Ben Wheatley's High Rise

My buddy Scott told me today that my favourite director is making a film of a book by my favourite author. This has got me pretty excited. My favourite director at the moment is Ben Wheatley who is one of the best British directors of his generation. He's made 4 films, 2 of which are utterly brilliant and the other 2 aren't bad. The brilliant ones are Kill List and Sightseers. 
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My favourite author, of course, is JG Ballard who also just happens to be the greatest English novelist since WW2. A surrealist satiric poet often pigeon holed as a science fiction author, Ballard's reputation has only grown since his death five years ago. When you read Graham Greene or Kingsley Amis or Ballard's other contemporaries these days their novels feel like period pieces whereas Ballard somehow is as fresh and exciting as ever. That's a clue that he's the real deal. 
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The great Ballard period was 1972 - 1979 when he produced award winning collections of short stories and a run of novels, all of which became classics: Crash, Concrete Island, High Rise and The Unlimited Dream Company. Ben Wheatley is making a film out of High Rise and if he's allowed a good budget it could be one of the great British films of this decade. A great film like Sightseers or Fish Tank I mean not tourist board rubbish like the Kings Speech. High Rise is the story of a group of people who live in a high rise apartment building that gradually descends into civil war between floors while the inhabitants at least initially continue to commute to their day jobs in the city of London. Its a classic Ballard conceit carried out with all the iron logic you'd expect from a master surrealist with a sense of humour, qualities Wheatley has in abundance too. Please don't let me down Ben.    

Mais, Il Est Le Plus Populaire de L'autre Côté de La Sheugh

JG Ballard has always been more respected in France than in England (or America) where - until very recently - he was still considered to be a minor science fiction writer. Fortunately that is now changing and when the news slipped out last autumn that Ballard had terminal cancer a serious reappraisal began of Ballard's life and work. I finished Ballard's final book The Miracles of Life in the wee hours of this morning. It's an episodic autobiography which fills in the details he left out of his biographical novels Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women. Miracles of Life of course talks about his time in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Shanghai, but also about his early struggles with his sanity, the death of his young wife, his nasty feud with Kingsley Amis, the invective heaped upon him after the publication of Crash and his rather skeptical attitude towards his 'home' country. It's a great book, written with a very clear eye in dispassionate prose. I'm a Ballard completist, having read every one of his novels, essay and short story collections. The fact that this is the very last one is bitter sweet.

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I was listening to Radio 4 a few weeks ago and the director of the opera Dr. Atomic was on talking about how Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman etc. were all "war criminals" for working on the Manhattan project and how Japan would have surrendered anyway without the A Bomb being dropped. I suppose this is now what is taught in the core curriculum of UK schools. Ballard of course has no time for this thesis and points out in Miracles of Life that but for the A bombs he and all the prisoners in the Shanghai camp would have been massacred along with millions of Chinese civilians in and around Shanghai since the Japanese Imperial Army in China had plans to fight to the last man and kill as many people as possible. It was only the dropping of the atomic bombs that forced Hirohito to surrender the Imperial forces en masse (and even on the day of the broadcast there was an attempted coup) saving hundreds of thousands of allied troops and millions of Japanese and Chinese lives. The dropping of the bombs was a terrible thing, but, Ballard argues, it prevented an even more terrible thing.

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If you haven't read any Ballard, Empire of the Sun is a good place to start but my favourite era is the period 1973 - 1979 when he produced four extraordinary novels: Crash, Concrete Island, High Rise and The Unlimited Dream Company which I'd be happy to talk about in the comments below.