The writer JG Ballard, who died in 2009, is a tantalising subject for a biographer. His extraordinary childhood in prewar Shanghai, his family’s subsequent internment in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, and the death of his wife, Mary, at the age of 34, were formative events in the creation of his unique vision. The vivid and sometimes shocking images he witnessed in his early life would resurface repeatedly in his fiction.
Yet he always resisted approaches from those keen to tell his story, and at the end of his life produced a curiously flat memoir, Miracles of Life. The author of this new biography, Christopher Priest, apparently admired that work, while recognising that it represented “a carefully curated account … of a messier reality”. As he points out, it revealed nothing that was not already known. An unauthorised biography by John Baxter appeared two years after Ballard’s death, which, though it has been criticised by Ballard’s family for inaccuracies, remains a useful introduction to the life and work of one of the most interesting writers of the postwar period.
