Terminal Beach by J. G. Ballard

In the midst of life, we are in death. Especially if we’re reading Ballard. His abiding interests seem to be sex and death and, to be honest, I think he likes death better. His work often seems to deal with our destructiveness and self destructiveness and his view of humanity is pretty bleak, but perhaps that’s unsurprising for someone who spent their teenage years in a Japanese POW camp.

My favourite story was one about a dead giant which washed up on the beach. Crowds turn up to see him, but soon their wonder turns into thoughts of how to turn a profit from this new resource and a little industry sets up around the giant, cutting manageable chunks off him and carting them off to rendering plants until nothing is left. The most disturbing story in the book is probably “The Giaconda of the Twilight Noon” in which a man recovering from temporary blindness chooses to gouge out his eyes, Oedipus style, in order to better enjoy vivid sexual fantasies about his mother. This kind of thing is pretty much par for the course when one reads Ballard.

Many of the stories feel rather dated now; especially those ones which seem to fit the pattern of Heart of Darkness. There are several of these which feature an upper class white Englishman choosing disease and death amongst the natives in some corner of the Empire, rather than going home to safe and insipid civilised life which would involve having to pull himself together and stop behaving like a nutter. The colonial attitudes of the characters are jarring for the modern reader but I think they might have been pretty standard when the book was written in 1964.

I enjoyed this collection, but not as much as my favourite Ballard book, "Crash". I heartily recommend that one. It is grotesque and disturbing, but still tempts you to corner far too fast while listening to The Pixies.

Ballard himself has been in the news of late as by virtue of publishing an autobiography which reveals he’s dying of prostate cancer. Looks like JGB is occupying one of the best sun loungers on the Terminal Beach.