The Unlimited Dream Company

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 ‘Rejected would-be mercenary pilot, failed Jesuit novice, unpublished writer of pornography … yet for all these failures I had a tenacious faith in myself, a messiah as yet without a message who would one day assemble a unique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

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The Coming of the Helicopters (#ucd1446f7-77ea-5266-b90b-d3d8c542515a)

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.

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I Steal the Aircraft (#ucd1446f7-77ea-5266-b90b-d3d8c542515a)

Dreams of flight haunted that past year.

Throughout the summer I had worked as an aircraft cleaner at London Airport. In spite of the incessant noise and the millions of tourists moving in and out of the terminal buildings I was completely alone. Surrounded by parked airliners, I walked down the empty aisles with my vacuum-cleaner, sweeping away the debris of journeys, the litter of uneaten meals, of unused tranquillizers and contraceptives, memories of arrivals and departures that reminded me of all my own failures to get anywhere.

Already, at the age of twenty-five, I knew that the past ten years of my life had been an avalanche zone. Whatever new course I set myself, however carefully I tried to follow a fresh compass bearing, I flew straight into the nearest brick wall. For some reason I felt that, even in being myself, I was acting a part to which someone else should have been assigned. Only my compulsive role-playing, above all dressing up as a pilot in the white flying suit I found in one of the lockers, touched the corners of some kind of invisible reality.

At seventeen I had been expelled from the last of half a dozen schools. I had always been aggressive and lazy, inclined to regard the adult world as a boring conspiracy of which I wanted no part. As a small child I had been injured in the car crash that killed my mother, and my left shoulder developed a slight upward tilt that I soon exaggerated into a combative swagger. My school-friends liked to mimic me, but I ignored them. I thought of myself as a new species of winged man. I remembered Baudelaire’s albatross, hooted at by the crowd, but unable to walk only because of his heavy wings.

Everything touched off my imagination in strange ways. The school science library, thanks to an over-enlightened biology master, was a cornucopia of deviant possibilities. In a dictionary of anthropology I discovered a curious but touching fertility rite, in which the aboriginal tribesmen dug a hole in the desert and took turns to copulate with the earth. Powerfully moved by this image, I wandered around in a daze, and one midnight tried to have an orgasm with the school’s most cherished cricket pitch. In a glare of torch-beams I was found drunk on the violated turf, surrounded by beer bottles. Strangely enough, the attempt seemed far less bizarre to me than it did to my appalled headmaster.

Expulsion hardly affected me. Since early adolescence I had been certain that one day I would achieve something extraordinary, astonish even myself. I knew the power of my own dreams. Since my mother’s death I had been brought up partly by her sister in Toronto and the rest of the time by my father, a successful eye surgeon preoccupied with his practice who never seemed properly to recognize me. In fact, I had spent so much time on transatlantic jets that my only formal education had come from in-flight movies.

After a year at London University I was thrown out of the medical school – while dissecting a thorax in the anatomy laboratory one afternoon I suddenly became convinced that the cadaver was still alive. I terrorized a weak fellow student into helping me to frogmarch the corpse up and down the laboratory in an attempt to revive it. I am still half-certain that we would have succeeded.

Disowned by my father – I had never been close to him and often fantasized that my real father was one of the early American astronauts, and that I had been conceived by semen ripened in outer space, a messianic figure born into my mother’s womb from a pregnant universe – I began an erratic and increasingly steep slalom. Rejected would-be mercenary pilot, failed Jesuit novice, unpublished writer of pornography (I spent many excited weekends dialling deserted offices all over London and dictating extraordinary sexual fantasies into their answering machines, to be typed out for amazed executives by the unsuspecting secretaries) – 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.

For six months I worked in the aviary at London Zoo. The birds drove me mad with their incessant cheeping and chittering, but I learned a great deal from them, and my obsession with man-powered flight began at this point. Once I was arrested by the police for being over-boisterous in the children’s playground near the zoo where I spent much of my spare time. For five minutes one rainy afternoon I was gripped by a Pied Piper complex, and genuinely believed that I could lead the twenty children and their startled mothers, the few passing dogs and even the dripping flowers away to a paradise which was literally, if I could only find it, no more than a few hundred yards from us.

Outside the courthouse, where I had been discharged by a sympathetic magistrate, I was befriended by a retired air hostess who now worked as a barmaid at a London Airport hotel and had just been convicted of soliciting at the West London Air Terminal. She was a spirited and likeable girl with a fund of strange stories about the sexual activities at international airports. Carried away by these visions, I immediately proposed to her and moved into the apartment she rented near Heathrow. At this time I was obsessed with the idea of building a man-powered aircraft. Already I was planning the world’s first circumnavigation, and saw myself as the Lindbergh and Saint-Exupéry of man-powered flight. I began to visit the airport each day, watching the airliners and the thousands of passengers taking off into the sky. I envied them, their profoundly ordinary lives crossed by this incredible dream of flight.

Flying dreams haunted me more and more. After a few weeks spent on the observation decks I found a job as an aircraft cleaner. On the southern side of London Airport was a section reserved for light aircraft. I spent all my free time in the parking hangars, sitting at the controls of these wind-weary but elegant machines, complex symbols that turned all sorts of keys in my mind. One day, accepting the logic of my dreams, I decided to take off myself.

So began my real life.

Whatever my motives at the time, however, an event that morning had profoundly unsettled me. While watching my fiancée dressing in the bedroom, I felt a sudden need to embrace her. Her uniform was decorated with flying motifs, and I always enjoyed the way she put on this grotesque costume. But as I held her shoulders against my chest I knew that I was not moved by any affection for her but by the need literally to crush her out of existence. I remember the bedside lamp falling to the floor at our feet, knocked down by her flailing arm. As she struck my face with her hard fists I stood by the bed, choking her against my chest. Only when she collapsed around my knees did I realize that I had been about to kill her, but without the slightest hate or anger.

Later, as I sat in the cockpit of the Cessna, excited by the engine as it coughed and thundered into life, I knew that I had meant no harm to her. But at the same time I remembered the dumb fear in her face as she sat on the floor, and I was certain that she would go to the police. Narrowly missing a stationary airliner, I took off on one of the parking runways. I had watched the mechanics start the engines and often badgered them to let me sit beside them as they taxied around the hangars. Several of them were qualified pilots and told me all I needed to know about the flight controls and engine settings. Strangely, now that I was actually airborne, crossing the car-parks, plastics factories and reservoirs that surrounded the airport, I had no idea what course to set. Even then I realized that I would soon be caught and charged with stealing the Cessna after attempting to murder my fiancée.

Forgetting to raise the flaps, I was unable to climb higher than 500 feet, but the idea of low-flying aircraft had always excited me. About five miles south of the airport the engine began to overheat. Within seconds it caught fire and filled the cabin with burning smoke. Below me was a placid riverside town, its tree-lined suburban streets and shopping centre tucked into a wide bend of the river. There were film studios, technicians on a lawn by their cameras. A dozen antique biplanes were drawn up by the canvas mock-up of a camouflaged hangar, and actors in World War I leather flying gear raised their goggles to stare up at me as I soared past, trailing an immense plume of smoke. A man standing on a platform above a metal tower waved his megaphone at me, as if trying to incorporate me into his film.

By now the burning oil that filled the cabin was scorching my face and hands. I decided to put the aircraft down into the river – rather than be burned alive I would drown. Half a mile ahead, beyond tennis courts and a park ringed by dead elms, a large Tudor mansion stood above a sloping lawn that ran down to the water.

As the aircraft crossed the park my shoes were on fire. Vaporizing glycol raced up the funnels of my trousers, scalding my legs and about to boil my testicles. The treetops rushed by on either side. The undercarriage splintered the brittle upper branches of the dead elms, and a cloud of starlings erupted from the trees like shrapnel from a shell. The control column struck itself from my hands. At the last moment I shouted at the river as it rose towards me. Falling apart in the air, its tail impaled by the branches, the aircraft plunged into the water. Spray and steam exploded through the fuselage, the hot pellets striking my face. Hurled forwards against the harness, I felt my head strike the cabin door, but without any sense of pain, as if my body belonged to a passenger.

However, I was certain that I never lost consciousness. Immediately the aircraft began to sink. As I tried to release the harness, struggling with the unfamiliar buckle, a seething black water filled the cabin and swirled in a greedy way around my waist. I knew that within a few seconds I would be drowned.

At this point I saw a vision.

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