sudden and unexplained, simultaneous and incomplete transformation into birds. A major feature of The Unlimited Dream Company is the frequent metamorphoses of the protagonist, a Mr. Blake (a nod to the poet / print artist William Blake, of course), and, at one time or another many or all of the population of a London suburb, into birds, as well as fish or various mammals.

So, I put up with all of the constant references to and descriptions of Blake running around naked and being all but worshiped for it, Blake causing luxuriant tropical plants to sprout everywhere that he sprays his considerable volume of semen (dude is a firehose), Blake entertaining taboo sexual fantasies about everything with a pulse, Blake daydreaming about one woman's body odor, etc. He never gets quite so self - aggrandizing as Miller (well, okay, he comes close on occasion, but never at Miller's, umm, length), nor as opaque as Greenway, at least.

By which I mean the prose is as clear and readable as ever, without ever getting too banal or clinical as one might expect a science fiction writer might do when getting explicit with a capital X. Hey, I'm surprised, too.  But I shouldn't be. I am a Ballard fangirl for life, and am now convinced that he'll never let me down.

I might just need to chill out with some nice Sigrid Undset or something for a while once I'm done with some of my current projects, one of which is a review of D. Harlan Wilson's critical biography/ bibliography of J.G. Ballard, which I'll be posting soon to Skiffy and Fanty. Hence my deep dive into Ballardiana I hadn't yet read!

*And if you don't, I envy you.

100 Books 52 - Ian McEwan's SOLAR

I feel a little bit bamboozled, when I turn my mind to this one. I haven't read any of McEwan's other work but he's classed with a lot of science fiction writers I admire, and so I dove into this "New York Times Notable Book" expecting some good near-future sci-fi and some nice thoughts on an alternative-energy future to boot, but that's not really what I got.

This is much more of an entry into the "white male narcissist" genre -- so named by the late David Foster Wallace, very aptly. We have here a middle aged protagonist whom John Updike and his ilk could easily have inflicted on us, most of the story concerning his various failures as a lover, a housekeeper, a driver of his own destiny -- failures at self-care, at continence, at social relationships -- and oh, it just happens that he is a Nobel prize-winning physicist who has inherited (from a protege who died stupidly just minutes after being caught in flagrante with our protagonist's fifth wife) the foundations for artificial photosynthesis, a technology that could finally make solar energy a reasonable replacement for fossil fuels.

As a White Male Narcissist book it's one of the less annoying I've encountered; as science fiction it's so-so. What saves it from being an oh-God-delete-it-from-my-Kindle drag is something cunning that it achieves: it conveys the feeling that we're getting a peek behind the scenes at what is really holding alternative energy back, namely, the messed-up personal lives of the staggeringly ordinary men and women doing the science, the engineering, and the logistics. This coupled with the way the protagonist, Michael Beard, serves as rather a sly and amusing stand-in for all of us westerners, who know we need to shape up and stop being such idiots about our present and future but never quite seem to take those necessary first steps -- pass up that bacon double cheeseburger, take a jog around the block, turn down an ill-advised sexual liaison, buy a hybrid vehicle or shut off the air conditioner, act in any way like a responsible, competent adult -- to addressing the heap of problems piling high and threatening to topple and engulf us.

So I don't consider the time spent reading Solar to be wasted as such, but as I am pretty well convinced already that anthropogenic climate change is a reality and that redressing those ills starts at home (hence my love of bicycle commuting and hand-cranked gadgets and other ways to lessen ye carbone footeprinte), I'm not sure that if I'd had a clearer idea of what I was getting into with this novel, I would have taken it up.

Meh.