The Shepperton that appears in these pages is that same Thames suburb more magically transmuted. But whereas Hello America is full of deadpan humour, the mood that pervades The Unlimited Dream Company is joyful and rhapsodic.Įarly this year when the floods hit Shepperton, where Ballard lived from 1960 until his death in 2009, the town became for a time like one of his disaster areas. Only Hello America (1981), where he pictures New York swathed in golden sand-dunes and Las Vegas as the jungle capital of an almost deserted country, is similar in style. With its short chapters, some only a page or two long, it reads at times like modernist verse. Where The Unlimited Dream Company differs from his other novels is in its strongly poetic quality. The exotic landscapes he conjures are often as important as the characters who inhabit them.
Surrealist painting is a pervasive influence in his work – more influential than that of any writer, he used to say – and he followed the surrealists in believing that the world could be remade by the human mind. The Unlimited Dream Company is a succession of images held together by a single landscape, a succession more brilliant and more hallucinatory than anything else in Ballard's fiction. Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe for the Guardian
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