The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard

by Roger Luckhurst

Does the Angle Between Two Walls have a Happy Ending?

J. G. Ballard has both been declared Britain's most important living novelist and dismissed as a marginal figure "beyond psychiatric help". He has earned praise and condemnation, written bestsellers and obscure avant-garde works, gained coveted prizes and prosecutions for obscenity. For forty years, his extraordinary work has moved between science fiction, apocalyptic visions, autobiography and fictions of the contemporary urban landscape. Prophet or pervert? How are we to judge his work?

In this book, Roger Luckhurst reads Ballard's fiction within a series of contexts, skillfully negotiating literary, philosophical and historical terrains in order to illustrate Ballard's central works. Luckhurst suggests that the extremity of the responses to texts such as The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash is a product of Ballard's occupation of an "impossible" space in the mechanisms that dictate literary judgements. At once science fiction and mainstream, popular and avant-garge, Ballard is seen as being in the 'angle between two walls". His fictions are awkward and provoking, it is suggested, in forcing us to confront the frameworks in which we come to judge the literary.

213 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1998

About the author

Roger Luckhurst is a British writer and academic. He is Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and was Distinguished Visiting Professor at Columbia University in 2016. He works on Victorian literature, contemporary literature, Gothic and weird fiction, trauma studies, and speculative/science fiction.

Reviews

[Bill Reynolds · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the 2nd book-length academic study of Ballard that I seem to have read this year. It's denser than the Wilson, and intentionally doesn't try to be comprehensive. Luckhurst discusses the "reading protocols" view of SF that Samuel R. Delany wrote about (and which I agree with). The book spends a lot of time on The Atrocity Exhibition and Luckhurst sees it as central to Ballard's work, which I also agree with, rather than downplaying it or almost apologizing for it (also the way articles on Aldiss tend to ignore or downplay his brilliant Barefoot in the Head) as some people do. He also discusses Vermillion Sands at length. The book is tough sledding at times, but ultimately worth it.

[Guy Salvidge · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love JGB, and I first read this book when I was at uni a decade or more ago. It didn't make a heap of sense to me then and it doesn't make a heap of sense to me now, which isn't to say I think it's a bad book. I got this on Book Depository for $8 or something and I'm not sad that I did. But it seems that the world of academia is not for me...