British author J.G. Ballard was best known for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, which were both made into movies. (HarperCollins Canada)

Back in the fall of 2006, I interviewed J.G. Ballard about his latest work, Kingdom Come. Toward the end of our talk, he told me, “We shouldn’t have the time to waste on discussing the novel.”

Ballard's fiction was radically ambivalent, populated by protagonists who were susceptible to deviant, even dangerous ideas.

Perhaps, in the quote above, “the novel” should be represented as “The Novel”: a conception of the form linked to Victorian ideals of self-improvement and social change. Certainly, that model held only a forensic interest for Ballard, who is best known for the novels Crash (1973), a feverish excavation of consumer and celebrity culture focused on the fetishization of car crashes, and Empire of the Sun (1984), a subversive coming-of-age story about an English youth who spends time in a Japanese internment camp in China during the Second World War and grows to crave violence, feeling that he is dead inside. The latter was based on Ballard’s own experience of being imprisoned in the Lunghua civilian camp (near Shanghai) in the ’40s.

Ballard was openly skeptical of the power of literature to affect society. In our interview, he mused, “I don’t suppose Joyce has had any influence at all on anyone apart from English literature academics, who make their living decoding Ulysses. I think most people enjoy a good read, but most people prefer middlebrow fiction, which has probably had a bigger influence.”

(Picador USA)

It’s no coincidence that in his later years, Ballard turned to more mainstream forms of literature, only to subvert them. His last four novels (Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come) use the exotic locations and sensationalistic set pieces of the common thriller, but undermine its pleasures by posing disturbing questions about the genre’s ideology of violence.

Ballard, who on April 19 succumbed to prostate cancer at the age of 78, was a determined and puckish contrarian. How to take stock of the work of a writer who delighted in undermining the very literary project in which he was engaged?

James Graham Ballard found a foothold as an author in the 1950s by writing stories for science fiction magazines. At the time, sci-fi as a genre dealt largely with setting up and solving scientific puzzles, and understood the workings of the universe in terms of melodramatic black-and-white morality. Ballard’s preoccupations were very different. He was fascinated by the decadent and the grotesque, and he presented his fantastic imagery in apocalyptic novels such as The Drowned World (1962) and The Crystal World (1966) as projections of damaged psychological states. He helped create the so-called “new wave” of science fiction, which thrived on ambiguity. His own fiction became radically ambivalent, populated by protagonists whose susceptibility to deviant, even dangerous ideas and behaviour made it decidedly difficult for readers to cheer them on.

In a culture of smug sound bites, Ballard’s work was shot through with disquieting aphorisms, designed to disconcert readers, to raise disagreements, to drive one’s thoughts in unexpected directions. “People no longer need enemies,” says one of his characters in Super-Cannes (2000). “Their great dream is to be victims.” Not the sort of quote that would play well in Oprah’s Book Club.

Ballard’s talent for provocation made him the kind of cult writer whose influence far outstripped the reach of the books themselves. Like George Orwell, he lent his name to an adjective, “Ballardian,” which according to the Collins English Dictionary describes “dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.” He roused populists from Steven Spielberg (who directed the film version of Empire of the Sun) to Madonna (who named her 2001 jaunt the Drowned World Tour), and iconoclasts from David Cronenberg (Crash) to the band Joy Division.

(HarperCollins Canada)

An academic conference held in 2007 at the fittingly Ballardian University of East Anglia in Norwich, England – a cold, concrete island in a scenic medieval city – offered a sense of the scope of his appeal. Historians, sociologists, artists and literary types from across the globe presented papers that worked their various interests through Ballard’s works, or vice versa. Surveying the wealth of writing about Ballard over the decades, Roger Luckhurst, author of The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard, remarked that his writing sets up a hall of mirrors that can reflect whatever perspective a reader decides to give it – be it psychoanalytical, surrealist, deconstructionist, even feminist.

One of the few passages in Ballard’s writing that sidesteps the hall-of-mirrors effect is the conclusion to his 2008 autobiography, Miracles of Life, in which he revealed for the first time that he was suffering from advanced prostate cancer. Apparently, he was diagnosed with it in the summer of 2006. Ballard must have known this by the time he granted my interview, but he gave no sign of being ill or ill at ease. Indeed, he seemed to revel in the art of the interview as a performance, declaiming in his rich, plummy baritone about everything from “the esthetic elements in political movements” to his love for the song Teddy Bears’ Picnic. He even admitted to a hope that his novels may have “had an effect” on the world, “in a very small way, in a modest way.”

According to his agent, one last manuscript of Ballard’s exists. It has the working title Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life. The qualifier “if any” suggests a skepticism that’s open to argument – or a belief that’s open to doubt. The great virtue of Ballard’s work is that it pursues ideas and theories to their logical, or more often, illogical conclusions. As a result, discussing his novels – and through them the plight of humanity in a Ballardian age – is anything but a waste of time.

Mike Doherty is a writer based in Toronto.