Low-Flying Aircraft (Book Review)

 

John Ballard Low-Flying Aircraft (1976) Ballard is probably best known for The Empire of the Sun, made into a movie by Spielberg in 1987, and for Crash, filmed by David Cronenberg (1996). This collection of SF stories consists of his usual near-future, post-collapse settings, featuring protagonists who are oddly unable to make the necessary crucial decisions in their lives. They are examples of  “New Wave science fiction”, or so the Wikipedia article on Ballard says. Initially interesting because of their studied weirdness, they quickly become boring. Ballard too often imitates himself.
     There’s no question that Ballard has earned a reputation as an important writer, but in my opinion he was merely lucky enough to express a kind of spiritual panic that at the time was widespread in Western culture. He claimed influences from surrealist painting, and proposed collage-like structures for fiction. Both surrealist content and non-linear narrative have become common-place since he discussed these ideas. For Ballard to survive, he has to be more than one of the pioneers. I don’t think he has much more than pioneering experiments to recommend him. His style is flat and often boring, his characters not so much enigmatic as empty. Of course, all that may be deliberate.
     The title story tells of a couple awaiting the birth of their child in a crumbling, abandoned resort town whose only other occupants are a doctor and his nearly-blind companion. If the child is a blind mutant like the previous ones, it will be killed. Every day, the doctor flies into the mountains spraying phosphorescent paint about, to guide mutant creatures which are blind to most of visible colours, but which can see the ultraviolet light reflected and emitted by the paint. The doctor claims the blind mutant children being born to the remaining fertile women are humankind’s successors: it seems normal children are simply not being born, yet women become pregnant very easily. The protagonist disagrees with the doctor’s conclusions, yet allows him to take the baby away to where it will be cared for, while he tells his wife it was correctly disposed of.
     The tone and ambience of these stories is curiously stifled. Although presumably momentous events have happened and will continue to happen (the destruction or disappearance of humankind is not to be taken lightly, after all), the feeling is that nothing happens, that action is frozen, or so constrained that no one can make decisions. I can see why readers of a certain kind, or at a certain stage in their spiritual development, would be attracted to such fiction, and praise it as New Wave, or whatever, but in me it caused an almost paralyzing ennui. I finished only about half of the stories, so little did they engage my sympathies, summon my empathy, or arouse my desire to find out what would happen next. Many of them had the feel of experiments, trials, attempts to make something of the kernel image or idea with which the creation of every story begins. They felt like the kinds of exercises students in creative writing classes produce. They will no doubt interest a crop of PhD students some time in the future. *