Let us now praise J. G. Ballard

I just made one of the world's shortest movies. Fourteen seconds, one shot. It's called Flesh Frame, and it's a brief and oblique tribute to J. G. Ballard. Filmed on one of the earliest camera-phones, if it were any lower-fi, it would be a single blinking pixel.

I won't tell you anything else about the movie, because its only function is to evoke a mood (or, in English, give you a feeling). And nothing wrecks a mood-film like an explanation of what you tried to do and exactly how you did it.

I'll tell you a little about Ballard, though. (Some of you will know all this already: fair play to you. Go get an icecream and I'll see you later.)

J. G. Ballard is one of the few great British writers of the past century.

 You could also call him one of the most original and radical British visual artists of the past century. His "novels" are often a series of astonishing images, hypnotically encoded in words.

He spent much of his childhood interned (along with his parents) by the Imperial Japanese Army, in a Shanghai prisoner camp.

After Ballard's wife died (very suddenly and very young), he wrote much of his most extreme fiction in short bursts at the kitchen table, between sandwich-making and soccer practice, while bringing up three children. 

The resulting classic of modern headwrecker fiction, The Atrocity Exhibition, was pulped a week before publication by his American publisher, Doubleday, after the head of the firm finally read it. (Doubleday were also my American publisher, for Juno & Juliet, which they loved.  When Doubleday rejected my follow-up, Jude, with horror - they particularly hated Level 3 - I knew I'd finally achieved something really exceptional.)

Three years later he wrote Crash, a novel about sex and car crashes that is still sending ripples through the culture. (The shudders of orgasm? Or death?) Finally published in 1973, in print ever since, and about as influential as a novel can be, the initial reader's report to his UK publisher was "This author is beyond psychiatric help. DO NOT PUBLISH."

 He is now seventy seven, and his prostate cancer has spread to his ribs and spine. He will be dead soon, and I would recommend that you read some of his work immediately, so that you can thank him by postcard while he is still alive. (He doesn't really do email or computers.) J.G. Ballard, Shepperton, England would probably get through to him at this stage. (Or just write care of his publisher: J. G. Ballard, c/o Fourth Estate, HarperCollins Publishers, 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, London  W6 8JB, England).

If you don't know where to begin (I don't blame you, he's written a lot of stuff), I'll give you a quick guided tour of my favourites...

Feck it, I'll include links to Amazon while I'm at it, and if you buy one they'll slip me a shiny thruppenny bit. (Well, thirty or forty pence probably.)

A warning: Don't start with Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition, unless you're feeling well hard. They will do serious damage to your head. (Either you will throw the book across the room, or the book will throw you across the room.) Work up to them.(Yes, I know some of you ARE well hard. Fair enough, OK, go for it.)

A lovely place to start, if you're feeling at all delicate, would be with the short story collection Vermilion Sands, set in a desert resort full of cloud-sculptors and singing orchids. (One of his gentlest books, it is one of his own favourites.)

His most accessible and successful book was the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun, the story of an English boy's childhood in a Japanese prison camp. (Filmed later by Spielberg, yes. And, as with all Spielberg films, it would be a pretty good movie if you could remove the final 25 minutes of slush, in which Spielberg keeps trying to end it happily, against the grain of the story. Spielberg's strangely desperate attempts to end, to leave Ballard's dream without being changed by it, grow ever more conventional and sentimental, with each botched ending damaging the film more and more... it's fascinating to watch. As with Saving Private Ryan years later, Spielberg starts by telling us something true, and hard to bear, and then spends the rest of the film denying and rejecting that truth ever more hysterically, walling it off behind comforting clichés. Oooh, I could write a book...)

 The followup to Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women, is a dreamy, wildly sensual classic.

The Crystal World is one of his early disaster trilogy, full of Max Ernst imagery. Crocodiles and jungle plants slowly turn to crystal. The world is dying beautifully. A man sails upriver, upriver, into the heart of lightness.

From his urban collapse period, Concrete Island is Robinson Crusoe on a huge traffic island, surrounded by lane after lane after lane of roaring cars. A man crashes there, and can't get off the island. Or doesn't want to. And then he finds a footprint... (I pay comic tribute to this in Jude: Level 2, when Jude spends weeks walking to London up the middle of a motorway's central reservation.)

 The Unlimited Dream Company brings a dreamlike, William Blake, visionary end-of-the-world to the English suburbs. Banyan trees burst up through the pavement in front of the supermarket. People, after a difficult day at work, learn to fly, and are soon copulating with birds, high over Shepperton. Nobody seems to mind. (Anthony Burgess picked this as one of his Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939.)

And if you'd prefer something a little closer to  a thriller, or detective fiction, there's Cocaine Nights. A death in a gated community. When all darkness and danger have been pushed outside the gates... is life still liveable, inside, as the sunshine bounces off the white concrete?

Those are my pick of the novels, but his short stories are among the best ever written. There's the Complete Short Stories (too heavy to hold in hardback, but sensible broken up into two volumes in the paperback.)  The original collections... well they're all good (and mostly out of print), but I remember The Terminal Beach, in this edition, very fondly.

They'll hold you for now.

Seriously, pick one. Buy it. Read it. If you love it, tell him. He won't live forever.

A last warning: the reason J. G. Ballard doesn't sell like John Grisham is that Ballard's books knock you off balance and disturb you, annoy you. The language can be eerily flat. You can start to feel strange. Go with it. Get past it. It's worth it.

Good luck on your voyage.