J. Ballard - Hello America

Whatever kind of future Ballard is proposing here, it’s not one gifted with much remote intelligence, because each of our protagonists is filled not with hard facts about this failed part of the world, but with full-blown, unchecked fantasies of the America that awaits. Their scientific mission is quickly subsumed by more personal, mythological yearnings. In a place without people, a person can become whatever he wants. Even president. Although what one would be president of is never made especially clear. Leadership itself, in its pure form, as distilled prestige, is what one is meant to readily covet. For Ballard, instilling a character with a lifelong dream of becoming president is giving that character one of the greatest ambitions there is.

We know almost nothing about where our explorers have come from, only that Europe practised moderation with its resources and avoided America’s greedy, suicidal eco-disaster. If Europe survived, though, it would seem to be a pinched and thin survival, hardly worth the novel’s attention. It’s interesting to note that the explorers never think of home while in America, never wish they were elsewhere, and seem in fact to have no pasts to speak of at all. Their lives have begun anew in this strange place. Is this the powerful hold of the American dream, which has apparently outlasted the American reality? However fallen the new world is, however much it is a victim of its own excess, a new round of explorers would seem to prefer it, death-ridden as it is, to anything else on the planet. One begins to sense that underneath the clear and lurid scorn Ballard shows for what America had become, there simmers a circumspect romanticism, a longing for the place, however diseased it was. But for Ballard, romance and death are hardly ever separate. He has no trouble showing the allure of death. In his world, it’s better to throw one’s lot in with the crazy dreamers, however perilous the mission, than to conduct oneself more rationally, with modest and realistic hopes.

Still, Ballard does love to topple an icon, and here his destruction is as luscious, and perverse, as ever. A hollowed-out, depopulated America is a perfect playground for him. He needn’t trifle so much with characters when he can provide a running inventory of all that is gone, and one of the novel’s strongest currents is the endless account of those parts of America that no longer exist or no longer work. The book is a near-rhapsody of decline. Cities are sucked of life. Dust covers everything. Pools are empty, the lights are out, and the glass in buildings is warped or gone. Rarely has a writer seemed to take such glee in cataloguing what is missing in his narrative world, a kind of grave-dancing unparalleled in any other book I can think of.

The book bursts with American death, revels in it, in lieu, really, of any kind of old-fashioned character development. Ballard was long besotted with America, or, more specifically, with its cultural artefacts and over-hyped promise, the way it advertised itself through its exports. When the movie version of Crash was set to be filmed, Ballard applauded David Cronenberg’s decision to shoot the film in Toronto, bringing it closer to the land where cars were an ugly, compelling obsession. But if Crash was, in part, about death by car, Hello America is about the death of the car, and with it the American dream.

There is no page in this book that doesn’t vividly show how finished America is. If we often think that a novelist creates a world, it is more fitting to say that here Ballard, as he did so spectacularly in his disaster fiction, has destroyed one instead. The book makes rubberneckers of us readers, because who wouldn’t be fascinated by the destruction of a land and culture that, in our time anyway, feels so fatally dominant, so in need of humbling? For an American reader, it is about as close as one can get to attending one’s own funeral. We read with a full arsenal of emotions: fascination, fear, guilt, and glee. And as our explorers move west, we encounter Ballard’s real achievement: he has written a historical novel about the future. Hello America depicts a second discovery of America, this time by demented lunatics with destructive, conquering delusions of a place that would be empty and pointless but for their dreams of it. An abandoned America turns out to be the perfect landscape for his passionate, violent characters. If America is the great land of make-believe, then Ballard’s characters are the perfect torch-bearers for the life of the imagination. Even while the country itself has perished, Ballard shows us how it endures in fantasy, mattering perhaps more than the reality ever could.

New York, 2014

‘There’s gold, Wayne, gold dust everywhere! Wake up! The streets of America are paved with gold!’

Later, when they beached the SS Apollo against the derelict Cunard pier at the lower tip of Manhattan, Wayne was to remember with some amusement how excited McNair had been as he burst into the sail locker. The chief engineer gesticulated wildly, his beard glowing like an overlit lantern.

‘Wayne, it’s everything we’ve dreamed of! Look at it just once, even if it blinds you!’

He almost tipped Wayne from his hammock. Steadying himself against the metal ceiling, Wayne gazed at McNair’s inflamed beard. An eerie copper light filled the sail locker, surrounding him with bales of golden carpets, as if they had steamed into the eye of a radioactive hurricane.

‘McNair, wait! See Dr Ricci! You may be – !’

But McNair had gone, ready to rouse the ship. Wayne listened to him shouting at the two startled stokers in the coal bunker. While he slept through the afternoon – he had come off the long night watch at eight that morning – the Apollo had anchored half a mile from the Brooklyn shore, presumably to give Professor Summers and the scientific members of the expedition time to test the atmosphere. Now they were ready to make way again and enter New York harbour, their first landfall after the voyage from Plymouth.

Winches wheezed and grunted, the anchor chains dragged at the rusty bow plates. Wayne climbed from his hammock and dressed quickly, glancing into the cracked mirror that swung from the door. A golden face stared back at him, startled eyes under the blond thatch like a gawky angel’s. As he reached the deck a cloud of soot-flakes fell from the funnel and covered the glowing fore-sail with hundreds of fireflies. Crew and passengers crowded the rail, waiting impatiently while the antique engines of the Apollo, clearly exhausted by the seven-week voyage across the Atlantic, laboured against the slack coastal water.

Annoyed with himself – already he was trembling with excitement like a child – Wayne looked out at the magnetic coast. An immense golden sheen lay over the Brooklyn shoreline, reflected from the silent quays and warehouses. The afternoon sun hung above the deserted Manhattan streets, adding its light to the glittering field below. For a moment Wayne almost believed that these long-silent avenues and expressways had carpeted themselves with the rarest treasures in preparation for just his visit.

Behind the Apollo was the massive span of the Verrazano Narrows suspension bridge, long familiar to Wayne from the ancient slides in the Geographical Society library in Dublin. He had gazed for hours at the photographs, as he had at a thousand other images of America, but he was unprepared for the spectacular size and mysterious form of the bridge. In some way it had managed to exaggerate itself during the long century it had been forgotten by everyone else. Many of the vertical cables had snapped, and the huge, copper-hued structure, covered with rust and verdigris, resembled a recumbent harp that had played its last song to the indifferent sea.