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The Unlimited Dream Company
John Gray
J. G. Ballard
From the author of The Sunday Times bestseller Cocaine Nights the story of suburban London transformed into an exotic dreamworld.When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to have come back from the dead. Within hours everything in the dormitory suburb is surreally transformed. Vultures invade the rooftops, luxuriant tropical vegetation overruns the quiet avenues, and the local inhabitants are propelled by the young man’s urgent visions through ecstatic sexual celebrations towards an apocalyptic climax.In this characteristically inventive novel Ballard displays to devastating effect the extraordinary imagination that established him as one of Britain’s most highly acclaimed writers.This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard’s works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Ned Beauman, Ali Smith, Neil Gaiman and Martin Amis) and brand-new cover designs.
J. G. BALLARD
The Unlimited Dream Company
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London W6 8JB 4thestate.co.uk (http://4thestate.co.uk)
This edition published by Fourth Estate in 2014
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1979
Copyright © J. G. Ballard 1979
The right of J. G. Ballard to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
Introduction copyright © John Gray 2014
Interview copyright © Vanora Bennett 2004
‘Fly Away’ by Malcolm Bradbury reproduced with permission of Curtis
Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of the Estate of Malcolm Bradbury copyright
© Malcolm Bradbury 1979
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Cover by Stanley Donwood.
Photography by Peter Stone.
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780007374885
Version: 2014-09-25
Praise (#ucd1446f7-77ea-5266-b90b-d3d8c542515a)
From the reviews of The Unlimited Dream Company:
‘A remarkable piece of invention, a flight from the world of the familiar and the real into the exotic universe of dream and desire … dense and erotic and magical, a pleasure to read’
MALCOLM BRADBURY, New York Times Book Review
‘A remarkable fantasist … rich, seductive … Ballard’s eloquence is as lush as the flowering vines he hangs from his multi-storey garages’
Observer
‘I was completely beguiled … Worked out with Ballard’s mastery, it is the most cunning evocation of a dream world’
Daily Telegraph
‘The idea is blindingly original and yet as basic as a dream of the whole human race. Moving, thrilling, exquisitely written’
ANTHONY BURGESS
‘Ballard is one of the few genuine surrealists in business … At its most heightened, Ballard’s prose is an impacted mass of images, dense and iridescent as mercury, stranger, you might say, than fiction’
Guardian
‘An extraordinary and touching piece of surrealism … [a] strange and beautiful extravaganza’
Glasgow Herald
‘Extraordinary … there is no doubt of the intensity and originality of the imagination that conceived the scenes of Shepperton transformed into a paradise … far beyond the scope of most novelists’
Spectator
‘One of the most startling and original novelists. Extremely witty, Ballard’s most optimistic book contains some of his strongest, most vivid prose … exuberant fantasy’
Time Out
Contents
Title Page (#u663813c8-ee28-562f-9edf-a7acf0f94531)
Copyright (#ua186ad1d-8a7c-5d34-9be5-cd4ef402a838)
Praise
Introduction by John Gray
CHAPTER 1 The Coming of the Helicopters
CHAPTER 2 I Steal the Aircraft
CHAPTER 3 The Vision
CHAPTER 4 An Attempt to Kill Me
CHAPTER 5 Back from the Dead
CHAPTER 6 Trapped by the Motorway
CHAPTER 7 Stark’s Zoo
CHAPTER 8 The Burial of the Flowers
CHAPTER 9 The River Barrier
CHAPTER 10 The Evening of the Birds
CHAPTER 11 Mrs St Cloud
CHAPTER 12 ‘Did You Dream Last Night?’
CHAPTER 13 The Wrestling Match
CHAPTER 14 The Strangled Starling
CHAPTER 15 I Swim as a Right Whale
CHAPTER 16 A Special Hunger
CHAPTER 17 A Pagan God
CHAPTER 18 The Healer
CHAPTER 19 ‘See!’
CHAPTER 20 The Brutal Shepherd
CHAPTER 21 I Am the Fire
CHAPTER 22 The Remaking of Shepperton
CHAPTER 23 Plans for a Flying School
CHAPTER 24 The Gift-making
CHAPTER 25 The Wedding Gown
CHAPTER 26 First Flight
CHAPTER 27 The Air is Filled with Children
CHAPTER 28 Consul of This Island
CHAPTER 29 The Life Engine
CHAPTER 30 Night
CHAPTER 31 The Motorcade
CHAPTER 32 The Dying Aviator
CHAPTER 33 Rescue
CHAPTER 34 A Mist of Flies
CHAPTER 35 Bonfires
CHAPTER 36 Strength
CHAPTER 37 I Give Myself Away
CHAPTER 38 Time to Fly
CHAPTER 39 Departure
CHAPTER 40 I Take Stark
CHAPTER 41 Miriam Breathes
CHAPTER 42 The Unlimited Dream Company
Interview with J. G. Ballard
‘Fly Away’ by Malcolm Bradbury
About the Author
By the Same Author
About the Publisher
Introduction (#ucd1446f7-77ea-5266-b90b-d3d8c542515a)
by John Gray
To anyone who thinks of J. G. Ballard as a dystopian writer obsessed by images of catastrophe this book will come as a surprise. One of his least-known novels, it is also one of the most powerfully lyrical. Ballard’s stories depict disaster zones: London drowned by the effects of climate change, an ultra-modern high-rise in which human beings struggle to survive, an American continent covered by desert and rainforest that a ragged band of explorers must cross. Yet the central thrust of his work is that disaster is not always an entirely negative experience. A seemingly destructive alteration in the outer world – geophysical or socio-political – may be the trigger for a process of psychological breakthrough. Instead of being destroyed, Ballard’s characters are liberated by catastrophe. Far from being a type of dystopian prophecy – though at times it is that too – his work has at its core an experience of inner transformation and renewal.
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. 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 exotic landscapes he conjures are often as important as the characters who inhabit them. Where this book differs from his other novels is in its strongly poetic quality. With its short chapters, some only a page or two long, it reads at times like modernist verse. 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. But whereas Hello America is full of deadpan humour, the mood that pervades The Unlimited Dream Company is joyful and rhapsodic.
Serendipitously, the actual Shepperton became for a time something like one of Ballard’s disaster areas in the floods that hit the town at the start of 2014. The Shepperton that appears in these pages is that same Thames suburb – where Ballard lived from 1960 until his death in 2009 – more magically transmuted. Hosts of brightly plumed birds – ‘flamingos and frigate-birds, falcons and deep-water albatross’ – have flocked into the town, and when the narrator leans against a pillar-box, trying to straighten his flying suit, an eagle ‘guarding these never-to-be-collected letters snaps at my hands, as if she has forgotten who I am and is curious to inspect this solitary pilot who has casually stepped off the wind into these deserted streets’. When the pilot leaves town, he looks up at ‘the vivid tropical vegetation that forms Shepperton’s unique skyline. Orchids and horse-tail ferns crowd the roofs of the supermarket and filling station, saw-leaved palmettos flourish in the windows of the hardware store and the television rental office, mango trees and magnolia overrun the once sober gardens, transforming this quiet suburban town where I crash-landed only a week ago into some corner of a forgotten Amazon city.’
