nixsight

I’ve been very lax this week, and haven’t actually fully read anything.

However, I did start reading something – “Millennium People” by J.G Ballard. I also bought a book that I used to own called “The Sparrow” by Maria Doria Russell, because somewhere down the line, my copy has gone missing, and I want Girl One to read it.

So far, “Millennium People” is fairly typical of my previous Ballard reading experiences, which is to say a curiosity, and a great examination of craft, but ultimately a hollow experience.

That said, I’ve only ever read one of his books before -  the controversial “Crash” – so I’m hardly an authority.

At the moment this book is intriguing enough, but there’s a level at which I require a human interaction from my reading, and Ballard is failing to deliver it, although the narrator here is much more involving than any of the characters in that novel.

But then, I think the reason Ballard is so well respected is that his fans find his writing insightful and full of ideas. And so far, the ideas have very much been all there in the prose.

The concept is this – There has been some sort of aggressive revolt by the bored Middle Classes in England, which has, at the opening of the book, already culminated in rioting and police intervention. Our narrator is somehow tied into all of this, and we are quickly thrown into flashback as a terrorist explosion at Heathrow kills his ex-wife, and he resolves to find out who was behind it.

This is all an interesting enough beginning to the book, and Ballard’s premise – that the Middle Class are on the verge of some kind of aimless uprising – one that even he seems to find amusing in his assertions, over and over, that the riot at the book’s start is a very polite and urbane one.

I already know that I’ll finish the book, but I’m feeling a little ambivalent about it at the moment. It just feels as if Ballard has had a part misanthropic, part satirical flight of fancy about the state-of-play in England today – one that it’d be easy enough to embark on if you chose to ignore how ultimately fucked up and ambivalent every class in England is right now – and really run with it. Thus far, his characters are all a function of those ideas, and have little depth beyond them – and he instead creates the illusion of depth that I remember from “Crash”, wherein those characters are handled in such a clinical and dissaffected way as to seem mysterious, and consequently more layered.

The key flaw to “Crash” was that, if you were sharp enough to quickly get – or tuned in enough to have already had – the two or three “wild” ideas that Ballard was clearly preoccupied with at the time, or didn’t find the book controversial for some other reason – say that you were already an amputee fetishist or something – there wasn’t much else there for you, because the whole book was balanced on those two points. My concern with “Millennium People” is that I’m already over, and in fact well past, the supposedly insightful and prescient concepts at the book’s heart, and that the writer may have been so impressed with those ideas that he may not have given me much else to enjoy before the book is over.

“The Sparrow”, on the other hand, I’m looking forward to re-reading once Girl One has had a crack at it.

As it is, I’m driving her a little barmy pushing her on with her current book so that she can get onto this one.

Reading “The Sparrow” for the first time was a polar-opposite experience to reading “Crash”, or what I have read so far of “Millennium People”. Doria Russell takes the quite fantastic idea of a contemporary Jesuit funded mission into space, and grounds it so solidly in authentic science and believable exploration of – and conflict between – ideology and emotions that it is impossible not to be moved by the book, or the potentially redundant but still stunning sequel, “Children Of God”.

Though the genre that this story most superficially sits in is science fiction, and many of the well-drawn characters have belief systems and lifestyles a million miles from my own, they seem less cold and alien, and more human, than any of Ballard’s automatons.

Doria Russell doesn’t, if memory serves, use melodrama or cheap tricks to find this connection, though. The book is so well crafted that the reader finds their way to a multitude of feelings quite by themselves, through unflinching insights into the characters lives, and excellently crafted sequences of events that are never without real consequences, and never feel contrived.

Of course, now I realise I’m setting myself up for a fall when I re-read it later in the year!