The Unlimited Dream Company
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Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London W6 8JB 4thestate.co.uk
This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1979
Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1979
The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
Introduction copyright © John Gray 2014
Interview copyright © Vanora Bennett 2004
‘Fly Away’ by Malcolm Bradbury reproduced with permission of Curtis
Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of the Estate of Malcolm Bradbury copyright
© Malcolm Bradbury 1979
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Cover by Stanley Donwood.
Photography by Peter Stone.
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007374885
Version: 2014-09-25
Praise
From the reviews of The Unlimited Dream Company:
‘A remarkable piece of invention, a flight from the world of the familiar and the real into the exotic universe of dream and desire … dense and erotic and magical, a pleasure to read’
MALCOLM BRADBURY, New York Times Book Review
‘A remarkable fantasist … rich, seductive … Ballard’s eloquence is as lush as the flowering vines he hangs from his multi-storey garages’
Observer
‘I was completely beguiled … Worked out with Ballard’s mastery, it is the most cunning evocation of a dream world’
Daily Telegraph
‘The idea is blindingly original and yet as basic as a dream of the whole human race. Moving, thrilling, exquisitely written’
ANTHONY BURGESS
‘Ballard is one of the few genuine surrealists in business … At its most heightened, Ballard’s prose is an impacted mass of images, dense and iridescent as mercury, stranger, you might say, than fiction’
Guardian
‘An extraordinary and touching piece of surrealism … [a] strange and beautiful extravaganza’
Glasgow Herald
‘Extraordinary … there is no doubt of the intensity and originality of the imagination that conceived the scenes of Shepperton transformed into a paradise … far beyond the scope of most novelists’
Spectator
‘One of the most startling and original novelists. Extremely witty, Ballard’s most optimistic book contains some of his strongest, most vivid prose … exuberant fantasy’
Time Out
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
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
Introduction
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.
The story describes the protagonist ‘B’ waking up to find Shepperton devoid of human beings. Driving to London he finds the city equally deserted, with not even a cat or dog in the streets. It is only when he reaches London Zoo that he finds sentient life – birds trapped in their cages, which seem ‘delighted to see him’ but fly off as soon as he frees them. The story ends with B making his way back to Shepperton where he settles contentedly into his new life, quickly forgetting his former human neighbours. His only visitors are the birds, and soon Shepperton turns into ‘an extraordinary aviary’. The closing sentence of the story reads: ‘Thus the year ended peacefully, and B was ready to begin his true work.’
As anyone who knew him can confirm, Ballard was a warm and convivial man who enjoyed deep and enduring human relationships. Though he presented himself to the press as reclusive, this was mostly a performance. But a part of him prized solitude. He resisted the idea that social interaction is always the most important part of life, and this impulse found expression in his work.
In welcoming the dissolution of his socially conditioned personality, Blake is like many of Ballard’s protagonists. The Unlimited Dream Company was published in 1979, but in what he regarded as his first novel, The Drowned World, the central character pursued a similar quest. Working his way into the sweltering depths of the jungle that has covered Britain, he leaves a final message he knows no one will ever read: ‘Have rested and am moving south. All is well.’ A few days later, he is ‘completely lost, following the lagoons southward through the increasing rain and heat, attacked by alligators and giant bats, a second Adam searching for the forgotten paradises of the reborn sun’.
In the course of his life Ballard creatively deployed a remarkably wide range of different styles and genres, but nearly all of his novels and most of his short stories seem to me to explore a single theme. Whether the subject is an apocalyptic shift in the environment as in The Drowned World (1962) and The Drought (1964), mental breakdown and transgressive sex in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and Crash (1973), urban collapse in Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975), the therapeutic functions of crime in Cocaine Nights (1996) and Super-Cannes (2000) or the black comedy of Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006), Ballard is showing how the personal identity we construct for ourselves is a makeshift, which comes apart when the stability of society can no longer be taken for granted. Empire of the Sun (1984) – the autobiographical novel that Spielberg brought to a wider audience – explores the same theme: it is in extreme situations where our habit-formed identities break down that we learn what it really means to be human. A drastic shift in the familiar scene may be the entry-point to a world that is closer to our true nature.
The paradox that is pursued throughout Ballard’s work is that the surreal worlds created by the unrestrained human imagination may be more real than everyday human life. According to William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.’ The dishevelled pilot who appears at the start of this book wants to escape the cavern completely. Blake’s Shepperton is the world as it could be if the doors of perception were ripped from their hinges. The world Blake sees is shaped by unfettered human desire, a creation of the imagination in which the imperatives of society and morality count for nothing.
For Ballard himself these surreal landscapes may have had a healing function. His traumatic childhood left him with the conviction – fully corroborated by events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – that order in society has no more substance or solidity than a rackety stage set. Together with the scenes of cruelty he witnessed after he left the camp where he had been interned with his parents, the spectacle of desolation in the empty city of Shanghai must have left deep scars.
Ballard spent twenty years forgetting what he had seen during his childhood years, he said more than once, and another twenty remembering. His fiction was a product of this process, an inner alchemy that turned the dross of senseless suffering into something beautiful and life-affirming. Nowhere is the result more compelling than in The Unlimited Dream Company.
London, 2014
1
The Coming of the Helicopters
In the first place, why did I steal the aircraft?
If I had known that only ten minutes after taking off from London Airport the burning machine was to crash into the Thames, would I still have climbed into its cockpit? Perhaps even then I had a confused premonition of the strange events that would take place in the hours following my rescue.
As I stand here in the centre of this deserted riverside town I can see my tattered flying suit reflected in the windows of a nearby supermarket, and clearly remember when I entered that unguarded hangar at the airport. Seven days ago my mind was as cool and stressed as the steel roof above my head. While I strapped myself into the pilot’s seat I knew that a lifetime’s failures and false starts were at last giving way to the simplest and most mysterious of all actions – flight!
Above the film studios helicopters are circling. Soon the police will land on this empty shopping mall, no doubt keen to question me about the disappearance of Shepperton’s entire population. I only wish that I could see their surprise when they discover the remarkable way in which I have transformed this peaceful town.
Unsettled by the helicopters, the birds are rising into the air, and I know that it is time for me to leave. Thousands of them surround me, from every corner of the globe, flamingos and frigate-birds, falcons and deep-water albatross, as if sprung from the cages of a well-stocked zoo. They perch on the portico of the filling-station, jostle for a place on the warm roofs of the abandoned cars. When I lean against a pillar-box, trying to straighten my ragged flying suit, the harpy 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. The barbarous plumage of cockatoos, macaws and scarlet ibis covers the shopping mall, a living train that I would like to fasten around my waist. During the past few minutes, as I made sure that none of my neighbours had been left behind, the centre of Shepperton has become a spectacular aviary, a huge aerial reserve ruled by the condors.
Only the condors will remain with me to the end. Two of these great vultures are watching me now from the concrete roof of the car-park. Fungus stains the tips of their wings, and the pus of decaying flesh glints between their talons, carrion gold shining in the claws of restless money-changers. Like all the birds, they give the impression that they might attack me at any moment, excited by the helicopters and the barely healed wound on my chest.
Despite these suburban pleasantries, I wish that I could stay longer here and come to terms with everything that has happened to me, and the consequences for us all that extend far beyond the boundaries of this small town fifteen miles to the west of London. Around me the streets are silent in the afternoon light. Toys lie by the garden gates, dropped in mid-game by the children when they ran away an hour ago, and one of my neighbours has forgotten to turn off his lawn sprinkler. It rotates tirelessly, casting a succession of immaculate rainbows over the ornamental pond at the foot of the garden, as if hoping to lasso a spectral fish from its deeps.
‘Mrs St Cloud …! Father Wingate …!’ I miss them already, the widow who tried to finance my flying school, and the priest who found my bones in the river-bed.
‘Miriam …! Dr Miriam …!’ The young doctor who revived me when I had almost drowned.
All have left me now. Beckoning the birds to follow me, I set off across the shopping mall. On a beach by the river is a hiding place where I can wait until the helicopters have gone. For the last time I look 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.
The helicopters are nearer now, clattering up and down the deserted streets by the film studios. The crews peer through their binoculars at the empty houses. But although the townspeople have left, I can still feel their presence within my body. In the window of the appliance store I see my skin glow like an archangel’s, lit by the dreams of these housewives and secretaries, film actors and bank cashiers as they sleep within me, safe in the dormitories of my bones.
At the entrance to the park are the memorials which they built to me before they embarked on their last flight. With good-humoured irony, they constructed these shrines from miniature pyramids of dishwashers and television sets, kiosks of record players ornamented with sunflowers, gourds and nectarines, the most fitting materials these suburbanites could find to celebrate their affection for me. Each of these arbours contains a fragment of my flying suit or a small section of the aircraft, a memento of our flights together in the skies above Shepperton, and of that man-powered flying machine I dreamed all my life of building and which they helped me to construct.
One of the helicopters is close behind me, making a tentative circuit of the town centre. Already the pilot and navigator have seen my skin glowing through the trees. But for all their concern, they might as well abandon their machine in mid-air. Soon there will be too many deserted towns for them to count. Along the Thames valley, all over Europe and the Americas, spreading outwards across Asia and Africa, ten thousand similar suburbs will empty as people gather to make their first man-powered flights.
I know now that these quiet, tree-lined roads are runways, waiting for us all to take off for those skies I sought seven days ago when I flew my light aircraft into the air-space of this small town by the Thames, into which I plunged and where I escaped both my death and my life.