John Gray - The Unlimited Dream Company

Praise

Introduction by John Gray

CHAPTER 1 The Coming of the Helicopters

CHAPTER 2 I Steal the Aircraft

CHAPTER 3 The Vision

CHAPTER 4 An Attempt to Kill Me

CHAPTER 5 Back from the Dead

CHAPTER 6 Trapped by the Motorway

CHAPTER 7 Stark’s Zoo

CHAPTER 8 The Burial of the Flowers

CHAPTER 9 The River Barrier

CHAPTER 10 The Evening of the Birds

CHAPTER 11 Mrs St Cloud

CHAPTER 12 ‘Did You Dream Last Night?’

CHAPTER 13 The Wrestling Match

CHAPTER 14 The Strangled Starling

CHAPTER 15 I Swim as a Right Whale

CHAPTER 16 A Special Hunger

CHAPTER 17 A Pagan God

CHAPTER 18 The Healer

CHAPTER 19 ‘See!’

CHAPTER 20 The Brutal Shepherd

CHAPTER 21 I Am the Fire

CHAPTER 22 The Remaking of Shepperton

CHAPTER 23 Plans for a Flying School

CHAPTER 24 The Gift-making

CHAPTER 25 The Wedding Gown

CHAPTER 26 First Flight

CHAPTER 27 The Air is Filled with Children

CHAPTER 28 Consul of This Island

CHAPTER 29 The Life Engine

CHAPTER 30 Night

CHAPTER 31 The Motorcade

CHAPTER 32 The Dying Aviator

CHAPTER 33 Rescue

CHAPTER 34 A Mist of Flies

CHAPTER 35 Bonfires

CHAPTER 36 Strength

CHAPTER 37 I Give Myself Away

CHAPTER 38 Time to Fly

CHAPTER 39 Departure

CHAPTER 40 I Take Stark

CHAPTER 41 Miriam Breathes

CHAPTER 42 The Unlimited Dream Company

Interview with J. G. Ballard

‘Fly Away’ by Malcolm Bradbury

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

by John Gray

To anyone who thinks of J. G. Ballard as a dystopian writer obsessed by images of catastrophe this book will come as a surprise. One of his least-known novels, it is also one of the most powerfully lyrical. Ballard’s stories depict disaster zones: London drowned by the effects of climate change, an ultra-modern high-rise in which human beings struggle to survive, an American continent covered by desert and rainforest that a ragged band of explorers must cross. Yet the central thrust of his work is that disaster is not always an entirely negative experience. A seemingly destructive alteration in the outer world – geophysical or socio-political – may be the trigger for a process of psychological breakthrough. Instead of being destroyed, Ballard’s characters are liberated by catastrophe. Far from being a type of dystopian prophecy – though at times it is that too – his work has at its core an experience of inner transformation and renewal.

The Unlimited Dream Company is a succession of images held together by a single landscape, a succession more brilliant and more hallucinatory than anything else in Ballard’s fiction. Surrealist painting is a pervasive influence in his work – more influential than that of any writer, he used to say – and he followed the Surrealists in believing that the world could be remade by the human mind. The exotic landscapes he conjures are often as important as the characters who inhabit them. Where this book differs from his other novels is in its strongly poetic quality. With its short chapters, some only a page or two long, it reads at times like modernist verse. Only Hello America (1981), where he pictures New York swathed in golden sand-dunes and Las Vegas as the jungle capital of an almost deserted country, is similar in style. But whereas Hello America is full of deadpan humour, the mood that pervades The Unlimited Dream Company is joyful and rhapsodic.

Serendipitously, the actual Shepperton became for a time something like one of Ballard’s disaster areas in the floods that hit the town at the start of 2014. The Shepperton that appears in these pages is that same Thames suburb – where Ballard lived from 1960 until his death in 2009 – more magically transmuted. Hosts of brightly plumed birds – ‘flamingos and frigate-birds, falcons and deep-water albatross’ – have flocked into the town, and when the narrator leans against a pillar-box, trying to straighten his flying suit, an eagle ‘guarding these never-to-be-collected letters snaps at my hands, as if she has forgotten who I am and is curious to inspect this solitary pilot who has casually stepped off the wind into these deserted streets’. When the pilot leaves town, he looks up at ‘the vivid tropical vegetation that forms Shepperton’s unique skyline. Orchids and horse-tail ferns crowd the roofs of the supermarket and filling station, saw-leaved palmettos flourish in the windows of the hardware store and the television rental office, mango trees and magnolia overrun the once sober gardens, transforming this quiet suburban town where I crash-landed only a week ago into some corner of a forgotten Amazon city.’

It is no accident that the narrator’s name is Blake. In a letter, the poet William Blake declared ‘to the eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself’. Everything that Ballard’s character sees is seen through the eyes of the imagination. It is left open whether anything like the transformed Shepperton he describes exists or is no more than Blake’s delusion. He may even be dead and dreaming the place into existence. Impulsive, shifty and at times apparently psychopathic, Blake cannot be expected to give any remotely reliable account of himself. ‘Rejected would-be mercenary pilot, failed Jesuit novice, unpublished writer of pornography … yet for all these failures I had a tenacious faith in myself, a messiah as yet without a message who would one day assemble a unique identity out of this defective jigsaw.’

From what he tells us of the course of his life before he crash-landed, Blake is an archetypal loser. But he is also – whether only in his mind or in some alternate reality – capable of refashioning the world around him. He comes to Shepperton as a Surrealist saviour, seeding the town with his own semen, absorbing the population into his body in an act of magical cannibalism and exhaling them back into the town – now a seething jungle – as creatures that can soar with the wind. This suburban deity longs to awaken the town’s inhabitants from their earthly slumbers: ‘The unseen powers who had saved me from the aircraft had in turn charged me to save these men and women from their lives in this small town and the limits imposed on their spirits by their minds and bodies.’ Extending the Surrealist faith in the power of the imagination into something like mysticism, Blake affirms that what is created by the mind can be more alive than the deadly actuality: ‘My dreams of flying as a bird among birds, of swimming as a fish among fish, were not dreams but the reality of which this house, this small town and its inhabitants were themselves the consequential dream.’

The Unlimited Dream Company has all the marks of being the musing of a solitary mind, but the reverie contains some memorable portraits of other human beings. Tending him after he crashes into the town, the young doctor Miriam St Cloud becomes Blake’s bride. Tough-minded and initially sceptical, she finds herself accepting that he has come back from the dead. The Reverend Wingate also comes to accept Blake’s messianic role, and hands over the local church to him. Then there is Stark, the owner of a rundown zoo, who becomes a disciple of Blake’s, then turns against him and kills him, only for Blake to rise – again? – from the dead.

An intriguing feature of the book is the constant presence of birds. In Hitchcock’s film birds are enemies of humankind, but for Blake they are his kin. Flitting around the edges of the human world and soaring above it, they evoke the freedom of spirit that comes when the normal sense of selfhood, with its anxieties and repressions, is forgotten and left behind. The companionship of birds features in a short story teasingly entitled ‘The autobiography of J. G. B.’, which appeared in the New Yorker a few weeks after Ballard died in April 2009 but was published originally in French in 1981 and then twice reprinted in an English version in British science-fiction magazines.