Remember me
W hen JG Ballard died in 2009, aged 78, the broad outlines of his life were well known. He had published two autobiographical novels – the bestselling Empire of the Sun (1984), which draws on his teenage years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, and The Kindness of Women (1992), which makes use of episodes from his adulthood, including the premature death of his wife and his experience of single-handedly raising three children. There was also a late memoir, Miracles of Life (2008), which complicated the picture set out in the novels, revealing, for instance, that unlike Jim, the hero of Empire of the Sun, Ballard had been interred in the same camp as his parents.
Ballard’s telling of his life story did little to reconcile his public image – that of a hearty, clubbable bourgeois who lived quietly in a Shepperton semi-detached – with the imaginative extremity of such novels as The Drowned World (1962), a hallucinatory vision of psychic entropy in a London submerged by rising seas, or Crash (1973), a hypnotically stylish novel premised on the psychosexual appeal of car accidents. A full biography was required, to cast a sharper light on the man behind the work and to provide a fitting monument to one of the most powerful and original English voices of the 20th century.
Two years after his death, an unauthorised one appeared. John Baxter’s The Inner Man (2011) was a weirdly hostile and dismayingly amateurish book, which painted its subject as a racist, sexist, mendacious creep, beset by alcohol problems and “psychotic tendencies”, and his work as largely overrated. One of its more eye-catching claims was that Ballard physically abused his long-term partner, Claire Walsh. She described the allegations as “bizarre” when asked about them by the Times, while Ballard’s eldest daughter, Bea, gave an interview to the Telegraph in which she pointed out several factual errors in Baxter’s book and dismissed his portrait of her father as “ridiculous and without foundation”.
For more than a decade, no other biographer emerged. When word spread at the start of 2023 that the distinguished science fiction writer, Christopher Priest, was working on a new work of Ballard’s life, it was therefore a cause for excitement – cut short, just a few months later, by the news that Priest had died. That seemed to be that. But as it turns out, Priest’s fourth wife, Nina Allan, also a science fiction writer, has finished the book he started. The Illuminated Man, written with the cooperation of Ballard’s daughters (though evidently without the involvement of his son James, with whom he had a difficult relationship), easily clears the low bar set by Baxter. Nonetheless, it’s a decidedly eccentric and often frustrating piece of work.
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The sections written by each author are clearly demarcated. Allan tells us that Priest’s chapters “remained untouched and completely intact, the way he wrote them”. It’s hard not to feel that they might have benefited from the attentions of an editor. Priest opens with an unequivocal claim: “I have always acknowledged the influence of JG Ballard.” A couple of hundred pages later though: “As an independent novelist… I was reluctant to allow there was any influence on me from his work.” At another point he describes the adjective “Ballardian” as “a mysterious and imprecise word that no one could define” within a page of providing the dictionary definition.
Priest deals mainly with Ballard’s formation as a writer and his work; Allan with his later life and career. Priest has the harder job, since more witnesses of the early period are dead, and he’s frequently reduced to paraphrasing passages from Miracles of Life. When he does add new details, their value isn’t always clear. We learn that the encyclopaedia Ballard sold door-to-door in 1953 (“a multi-volume set bound as The Waverley Encyclopaedia of General Information”) was, contrary to what he believed, not the same edition he read as a boy (“an eight-volume collection which appeared in the early 1930s, called The Book of Knowledge, An Encyclopaedia for Readers of All Ages”). This hardly seems worth the effort it must have taken to discover.
Allan’s sections are a bit more enlightening. She details Ballard’s various affairs, including one with the novelist Emma Tennant, and says that he was dependent on alcohol “for a period of about ten years” and that the beginning of his relationship with Walsh “was marred by jealousy, emotional turbulence and violent arguments”. Whether these ever erupted into physical fights is a question she leaves open, calling one witness (the writer Michael Moorcock) who suggests that Ballard was capable of violence, alongside others (including Tennant) who insist that he wasn’t. She also reveals that Ballard’s descriptions of life as a single parent were somewhat over-egged: he had help from his in-laws, as well as from his mother and sister, who sometimes took the children for holidays.
By far the biggest surprise afforded by The Illuminated Man is how much of it is concerned less with Ballard than with Priest. We get pages and pages about the younger writer’s adolescence, his discovery of science fiction, his working methods, his final illness and, in Allan’s sections, his death. At two different points, we’re apprised of minor biographical similarities between him and Ballard (both were conceived in Stockport, took flying lessons, liked French films and typed rather than hand-wrote their first drafts; neither received a university degree). We’re given the entire text of an autobiographical story that Priest wrote in hospital. The diary Allan kept in his final days is also reproduced (“Your breath moves, flickering in your neck like the dust-soft, purring movements of a moth in bracken,” etc). This dual focus isn’t justified by any special connection between Ballard and Priest. They seem barely to have known one another. “I had reason to correspond with him from time to time,” Priest explains, “and was honoured to include a new short story by him in an anthology I edited.” It seems a weak basis for a shared memorial.
There are moments when Priest seems to view his ostensible subject mainly as a proxy for writing about his own attitudes and beliefs. He paraphrases Ballard’s description of his discovery of science fiction, before providing a gloss:
Science fiction has at its heart an unstated question: “What if…?” That simple postulate is inspirational to some people: they do not take the future as a given, a predetermined regurgitation of the past or present. They relish the unexpected, the possibilities of change. They are prepared to speculate, to wonder, to dream.
Ballard was clearly once such. He was thrilled and inspired by the imaginatively possible.
But that isn’t how Ballard described his attraction to the genre. In Miracles of Life he has this to say about his first encounter with it:
Here was a form of fiction that was actually about the present day, and often as elliptical and ambiguous as Kafka. It recognised a world dominated by consumer advertising, of democratic government mutating into public relations. This was a world of cars, offices, airlines, highways and supermarkets that we actually lived in, but that was almost completely missing from almost all serious fiction… I felt too that for all its vitality, science fiction was limited by its “what if?” approach, and that the genre was ripe for change, if not outright takeover. I was more interested in a “what now?” approach.
The former passage is really about the genre’s appeal to Priest, who also asserts that Ballard “loved” the strain of intergalactic science fiction represented by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke (he didn’t) and that he “never claimed” science fiction status for Crash (he did). Despite telling us that Ballard was more interested in the visual arts than in literature, Priest has almost nothing to say about the painters he admired. There are only a couple of brief references to surrealism – by Ballard’s own account the major influence on his early work.
Some of Priest’s claims are hard to comprehend. “Ballard’s motives for becoming a writer were no different from” those of John Osborne and Kingsley Amis. “Crash is perhaps the least ‘Ballardian’ book he wrote.” “Ballard’s stories and novels were to say the least misunderstood in America: he was often described or labelled as an avant-garde writer.” The last of these is particularly baffling. Is Priest really contending that it’s wrong to view a book such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), with its radical cut-up technique and protagonist whose name changes with every chapter, as belonging to the avant-garde? If so, his co-author seems to disagree with him. Allan tells us that in the late 1960s, when the episodes of The Atrocity Exhibition were first appearing in magazines, Priest “found himself out of sympathy with Ballard’s move towards the avant-garde”.
It’s a clarifying remark: Priest has given us a Ballard purged of any qualities with which he doesn’t identify. The man who’s most powerfully illuminated by this curious book isn’t the one whose name is in the title.
The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of JG Ballard
Christopher Priest and Nina Allan
Bloomsbury Continuum, 475pp, £22
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[Further reading: Franz Kafka’s ten apostles]
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This article appears in the 29 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The cover-up?