castle of illusion

Ballard is known as a writer of science fiction, a term which perhaps has no real validity. If science fiction constitutes a separate genre it demands new rules of appraisal. These not being available, it is proper to think of works like The Invisible Man, The Time Machine and The Unlimited Dream Company as belonging to no new category. They stand or fall as novels. This is perhaps the best novel that Ballard has written. We are in contemporary England. A young man who does not fit well into conformist society steals an aircraft and, not having flown a plane before, crash-lands on the Thames near Shepperton. We do not know whether or not he survives the crash: what follows may be a death or afterlife vision. He is rescued from drowning by a group who have been foretold of his coming as a kind of messianic redeemer. He discovers supernatural powers in himself which lead him to a total transformation of the town. This is isolated from the rest of the world and becomes a place of miraculous happenings — the spontaneous flowering of tropical vegetation, the appearance of strange wild animals. There are pagan fertility festivals and an uninhibited attitude to sexual congress, which is practised openly. “Shepperton had become a life engine.” The outside world tries to break in but cannot: “A fireman with a heavy axe began to hack a path through the stout bamboo. Within a dozen steps he was surrounded by fresh shoots and wrist-thick lianas that laced him into the bars of a jungle cage from which he was released only by the winches of the exhausted police.” The writing is distinguished and is in the service of an Edenic vision which has its intrusive snakes. When Blake, the hero, feels despair he floods the town with it: Shepperton is an extension of himself. At length the townsfolk take to the air — “fathers, mothers, and their children — our ascending flights swaying across the surface of the earth, benign tornados hanging from the canopy of the universe, celebrating the last marriage of the animate and inanimate, of the living and the dead.” It is an apocalyptic book but also very much a novel. (from Anthony Burgess’ 99 Novels)