Homage to the Sage of Shepperton

L’Arénas, between Côte d’Azur airport and a dual carriageway patrolled by prostitutes, is a banal stretch of concrete, steel and glass offices, malls and hotels that seems always to be deserted. A few weeks ago, I watched an 18-month-old Korean boy playing on an iPad by a hotel pool there. ‘Ballardian’ was le mot juste.

As with Kafka, Borges, Pinter, Orwell and others who have earned an adjective, the mental landscape conjured up by J.G. Ballard’s work is instantly recognisable — though to have been fully Ballardian, the pool should have been drained and overtaken by vegetation, zebras, wrecked Pontiacs and rusting B-29s.

In a review of Hello America in 1981 (in Foundation 23), Michael Moorcock provided a list of these characteristic images, describing a

classically surrealist vision of the American dream in which the gigantic figures of John Wayne and Charles Manson bestraddle a jungle-bound Las Vegas where robot gunships shoot to ribbons giraffes and alligators populating the city streets and 46 presidents of the United States attempt an assault on a War Room which has at its centre a roulette wheel on which are marked the names of cities to be destroyed by Cruise missiles buried in the mysterious jungles of Nevada and Arizona.