Ballard / Super Cannes

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
So...

A lot of people here rave about Ballard, but the only book of his that I've read is Super Cannes, which I couldn't stand - is there other stuff that he's written that I'm more likely to like / that is acknowledged to be better?

Fwiw, my problem with Super Cannes is that it reads like a literary novelist trying to write a thriller with 'big ideas' in, and discovering that writing thrillers isn't as easy as you'd expect. It's very hard to suspend disbelief, the pacing's extremely dodgy, the sex and violence get a bit tedious after a while and he seems to underestimate the readers intelligence in a big way, in particular leaving us about two steps ahead of the central character most of the time. This last one is so blatant that I'm never quite sure whether it's actually intentional, but it comes to a head in the scene where the protagonist figures out that what he thought was an appointments list was in fact (drumroll) a hit list! This wouldn't have been a job for Sherlock Holmes on its own, but Ballard helps the reader by making it the dramatic climax of a chapter called 'The Hit List.' Gah.

So yeah, have I missed the point or is it actually not very good, and are there other, better novels to read? I think I've read some of his writing for the Grauniad review section and been impressed by it, so I'd hope so...
 

mike

Mild Horses
I also read parts of SC and couldnt tell if he was actually trying to write a serious thriller or just working reflexively in the genre, but i assumed the later. I havent read many of his other novels, but i could recommend War Fever, a perfect sampling of why he is such a great short-story writer. Check out the chapter on Ronald Reagan's bowl movements, unmatchable. Concrete island has also been described to me as one of his best.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
The only one I've read is Cocaine Nights and I hated that. I think that I would make some of the same criticisms as you, it seemed to be a novel with an Idea but I just couldn't buy into that idea with the end result that the whole thing left me totally unmoved. It also seemed very contrived in putting the ideas across which didn't exactly help. In short it was a bad thing badly done.
 

carlos

manos de piedra
his early-ish short stories are a good place to start, at least they are my favorites of all his writings- i have this one- which came out in 1978- and is a really great selection, from "normal" sci fi to "why i want to fuck ronald reagan"

bestshortstories250.jpg
 

luka

Well-known member
concrete island and high rise are the two best ones i've read. if you want to sound hip you say you're favourite is the atrocity exhibition. i also like the early ones, drowned world etc
 

shykitten

peek-a-boo
Fwiw, my problem with Super Cannes is that it reads like a literary novelist trying to write a thriller with 'big ideas' in, and discovering that writing thrillers isn't as easy as you'd expect.

or it's like Ballard 'doing' a thriller, taking on its format and 'Ballardizing' it. i think Ballard (and his readers?) is more interested in messing about with the psychological topography of the thriller i.e. a detective/narrator as a sort of unreliable psychoanalyst, or the detective discovering he himself is also the criminal. i haven't read many 'straight' thrillers, but Super Cannes and Cocaine Nights seem to me like simulations of thrillers. the inevitability is part of that. don't expect a surprise ending in any Ballard story.

the sex and violence get a bit tedious after a while

well part of the premise of the novel is that for the hyper-mediated gated consciousness sex and violence have become boring... so the relentless, desensitizing aspect of it is part of the experience (see also Crash).

It's very hard to suspend disbelief

as before (sort of), there is a dream-like element to Ballard's work which means (for me anyway) i end up kind of suspending my belief rather than my disbelief... we live inside a novel, the real world as a film set etc., the usual Ballardian stuff. his writing is more like a series of surrealist paintings or tableaux which make supposedly familiar scenes (the interior of a car, an office, a group of people) seem alien. or something.

the pacing's extremely dodgy

i would go along with this actually for Cocaine Nights and Super Cannes (both quite long for Ballard texts). as above, as Ballard is a sort of painter with words, narrative is always a bit of an inconvenience, as is character, all the traditional literary stuff. but this is less of a problem, indeed more of an advantage, in the more condensed work (such as The Atrocity Exhibition and the short stories) than in works which try to appropriate a conventional narrative structure.

is there other stuff that he's written that I'm more likely to like / that is acknowledged to be better?

depends what you are interested in really... The Drowned World is Conrad-style SF, full of aqueous description... Atrocity Exhibition and Crash are the most exciting for me in terms of capturing a particular era, with Crash expanding AE's ideas to the point of (literal) exhaustion... High Rise is a sharper precursor to Super Cannes, the vertical to Crash's horizontal... Empre of The Sun is a good novel for decoding Ballardian themes historically, explicitly showing how his fiction is post-nuclear, based around ambivalent 'gated' spaces etc.

sorry to witter on but you just touched on one of my obsessions ;)
 
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owen

Well-known member
luka said:
concrete island and high rise are the two best ones i've read. if you want to sound hip you say you're favourite is the atrocity exhibition. i also like the early ones, drowned world etc

yes, i was going to say atrocity exhibition. with crash second and high rise third.

an excellent late ballard is the kindness of women...am actually very keen on super-cannes so will defend it sometime when not hungover
 

Loki

Well-known member
shykitten said:
Super Cannes and Cocaine Nights seem to me like simulations of thrillers. the inevitability is part of that. don't expect a surprise ending in any Ballard story.

Absolutely. There's a dreamlike dryness to Ballard's novels in which you get the sense that everyone (the characters included) know the end-point of the story at the very beginning - he's a Freudian at heart (demonstrated better in his short stories, where he was the freedom to delve - War Fever and Myths of the Near Future are good places to start) and the reader is just ahead of the characters because we are mapping the sometimes painfully slow transition from a glimmer of understanding to a full blown acknowledgement of inevitable truth... they begin in the preconscious, become conscious and end up re-integrated into the ego again.

to read them as thrillers is to start crowing because you reckon the famous one did it in Columbo.

To get the whole 'gated community' thing in an easy tablet I'd recommend Running Wild - compulsive and very short, easily read in a sitting and very satisfying. High Rise and Concrete Island are great for Ballard on city life and The Unlimited Dream Company ties in with many of the stories in Myths of the Near Future.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
Super C is one of his later books and I tend to not like them as much as the earlier ones born of a strange feverish imagination... I second the short stories, they represent truly unique visions... the kind of tales that resonate deeply with the times, but are also often prophetic in a profound sense.

the great stories about geological time shifts... vertical cities in which you ride elevators up and down like trains...

and then there's the psychological studies of minds gone horribly wrong... the isolation induced self reflectiveness and obsessiveness in many of the characters foreshadow the widespread diagnosis we are now beginning to see, the emerging of THE 21st century disorder (much like Schizophrenia was THE disorder of the 20th century) - Autism.

his methods are often as fascinating as the results... he sometimes would take a piece of found information, and trace back, detective style, forensic style, to the bizarre trail which preceded it... the sort of thing I cannot stop thinking about after reading.

much more than a good writer (which actually he may or may not be), I place him among the most important imaginations of late 20th century.
 

Buick6

too punk to drunk
Ballard's prolly my favourite writer. I really dug Super Cannes, the setting, the IT millionaire, the violence/power fetishists.

My fave's inlcude HIGH RISE, CRASH, CONCRETE ISLAND and SUPERCANNES.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Loki said:
Absolutely. There's a dreamlike dryness to Ballard's novels in which you get the sense that everyone (the characters included) know the end-point of the story at the very beginning - he's a Freudian at heart (demonstrated better in his short stories, where he was the freedom to delve - War Fever and Myths of the Near Future are good places to start) and the reader is just ahead of the characters because we are mapping the sometimes painfully slow transition from a glimmer of understanding to a full blown acknowledgement of inevitable truth... they begin in the preconscious, become conscious and end up re-integrated into the ego again.

to read them as thrillers is to start crowing because you reckon the famous one did it in Columbo.
So basically you're saying that it's a deliberately slow and frustrating read? Okay, I'd had half a suspicion that that might be the case. But I rather suspect that I'd enjoy that sort of technique more done over the course of a short story rather than a novel... I'll keep my eyes open for the short stories.

Btw, I wouldn't consider the inevitability of the ending to be a bad thing per se, but Super Cannes seemed (to me) to be more predictable than inevitable, if that makes any sense.
 

SIZZLE

gasoline for haters
Definitely co-sign on the 'Urban Disaster Trilogy' Crash, Concrete Island, High Rise.

But it's true, looking for suspense and surprises in Ballard is a bit of a lost cause. %50 of his books (including all 3 above) follow the same trajectory:

Strange Normalcy - Ruptured by an event - Protagonist begins doing insane things which seem to make sense - Descent into swirling madness, often accompanied by the surrounding environment

It's basically some kind of an insanity field trip, the goal being to show us normal people how easy it is to slip off the rails, keep us nodding along as the protagonist does increasingly insane things until we get to the last stage and he throws something really wild and repugnant in our face and we are forced to say, no wait, this is totally insane.

I read everything of his I could when I was 15-16, I think like certain other authors this is the age when this stuff will seem profound.

But Empire of the Sun and Kindness of Women (basically his autobiography in two parts) hold up very well.

And yes, the short stories are likely the best for sheer volume of crazy ideas. That city that covered the earth one was very memorable as well. Sort of saw echos of it in Wong Kar Wai's 2046 now that I think of it.
 

shykitten

peek-a-boo
Just resurrecting this thread as i am re-reading The Trial at the moment and thought perhaps what separates Ballard's recent novels from more conventional thrillers is that they are sort of Kafka-esque detective fiction. The 'investigator' is implicated from the start, and can never get to the 'bottom' of the story as it is somehow bottomless, it goes beyond rational explanation and is instead somehow located internally, as an absurd representation of the protagonist's own guilt and anxieites... the other characters seem like pieces in a game always being moved around by some unseen force trying to trap or tease the narrator, and this force turns out to be part of, or at least in unconscious collusion with, the narrator himself, etc...

I really like Owen's writing and was hoping he would return to Super-Cannes as promised and give his interpretation of it...

By the way the next JGB novel is almost here and sounds like fun from the Amazon blurb...
 

swears

preppy-kei
Yeah, just reading this at the moment.
On a sort of "the rich are all really perverts" kinda tip.
I'm liking it so far.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
All I've read of Ballard is 'Cocaine Nights' and the early one in which the children in a gated community turn killers (name?). I found his ideas kinda obvious (possible they were novel at the time and prescient in retrospect, i s'pose), and that he was somewhat too convinced of his own profundity (or seemed so).
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Well, I read Crash yesterday, and was much more impressed by it. It seemed to cover similar ground to Super Cannes while not doing any of the things that Super Cannes did to annoy me - the progress through the book (I suspect plot might be the wrong word in some way) has a sense of inevitability, maybe even predictability, but not in such a way that you get bored watching stuff that you knew was going to happen happen.

The 'suspension of disbelief' thing seems to be handled a lot better - I think I see Shykitten's point about the conventional idea of suspension of disbelief not really applying to Ballard, but something about Crash just made it seem more engaging (or something).

The relentless weird sex also felt a bit more natural and organic[1] like he was exploring an idea, and a bit less like he was dipping at random into the big book of weird sex and violence to find something else shocking to throw at you.[2]

So yeah, if that was a bit unclear - I really liked Crash. I'll continue keeping an eye out for other stuff.

[1] in the sense of how it fits in the story - neither 'natural' nor 'organic' really apply to the sex itself...

[2] cf Bill Drummond - "Brett Easton Ellis documents every form of misogynistic sadism possible in American Psycho as an allegory to the state of his nation, and not once does he record that his nose needed picking or the satisfaction to be gained from such a small pleasure."
 
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version

Well-known member
I've just seen Cronenberg's son - the one who did Possessor - is adapting this into a series.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
I haven't reread it since, but I still don't like Super Cannes. I don't think it does anything that Cocaine Nights doesn't do better, and does very little that High Rise doesn't do much better.
 
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