The Illuminated Man by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan review: 'a remarkable document'
Although saturated in loss and marbled with death, this biography of JG Ballard is life writing in every sense, writes Stuart Kelly
There is something about literary biography – by which I mean biographies of literary figures rather than a biography that uses literary techniques – that is peculiarly pliant to innovation and experiment. We will always have the triple-decker cradle to grave, but since, perhaps, AJA Symon’s The Quest for Corvo, there has been a pronounced strain of esoteric biographies. I am thinking of works such as Jonathan Coe’s Like A Fiery Elephant, about BS Johnson, Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman about Sylvia Plath (or the difficulties of writing her biography) or even Roger Lewis’s Anthony Burgess – I can’t think of a work that exudes such thorough-going loathing for its subject. In this pantheon I think there is an especial place for The Illuminated Man.
The subtitle of the book is Life, Death and the Worlds of JG Ballard. Its origin is that the novelist Christopher Priest (Fugue for a Darkening Island, The Glamour, The Prestige and others) was writing the biography of Ballard, to my mind one of the most significant and serious novelists of our times. In and of itself such an endeavour is pre-fraught with difficulties, as Ballard had written autobiographically himself – notably and novelistically in Empire of the Sun, about his childhood internment at the hands of the Japanese army, but also – a book which in some ways problematises the former – Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton. Priest became ill while working on the book, though had written substantial amounts: he died in 2024, from the same kind of cancer as had killed Ballard in 2009. Thereafter Priest’s widow, the novelist Nina Allan (The Dollmaker, Conquest, A Granite Silence) took up the task.
It would be inaccurate to say that she completed it. It becomes a different kind of book. Allan recollects that “when Chris was first diagnosed with cancer, his agent and I tried to persuade him that this book should take on a more personal aspect… Chris seemed enthused by the idea; the more time passed, the less he seemed able to contemplate writing about himself”. Although she provides the narrative sections that Priest was unable to, she also gives the subjective and personal touch that he felt unable to contribute. There is no attempt to homogenise the book: the stitches, gloriously, are evident, like the gold tracings in Japanese kintsugi. What emerges is a remarkable document, a series of homages of authors to each other, written with intense insight and abundant care. Yeats posited that “the intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work” and the glory of this book is to embrace the imperfection of both.
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One thing that must be highly commended is the critical readings of Ballard’s works. Priest and Allan adeptly convey the unheimlich nature of the Ballardverse, and are alert to the symbols – the empty swimming pools, the polished surfaces – that are immediately recognisable as Ballardian. Perhaps slightly more could have been done in terms of his formal experimentation in the short stories – stories as an index or as answers to questions we do not see. In a sense, any biography would have to delve deep into the work. On his return to England, and after the death of his wife Mary at the age of 30, the notion of the “Hermit of Shepperton” is not wholly ungrounded in reality. Ballard himself, in terms of science fiction, referred to “inner space” as his subject, rather than outer space, and his life in some ways conformed to that. Iain Sinclair makes a distinction between writers who are peds and those who are pods – rambling psychogeographers like himself, with Ballard as his exemplar of the fixed author, quarrying themselves. (Ballard appeared in the film of Sinclair’s London Orbital: normally retiring and slightly fuddy sartorially, Sinclair has him in a dramatic cape and trilby, like a suburban Phantom of the Opera).
That the oeuvre is significant should be indisputable. Although works like The Atrocity Exhibition and, notoriously, Crash, retain their shock, Allan and Priest make a fine case for the last quartet of bourgeois terrorism. I was slightly surprised not to see this quote – “Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes” – from The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) but wholly applicable to the later works (1996-2006). Priest and Allan do not attempt to psychoanalyse Ballard: Ballard, like Will Self, perhaps his most dazzling protégé, seems to think of psychoanalysis as a form of trauma, even torture.
I learned a great deal from this book – I had no idea about Ballard’s relationships with the writers Pamela Zoline (who is criminally underappreciated) and Emma Tennant (again, a writer well overdue reconsideration). There are mordant moments, such as one writer – the anecdote is unsure – saying “Oh Ballard’s going to love this” when the news came through of the death of Princess Diana. But as much as a learned, I felt. It is a book saturated in loss, but also in how one deals with loss. Although marbled with death, this is, literally, life writing.
The Illuminated Man by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan, Bloomsbury, £22
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