Читать книгу The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2 - Adam Thirlwell - Страница 10

For instead, Ballard’s subject was the system: physically, the vast urban spaces and their freeways, and mentally the vast interior landscapes of psychosis and neurosis. In his Ronald Reagan extravaganza, Ballard first perceived how the era’s separate preoccupations converged, and were even mutually complicit: the virtual worlds of cinema, of politics, of analysis, were all forms of the same violence. And that’s why his late style is so tonally acrobatic. Each closed system was revealed as a version of another.

One of his last stories, ‘The Object of the Attack’, was written in 1984. As always, it has its patina of genre fiction (‘Events are moving on apace.’). But in this story of an assassination attempt, the reader can observe all Ballard’s obsessions reacting with each other, as inside some miniature and hyper-modern laboratory: the outward tone – British, and bourgeois – encloses violent energies, where the Royal Family, the American Presidency and Space Travel are ways of encoding a manic form of pathology.

But then, why not? A mandala is an image of the world, so in a way every story is a mandala, too. Which would mean, according to the terms of Ballard’s fiction, that every story is therefore also a cosmic clock – counting down the minutes to the final catastrophe.

London,2014