Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2014 March 07 • Friday

The J. G. Ballard project continues. After purchasing the large volume of Ballard's complete stories, whose contents are in chronological order, I thought it might be fun to read the novels in chronological order at the same time, going back and forth between short and long works.

The Ballard reading is interrupted by reading several other books. I'd like to keep my sanity. Once the fiction is out of the way there's also a biography and a new collection of interviews to read.

The Unlimited Dream Company is the latest novel in our sequence.

The quality of the writing is extremely high with brilliant metaphors on almost every page. The book itself I found very difficult to get through, repetitive and not very rewarding as a novel.

It has a great first line: "In the first place, why did I steal the aircraft?".

It's hard for me to say what the book is about. The narrator steals an airplane and crashes it into the Thames in Shepperton. He either survives the crash or is resurrected or reborn or something after the crash. Once in Shepperton he becomes something of a god, healing people, absorbing nature's essence, transforming the suburb into a jungle paradise, granting the gift of flight to the inhabitants.

This kind of business goes on and on and is repeated over and over. The effect is like the prose equivalent of a gallery of surrealist paintings all of one period or on one subject. It's the most challenging of Ballard's books for me so far. I can't honestly say that I enjoyed it or understood it though there are things about it I admired.