The Unlimited Dream Company

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.’