Chris Hall revisits J.G. Ballard’s childhood and finds the future in the past

The opening of J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984) has young Jim watching British war propaganda films with fellow choristers in the crypt of the Holy Trinity church in Shanghai, which was designed by George Gilbert Scott and built in the 1860s and is due to reopen this year after extensive renovations. Ballard himself attended the church’s prestigious boys school, a 1920s Art Deco addition. It’s a nice thought that Ballard’s archive is going to be in the British Library, right next door to another Gilbert Scott building, what used to be the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras railway station in London, also recently restored to its former glory.

I was recently in Shanghai, researching a book about Ballard, and this was one of the many places from his childhood there (from 1930 to 1946) that I visited, including the Ballard family home on what used to be Amherst Avenue. It’s now another restaurant – the Xinyue Club – after some recent renovation work and, though internally much has changed, the structure of the house remains. Ballard described it as being in the “stockbroker style of the home counties”. A Chinese friend who lives in the city steered me there and we pretended that we’d come to take a look at the private dining rooms upstairs to hire for an event. Seeing what would have been Ballard’s bedroom as a “luxury and elegant private room” hammers home his belief that “reality is a stage set”.

It hit me while I was there that a great deal of those quintessentially Ballardian obsessions are seeded in Shanghai – gated communities, suburbia, his interest in Art Deco, etc. As Ballard himself said, the Art Deco buildings of Shanghai – the city is thought to have a higher concentration of them than even Miami Beach – seem somehow more modern than the steel and glass skyscrapers that tower above them.

Further south is Lunghua pagoda, which the Japanese used as a flak tower against the US planes and which features a lot in Empire of the Sun. The pagoda is oddly affecting when I finally chance upon it, and, like the Ballard house, it’s a very moving sight. Ballard wrote about the time shortly after his family’s internment: “During the American raids the pagoda had lit up like a Christmas tree, tracers streaming towards the low-flying Mustangs, but now its guns were silent and unmanned”.

From the ghost towers of Bangkok and the very real atrocity exhibition that is the War Remnants museum in Saigon, to the empty streets of Hong Kong the day after Chinese New Year and especially the drowned world of Brisbane, my trip had been a little too Ballardian for comfort.

Further Resources:

• Chris Mitchell: In Search of Ballard’s Shanghai

It’s been 70 years since HG Wells published The Shape of Things to Come but there has been a far more astute chronicler of our contemporary reality living among us in the suburbs for more than half a century. JG Ballard’s gimlet eye for the psychopathology of everyday life has never deserted him. Instead of characters with emotions, a history and a moral compass, Ballard’s fictional landscape is peopled with affectless casualties of the nihilistic, over-mediated consumer landscape, searching for meaning in a meaningless universe. This is fiction as biopsy, and its results are devastating.

Millennium People is the last in a trilogy of detective thrillers – along with Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes – to examine what might happen when all we have left as an ideology is consumerism. “People resent the fact that the most moral decision in their lives is choosing what colour the next car will be,” he says witheringly. “All we’ve got left is our own psychopathology. It’s the only freedom we have – that’s a dangerous state of affairs.”

I meet Jim Ballard at the Hilton International hotel on Holland Park Avenue. “I used to come here a lot because there was a Japanese restaurant called the Hiroku for many years. It would be impossible to identify your location,” he says approvingly, looking around the virtually deserted lounge we’re sat in with its palm trees and low-level skylight.

Despite reports, Ballard does not permanently reside in the suburbs – he spends two or three days a week in London visiting his girlfriend, Claire. “But living out in Shepperton gives me a close-up view of the real England – the M25, the world of business parks, industrial estates and executive housing, sports clubs and marinas, cineplexes, CCTV, car-rental forecourts… That’s where boredom comes in – a paralysing conformity and boredom that can only be relieved by some sort of violent act; by taking your mail-order Kalashnikov into the nearest supermarket and letting rip.”

Millennium People begins with a bomb attack at Heathrow airport, which kills three people. The proposition of the novel is that “the middle-classes are the new proletariat”, with the residents of Chelsea Marina, another gated community of his, so sick of school fees, private healthcare costs, stealth taxes and parking meters that they begin to dismantle the “self-imposed burdens” of civic responsibility and consumer culture. They are led, as is the psychologist narrator David Markham, by a charismatic paediatrician, Richard Gould, into attacking the shibboleths of the middle-class metropolis – the National Film Theatre, the BBC, Tate Modern – and then out into the suburbs.

But how seriously do these middle-class rebels take their claims of oppression? At one point in the book, there is the suggestion that the residents of Chelsea Marina might change the street names to those of Japanese film directors, but this is quickly scotched as it “might damage property prices”…

It is full too of perverse inversions and unsettling paradoxes – “Nothing brings out violence like a peaceful demonstration’ or “If your target is the global money system, you don’t attack a bank. You attack the Oxfam shop next door.”

Millennium People describes in part a murder with strong affinities to the Jill Dando case. “What all these murders – Hungerford, Dunblane, Jill Dando – have in common,” says Ballard, “is that they appear to be meaningless. There are no motives. Dando wasn’t even a celebrity. It may be that this is their great appeal.

“There are shifts in the unseen tectonic plates that make up our national consciousness. I’ve tried to nail down a certain kind of nihilism that people may embrace, and which politicians may embrace, which is much more terrifying; all tapping into this vast, untouched resource as big as the Arabian oilfields called psychopathology.”

Ballard continues to be endlessly engaged in what’s happening now. And as he says himself, he’s bucked the trend by becoming more left-wing as he’s got older. He is particularly disturbed by the apparently motiveless actions of our Prime Minister and has been following the “great smokescreen” that is the Hutton Inquiry. “Blair has this evangelical commitment to what he believes is right, and he invents the truth when he can’t find it out in front of him,’ he says incredulously. “I think we’re living in dangerous times and most people aren’t really aware of it. They’re worrying about asylum seekers or abortion or paedophilia…”

Does it get harder the older he gets (he’s 73), to anticipate, as he’s put it before, the next five minutes?

“I have no shortage of ideas and a peculiar kind of compulsion to get them down. Not that it makes a damn bit of difference…”

In what way?

“When you’re a young writer you want to change the world in some small way, but when you get to my age you realise that it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever, but you still go on. It’s a strange way to view the world. If I had my time again, I’d be a journalist. Writing is too solitary. I think journalists have more fun!”

Ballard is one of the best writers of speculative fiction alive today. Whether exploring the innate sexuality of automobile accidents, the power of dreams as reality, or navigating through the rubble of modern civilization, his often savage, apocalyptic work has influenced artists and filmmakers alike. Ballard himself counts among his influences the surrealist painters Dali, Magritte, and Ernst, as well as William Burroughs, whom he considers to be one of the most important authors of the twentieth century.

Ballard first entered the literary world as a science fiction writer, a genre he soon exhausted and has not explored in years. His transition to the mainstream was not entirely smooth, however. His 1970 anthology, The Atrocity Exhibition, was deleted from the Farrar, Straus and Giroux catalogue soon after its U.S. publication because of short stories like “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” and “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy.” After reading his classic 1972 novel, Crash, an editor wryly commented, “The author is beyond psychiatric help.”

I found Mr. Ballard to be quite sane – piercingly so, in fact – as he talked to me recently from his home in Shepperton, a suburb of London. Ballard is the author of 16 novels, including Hello America, The Crystal World, Empire of the Sun, The Terminal Beach, The Unlimited Dream Company and The Disaster Area. His newest novel, Rushing to Paradise, was just published by Picador U.S.A.

Ballard as seen by Ballard

MM: How do you see yourself as a writer and what do you think is your niche in the literary world?

JGB: I can’t speak for the United States, but I suppose some still refer to me as a science fiction writer. But since Empire of the Sun came out ten years ago, I think people have welcomed me to the mainstream. Although I’m not so sure I want to be embraced by the mainstream. I think I’m still what I always was, a kind of fringe writer. I think I’m an imaginative writer who began his career by writing science fiction, but I haven’t written any, really, for a very long time. I don’t even consider Crash to be a science fiction novel. I don’t know whether you’ve read it or not.

MM: Definitely. It seems to me that fantastically imaginative fiction tends to be lumped in with the whole science fiction genre.

JGB: Exactly. If you look at twentieth century novels, you can see that there’s a sort of mainstream, or what I would call realistic or naturalistic fiction. And then there are the imaginative writers who often tend to be mavericks. You know Genet, Celine, Burroughs, and so on. And I like to think of myself as a maverick. I’m certainly not a literary man, and this is an important point. I’ve met a great number of writers, novelists rather, English ones in particular, whose stock of references – their sort of instant associations that come to mind when they create and all that – all tend to come from the world of literature. Mine do not.

I’m interested in science and medicine, the media landscape, and so on. My reflexes are not the reflexes of a literary man. I’m more of a magpie pecking at any bright pieces of foil. I’m interested in the world, not the world of literature.

Science Fiction

MM: So you wouldn’t file your work of the past 15 or 20 years under science fiction?

JGB: No, not anymore. Some of my work was, there’s certainly no question about that. And I’m very proud that I was a science fiction writer. As I’ve often said, it’s the most authentic literature of the twentieth century. Sadly enough, most science fiction is being written by the wrong people nowadays. The constraints of a certain kind of commercial fiction have tended to formularize the field over the last 50 years.

MM: Speaking from my own experience, I think many people, especially as young readers, are drawn to the newness, inventiveness, even classic adventure elements of science fction, but eventually outgrow it. As you said, you find the repetition and formula simply bore you. Especially when you realise there’s so much more out there. Why limit yourself? Why be just a science fiction writer or reader?

JGB: I agree with you. That’s true. And that’s why I myself stopped writing. People within the science fiction world never regarded me as one of them in the first place. They saw me as the enemy. I was the one who wanted to subvert everything they believed. I wanted to kill outer space stone dead. I wanted to kill the far future and focus on inner space and the next five minutes. And sci-fiers to this day don’t regard me as one of them. I’m some sort of virus who got aboard and penetrated the virtue of science fiction and began to pervert its DNA.

Rushing to Paradise

MM: Your new novel deals with obsessive themes like fanaticism, radicalism and militant feminism, all within the frame of the extremist wing of the environmental movement. It’s not only eerily timely, it also strikes a raw nerve, especially in view of the healthy wave of anti-political correctness sweeping ouer the United States at the moment.

JGB: Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? The great talent of the United States is to take things too far, so that you have these huge pendulum swings of sorts. Always correct and then reverse. And then correct and reverse again. Here in England, I would say the extremist fringe of the feminist movement is largely positive. I’ve got two daughters as well as a son, and they’ve benefited enormously from the feminist movement of the past 20 years. England is a very class-bound society, and women, until recently, were practically an inferior class. Most professions were closed to women 30 years ago, except teaching and publishing. Nowadays they’re all mostly open. So we do have a few extremists, but nothing compared to the U.S., where you really do have some very strange people.

Sex, Violence, Censorship, Reality

MM: You said in a recent interview that “Everything should be done to encourage more sex and violence on television”.

JGB: Yes, I did say that. And I think it’s true. I mean, I live in the most censored nation in the Western world. There’s no question about that. Many people have said so. Film, TV videos, and art are more heavily censored here than anywhere in Western Europe or the U.S.

Censorship in England has a clear political role. It represents the fear of the established order that given any sort of imaginative freedom, or too much of it, the power structure will collapse. If people see sex and violence treated frankly, they may turn the same frank eye upon their own political situation. And start climbing up the base of the pyramid towards the apex. The people in real control sanitise the view of the world for us. Absolutely.

Best Work

MM: In his book, The 99 Best Novels Since 1939, Anthony Burgess considers your novel The Unlimited Dream Company to be your most important work to date. Which do you consider your best?

JGB: My most original and probably best novel is Crash. This is probably where I pushed my imagination as far as it has gone. I’ve also got a soft spot for other books of mine, most notably The Atrocity Exhibition. The Atrocity Exhibition is practically incomprehensible to most readers, whereas Crash is directly intelligible. There’s no doubt at all about what the author’s getting on about.

The Unavoidable Question

MM: Can we talk about Empire of the Sun? That is, if it isn’t already an exhausted topic. What is your opinion of Steven Spielberg’s film version of your novel?

JGB: I was very impressed by it. I thought it was a fine film. In fact, trying to remain as neutral as possible, I think it’s a much better film than Schindler’s List because it’s more imagined than Schindler’s List. I think the film is a remarkable effort in many ways. He extracted a wonderful performance from the boy. He was very faithful to the spirit of the book. There are always problems when Hollywood tackles a war film because the conventions of the entertainment cinema can’t really cope with the horrors of war. Still, I think it was a remarkable film, and more and more people are beginning to realize it.

Current Readings

MM: Have you read anything recently thut impressed you favourably?

JGB: Well, I don’t read much fiction nowadays, to be honest. Writing the stuff all day means when I read I tend to read nonfiction. It feeds my imagination. I read a great deal, but I can’t really pick a landmark book offhand. Let’s see, well, I just finished The Moral Animal by Richard Wright, a study of neo-Darwinism. That was quite impressive. Actually the best novel I’ve read in a while is by that Danish writer Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow. I thought it was a wonderful book. Far more than a mere thriller. In fact, it’s a pity that it had any thriller element to it at all. It was much more than that. It was quite remarkable on all sorts of levels. I hope it did well in the states. My girlfriend is reading his new one (Borderliners) now

Current projects

MM: What are you working on now?

JGB: I’m halfway through another novel untitled as of yet – another sort of cautionary tale. I’d rather not discuss it in detail thaugh.

MM: Any plans to come over to the States and promote Rushing to Paradise?

JGB: Oh, probably not, I’m too engrossed in the new book.

J.G. Ballard’s latest psychodrama is an intensely raw, tense, and bloodied tale of extremes set in the mythical “paradise” of Saint-Esprit, a desolate atoll somewhere in the South Pacific. The novel is thinly veiled as an adventure story as seen through the eyes of its narrator, 16-year old Neil Dempsey. This is no swashbuckling, hero-saves-the-day novel, however. In fact, there are no heroes to be found here at all.

The story centers around the strange relationship that develops between Neil and a middle-aged woman with a tarnished past, Dr. Barbara Rafferty. Neil sees her as a surrogate mother mentor, and lover all in one.

Neil, whose radiologist father died from his involvement in nuclear tests in the South Pacific, is obsessed with The Bomb. (much like Jim, the damaged boy from Empire of the Sun, Bailard’s not-so-fictional alter ego). His chance to get at the root of this obsession comes when Dr. Barbara invites him to join her disparate crew on an ill-fated journey.

Dr. Barbara’s dynamic single-mindedness galvanizes a virtual army of supporters, eager to help her save the albatross of Saint-Esprit from the French government’s proposed nuclear tests on the island.

Upon arrival on Saint-Esprit, “the spiritual ground-zero of the twentieth century,” Neil suffers a minor injury at the hands of French soldiers. Dr. Barbara deftly manipulates the world media, showing the videotape of the incident to anyone willing to listen. She soon becomes an environmental Mother Teresa, proclaiming Saint-Esprit to be a world sanctuary, an open-door haven for all endangered species. But her benign facade soon begins to degenerate as she takes on a far more sinister role.

Even Neil chooses to ignore the atrocities being committed as he becomes a human guinea pig for Dr. Barbara’s breeding experiment. Blinded by his unswerving loyalty and an unfulfilled lust for the madwoman, he rationalizes her decisions and actions, no matter how twisted – until he becomes the target.

A cross between Greenpeace-gone-black and Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Rushing to Paradise is Ballard’s most powerful novel in years, a terrifying, all-too-real “what if.” Which is exactly what Ballard does best, what-iffing Armageddon-like possibilities in this paradise we call Earth.

Walking along Oxford Street the day after I finished reading JG Ballard’s new novel, Super-Cannes, it struck me, literally, the total acceptance of the substrate of violence in consumer societies when it manifests itself. A silent, monolithic crowd hurtled down either side of the road as I walked from Centrepoint to Oxford Circus. I counted the number of times that I was physically forced to move out of the way or get hit head on (five). I counted the number of times I was pranged, bumped or rear-shunted (four). It’s said that London traffic moves at an average speed of 11mph, but pedestrian traffic can’t be far behind. Indeed, it’s not too fanciful to see in these crowds how the car has influenced our spatio-temporal perception. You see overtaking manoeuvres, you see people checking their rear views, as it were, with a glance behind before moving out. There is the same frustration at slow moving traffic: the same parameters of territoriality are in operation.

My shopping trip reminded me of a passage from the book in which Wilder Penrose, the resident psychologist of the business park Eden-Olympia, says “Our latent psychopathy is the last nature reserve, a place of refuge for the endangered mind. Of course, I’m talking about a carefully metered violence, microdoses of madness like the minute traces of strychnine in a nerve tonic.” And that’s just what that experience felt like: small, discrete moments of psychopathy.

It was with this in mind that I spoke to JG Ballard, who’d granted me the last interview on the round of publicity he’d been doing for Super-Cannes with the nationals. Unlike most people who interview Ballard, I wasn’t worried about whether he would be cold and distant or abstract, but simply that there wouldn’t be enough time with the Seer of Shepperton. I was right not to worry about any of those things. His voice has a rhythmic, musical quality, and his laughter is warm and inclusive. He gives the impression of an eccentric school master with, yes, a slightly abstracted air; a patrician whose sentences end with a heavy emphasis. Ballard is clearly used to developing an idea without interruption.

J.G. Ballard

“The main theme of Super-Cannes,” he says, “is that in order to keep us happy and spending more as consumers then capitalism is going to have to tap rather more darker strains in our characters, which is of course what’s been happening for a while. If you look at the way in which the more violent contact sports are marketed – American Football, wrestling, boxing – and of course the most violent entertainment culture of all, the Hollywood film, all these have tapped into the darker side of human nature in order to keep the juices of appetites flowing. That is the risk.”

Or as Wilder Penrose says in Super-Cannes: “A perverse sexual act can liberate the visionary self in even the dullest soul. The consumer society hungers for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that will keep us ‘buying’? Psychopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the arts, sciences and industries of the world.”

Ballard makes the simile with politics – “Hitler tapped into all kinds of psychopathic traits in the German people, the race hatred in particular: Jews, Gypsies, non-Germans, all ‘biological inferiors’. These were very potent ideas that are probably carried in all of us from our distant past when it made sense to fear strangers because they were probably trying to steal your cattle, kill you or rape your wife. Hitler tapped those buried layers of psychopathy. It’s an example of what could happen.”

With Super-Cannes we once again have all the cool clarity of a writer who has never flinched from his subject matter for the last 40 years. As our narrator, Paul Sinclair, drives south to the French coast with his doctor wife Jane, towards Eden-Olympia, their new home, “hundreds of blue ovals trembled like damaged retinas in the Provençal sun”. Ballard writes of the flare of swimming pools on the hillside: “Ten thousand years in the future, long after the Côte d’Azur had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of tritons and stylised fish, inexplicably hauled up the mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary geometers.” Thus we are in familiar unfamiliar territory, in a world we think we know but which is perhaps meaningful only retroactively.

Once again there is the Ballardian theme of morality reduced to aesthetics, or as Paul Sinclair has it “Civility and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia. By the end of the afternoon all this tolerance and good behaviour left me feeling deeply bored.” Sinclair is in a world in which “A moral calculus that took thousands of years to develop starts to wither from neglect, an adolescent world where you define yourself by the kind of trainers you wear.”

Super-Cannes takes off as a “why-dunnit” when Paul Sinclair learns that he and his wife have been housed in a villa whose previous occupant, David Greenwood, had apparently gone insane and killed seven very senior executives. Sinclair says: “It occurred to me that three of us would sleep together in this large and comfortable bed, until I could persuade David to step out of my mind and disappear for ever down the white staircase of this dreaming villa.” As so often with Ballard’s fiction, a fusion of inner and outer landscapes has already begun.

Sinclair is amazed to find that, as a psychologist, Wilder Penrose is prescribing madness as a form of therapy at Eden-Olympia, which Wilder clarifies for him: “I mean a controlled and supervised madness. Psychopathy is its own most potent cure, and has been throughout history. At times it grips entire nations in a vast therapeutic spasm. No drug has ever been more potent.”

Even though to some extent Super-Cannes, like Cocaine Nights, uses the conventions of a detective novel it nonetheless contains few of the dead sentences a genre novel would have. There are no characters crossing the room to pour themselves a drink – instead they wonder “how the Reverend Dodgson’s Alice would have coped with Eden-Olympia. She would have grown up quickly and married an elderly German banker, then become a recluse in a mansion high above Super-Cannes, with a fading facelift and a phobia about reflective surfaces.” And yet there are passages that are almost parodic of Ballard’s “concrete and glass” period: “Her hip pressed against the BMW, and the curvature of its door deflected the lines of her thigh, as if the car was a huge orthopaedic device that expressed a voluptuous mix of geometry and desire.”

Ballard has said elsewhere that whereas the 20th century was mediated through the car, the 21st century will be mediated through the home, and as far as Super-Cannes goes home means work. “The dream of a leisure society was the great 20th century delusion,” says Wilder Penrose. “Work is the new leisure. Talented and ambitious people work harder than they have ever done, and for longer hours. They find their only fulfilment through work. The last thing they want is recreation.” There are references to the flats and houses of Eden-Olympia as service stations “where people sleep and ablute”. The real home is now the office.

It’s not quite correct to say, as some have, that Super-Cannes is a companion piece to Cocaine Nights though both take place within gated communities of one kind or another and both involve on a superficial level a naive narrator trying to solve a mystery. It’s more that some of the ideas in Super-Cannes are taken further than they are in Cocaine Nights. Ballard is unapologetic about this new employment of detective genre conventions saying that if it’s good enough for Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov it’s good enough for him.

With his last two books one feels that he is reaching a new, younger audience – one perhaps attracted by the drug reference in the previous novel – and he obviously enjoys this as a professional writer, but as a knowing extract from The Kindness of Women shows, he has an instinctive feel for his core readership. This is Ballard describing the audience of an aversion therapy film at the Rio film festival: “…they gazed at the screen with the same steady eyes and unflinching expressions of the men in the Soho porn theatres, or the fans of certain kinds of apocalyptic science fiction.”

It seems that the “invisible literature” that he has written about, and which acts as compost for the mind, increasingly comes from the internet. Ballard doesn’t have a PC himself but his girlfriend, he says, supplies him with sites that might interest him: “She is a keen Net surfer, she’s constantly giving me fascinating stuff that she’s printed off. Extraordinary articles. Some really poetic, touching stuff. There’s one site that we first visited a year ago. It’s by these people at a bird sanctuary in Norfolk who have been tagging ospreys with radio transmitters [www.ospreys.org.uk]. They’ve been tracking their flights to and from their winter ground, an island off Ghana or somewhere, and they show maps of the routes taken by each bird flying across Europe and the Mediterranean, some of them detour for years before returning to this bird sanctuary. Watching all this is deeply moving. It lets another dimension into your life.”

Flight as a metaphor for transcendence occurs in Ballard’s work passim, and he has described in The Kindness Of Women how his own obsession with flying, which had started in Shanghai, had lead him to become an RAF trainee fighter pilot in Canada. “Flying is a very strange experience, it’s very close to dreaming,” he says. “The normal yardsticks, the parameters of our movements through space, are suspended. You’re travelling at 150mph, but if you\re 1,000ft up you’re not moving at all. Likewise, you can be travelling quite slowly coming in to land, yet you seem to be hurtling along like a Grand Prix car. The problem with light flying is that it’s very unstable and dangerous and also very noisy, there’s hardly any time to think.”

So, it’s a transcendental experience for him? “Yes, there’s no doubt about that. When I drive up to London, I go by London Airport and I always get a strange kick out of watching those big planes taking off and coming in to land. An empty runway moves me enormously, which obviously says something about my need to escape I guess.”

If Ballard’s interest in this bird sanctuary website seems apposite, then consider another of his favourites: “There’s this group that got into a disused American nuclear silo [www.xvt.com/users/kevink/silo/silo.html]. It’s wonderful! You’re taken on a tour and you can choose alternatives. ‘Would you like to look at the missile control room?’, ‘Would you like to see the sleeping quarters?’. It’s straight out of the stuff that I was writing about all that time ago.

“Sites such as these feed the poetic and imaginative strains in all of us who have been numbed by all the Bruce Willis films,” he says. “I’m waiting for the first new religion on the internet. One that is unique to the Net and to the modern age. It’ll come.”

Although he reads across the board of popular science, he says that he steers clear of cosmology books because “they are a happy hunting ground for, frankly, cranks. Multi-dimensional universes or strings and black holes – all this stuff is totally hypothetical.”

His friend Martin Bax wrote that Ballard has this amazing ability to know what’s going on in Cape Canaveral or anywhere without ever seeming to leave Shepperton, his home for the last 40 years. Sure enough, he’s got the goods on Channel 4′s Big Brother, although he claims not to have seen that much of it: “My girlfriend has been absolutely glued to it, she voted something like 30 times one evening! I think we can therefore discount the huge voting figures,” he says, with a warm, expansive laugh. “I’ve got a feeling people are just pressing the redial button.”

He doesn’t believe the official 7.5 million viewing figures (“that’s more than the number of votes that the Tory party got at the last election”) but he likens the interest in the programme to a Zen-like absorption: “If you focus on anything, however blank, in the right way then you become obsessed by it. It’s like those Andy Warhol films of eight hours of the Empire State Building or of somebody sleeping. Ordinary life viewed obsessively enough becomes interesting in its own right by some sort of neurological process that I don’t hope to understand.”

Is there not an echo of Big Brother in Super-Cannes when Paul Sinclair is at the Croisette in Cannes? “Without realising it, the crowds under the palm trees were extras recruited to play their traditional roles, when they stepped from their limos, like celebrity criminals ferried to a mass trial by jury at the Palais, a full-scale cultural Nuremberg furnished with film clips of the atrocities they had helped to commit.”

Ballard disliked the self-consciousness of Big Brother and would of liked to have seen more of a Truman Show element where the participants don’t know that they are being filmed. “It could be done. Candid Camera approached that slightly. You could just take people in a small holiday hotel on the Costa Brava and film it.” I suggest that this, as with certain psychology experiments proper, probably wouldn’t get past the relevant ethics boards. “Yes, that is the problem,” he says, as if it’s a minor but frustrating obstacle. “But then, afterwards you could say ‘yes, we did it without your permission but here’s a very large sum of money, sign this release form and you’re all going to be stars!’ ” In fact, the very next issue of New Scientist magazine that I picked up after speaking to Ballard had an article about a psychology professor at Stanford University who, frustrated at just those obstacles put in the way of research by ethics boards, is now running his own reality experiments in a TV series called Human Zoo.

“Most television is low-grade pap, it’s so homogenised it’s like mental toothpaste. But Big Brother as a slice of reality – or what passes for reality. It was like Tracey Emin’s Bed,” he says approvingly.

Ballard is worried that with all the interest in the internet we are forgetting what’s really around the corner: “The rapid development of the internet over recent years has rather shut out all discussion on the news about progress made on virtual reality. I assume that the world’s big electronic corporations are developing VR systems, which after all are going to take television and movies into completely new dimensions that I think potentially do represent a threat. When you enter into a simulated environment that is more convincing visually than the real world, the so-called real world, which of course is itself generated by the central nervous system,” he says, as if this is given a priori, “the temptation may be to stay there. It may lead to my phrase about playing with our own psychopathology as a game coming true with a bang. I see huge dangers there, but also huge possibilities. We might all learn how to play God! There might be a program along the lines of ‘Be a messiah. See what it’s like to be Jesus Christ or Buddha’!”

So God isn’t dead, he’s a latent component in a VR program? “Yes! Nietzsche was wrong!” he says triumphantly. “This might engender strong social changes, because most people have far more imagination than they realise, as their dreams make clear. Most people’s imaginations are damped down by the needs of getting on and making a living, generally coping with life and the imagination tends to be rather repressed in order to allow this flow.”

Surprisingly, for all his interest in film and an acknowledgement that it’s far more powerful than when it’s on TV, Ballard doesn’t go out to his local cineplex but watches rented movies at home. He gives a surprisingly prosaic reason for this: “There’s less rustling of chocolate papers.” Given that he’s a fan of David Cronenberg, and has generously praised his adaptation of Crash, it is also surprising that he hasn’t seen eXistenZ yet. “I hate all those VR pictures, especially the ones where people’s faces start to drip on to their chest and you realise,” he says with mock surprise, ” ‘My God, we’re in a dream sequence and the VR system has broken down!’ I hate that.”

For those of us desperate for more Ballard short stories, the news isn’t good: “I can’t see myself writing any for a while, partly because there’s nowhere to publish them. When I began writing short stories for sci-fi mags in the 1950s most of them were between 5,000 and 10,000 words. Now, magazines want 2,000 words or a 1,000 words – you can’t develop an idea. It’s not just a matter of knocking off a short story, it’s getting your mind into a writing phase where your imagination begins to think in terms of short stories rather than novels.”

For a writer who responds very much to social change, what does he feel will be the qualitative break between the 20th and 21st centuries? “If the 21st century represents a radical break with the 20th century then I don’t think that we’d be able to spot it. It might be something totally unexpected. It might be that our children and grandchildren vigorously reject the 20th century and everything it stood for. They may look back on it aghast and say ‘Who were these people? They spent all their time killing each other! Why?’. If consumer capitalism gets a little out of hand, and there are signs of resistance to the Americanisation of Europe, you might get absolute idealism in the young.

“The big change I assume is that there will be no more world wars, partly because no one will be able to borrow enough money from the World Bank to finance it. Now this changes the game enormously, it’s rather like playing chess and the rules being changed by the International Chess Federation ‘You don’t have to mate the king anymore’. ‘God, what do we do now!?’ I think the knock-on effect will be vast.” There is a certain glee with which Ballard accepts these changes, a state of grace that his protagonists strive towards.

“The decline of political ideology also changes things. There’s no real ideological clash between Dubyah and Gore for example. The decline of religion is also a factor. You do your triangulations and all we have left is consumerism, what I call the ‘suburbanisation of the soul’. That’s frightening. It may trigger all sorts of unconscious reactions. As someone in Super-Cannes says, in a totally sane society madness is the only freedom.”

This line has come up before in Running Wild for example? “Yes, I am tending to repeat myself in order to get the damn message home!” he says with slow emphasis before that gasping, generous laugh reverberates down the line.

Consider the word “triangulation” that Ballard uses. It’s a trope that almost uniquely marks out a Ballardian sentence with its three seemingly unrelated objects or events; as if he’s forcing the unconscious mind to construct a narrative to explain them. Take an example from Super-Cannes:

“Were assassins aware of the contingent world? I tried to imagine Lee Harvey Oswald on his way to the book depository in Dealey Plaza on the morning he shot Kennedy. Did he notice a line of overnight washing in his neighbour’s yard, a fresh dent in the nextdoor Buick, a newspaper boy with a bandaged knee? [my italics] The contingent world must have pressed against his temples, clamouring to be let in. But Oswald had kept the shutters bolted against the storm, opening them for a few seconds as the President’s Lincoln moved across the lens of the Zapruder camera and on into history.”

He says that he’s always been interested in content over style, even though he’s arguably our best stylist. “I don’t know if I am actually,” he says uncertainly, before warming to his theme. “I just want to push the message across. I don’t sloganise a political message but the sort of images that have appealed to me over the years – all the drained swimming pools, abandoned hotels, the strange business parks, gated communities and retirement complexes – these are what I want to convey, the peculiar latent psychology waiting to emerge into the daylight. That’s what I’m trying to do. Look at the world and see its latent content. I treat the external world as if it was a solidified dream.”

Boring Postcards USA

Ballard means this to apply to his life as well as his fiction: “With all the blandishments of advertisers and politicians, everyone is trying to sell you something. What are they really selling? What is the fashion industry really selling? Not just a new frock or a new pair of trainers, it’s selling something more than that.”

Super-Cannes involves a world where work is play and recreation doesn’t exist. Is writing, for Ballard, more work than play? “It’s part and parcel of the way I live. I mean, it’s not an extraneous activity. There’s no sort of office where, as it were, I say ‘right! I’ll have a cup of coffee and go through the day’s post’ It isn’t like that anymore.”

Ballard continues to be seen as a writer’s writer, his fiction a succès d’estime (Empire of the Sun notwithstanding), so it’s odd that at 70 Ballard still hasn’t had much of anything in the way of gongs. Germaine Greer has said that he is “a great writer who hasn’t written a great novel”. There might be something to this, that it’s his entire body of work that we should be assessing, not the individual novels. One can imagine that for Ballard it’s going to be like a great director or actor never receiving an Oscar for an individual film, but getting given one for lifetime achievement. How apposite that it seems we will be only retroactively able to acclaim his work in this way.

Of course, Ballard has always disdained or been uninterested in ingratiating himself with any kind of literary social scene. So maybe his lack of a public profile is partly a function of this. Plus the fact that he chooses to live in Shepperton (that locus of the twin Ballardian obsessions of flight and imagination, with its proximity to Heathrow and the film studios), out at the very edge of west London. He’s unlikely, for example, to be offered a South Bank Show after his comments last year about Melvyn Bragg’s dumbing down of the arts. And although he’s transcended the sci-fi genre in which he started (and transformed it) it’s hard to imagine him being particularly bothered about it. In this particular phase of Western literature, one of autobiography, perhaps a novelist of ideas, and rather outré ones at that, is simply unpalatable.

It’s often said that Empire of the Sun is his most nakedly autobiographical novel (along with its successor The Kindness of Women) and of course that’s true. But all of his fiction is no less autobiographical, even Crash, because of its exploration of inner space. One senses that he’s tired of this literalism, which has dogged him since he first started writing, and which reached its apotheosis with Crash. For example, a lot of people, he says, still think that he loves cars or that he’s a car buff (he drives a Ford Granada for God’s sake!) because of books such as Crash and Concrete Island, in his guise as poet of the motorways. “I’m not interested in cars at all. But I am interested in the psychology of the car user, the car as a facilitator of latent psychopathy or of the latent imagination for good. I think that a lot of people do express their imaginations through the cars they own. Imaginations they wouldn’t be able to express in other ways. Cars are a hugely liberating force in all kinds of ways.”

Boring Postcards USA

So he doesn’t agree with groups such as Reclaim the Streets or the wider eco movement? “I don’t agree with the Reclaim the Streets people at all. I think that the recent petrol tanker blockades across the country illustrates how silly it is to talk about the end of the car age. It hasn’t ended: more of us have cars and drive further in them than ever before.” Or as Paul Sinclair puts it in Super-Cannes: “Fanatical Greens always veer off course, and end up trying to save the smallpox virus.”

When the fuel crisis was at its worst there was the very real possibility that there would be thousands and thousands of abandoned cars on motorway flyovers and cloverleaf intersections. And this recent prediction that a giant tsunami is going to swallow the east coast of America. All very Ballardian. “I know; I feel I’ve been here before,” he says, as if his fiction was a parent and reality was a child lagging behind. As usual he’s done his triangulations.

Angela Carter once said that there is an element of Glen Baxter’s humour about Ballard’s fiction, and in a way that’s right, there is this possibility that it might descend into the ludicrous at any moment. But the point, surely, is that it never does. What humour there is is really so black that it could never escape the event horizon of laughter. No, a much better analogue is to be found with Martin Parr’s collections of Boring Postcards, especially his latest, Boring Postcards USA. Here we find interchange complexes, vast turnpike systems, interstates, thruways, empty hotel lobbies, freeways, bus depots, office buildings, shopping malls, trailer villages, in short all those images of our waking, solidified dreams that most of us look at and find ugly or brutal but which when viewed through Ballard’s visionary protagonists in their dry, affectless realms, are transformed into something meaningful and life affirming.

Jeff Noon’s gorgeous girlfriend has her hands on the wheel and a crazy glint in her big blue eyes. Jeff and Julie are my not entirely reliable guides on the Vurt tour, a late night ride scorching the tarmac of the scary bits of Manchester, following the path and pace of Noon’s Stashriders of Vurtchester. I make some feeble noises about speed limits. “Ya great mimsy ponce,” calls out the great science fiction writer, guest of honour at 1999 Eastercon, as white of knuckle and green of cheek I cling to my safety belt.

The car grinds to a halt in an enormous pothole in Hulme, a district of dismal skyscrapers about as inner city as you can get, the model for Vurt’s Bottletown. There are no lights in the streets, entirely deserted apart from two shady characters lurking on the pavement, up to no good, some kind of deal going on. I lock the doors. Then Julie’s foot is flat on the floor again and we’re careening at full g-force down the Rusholme curry corridor.

The car screeches to a merciful if sudden halt. Noon selects a garish neon-lit Indian restaurant, and we take our seats. Among the fragrant spices of dansak and balti, he is animated on the state of the art, on the writing techniques he has filched from dub music and contemporary painting, and damning of elves and spaceships, for him a blight on science fiction. In his view the genre has forgotten its finest moments in inner space and is fossilized in conservative narrative forms that went out with the ark.

Noon first sprung on an unsuspecting reading public in 1993 with Vurt, a brilliant debut which the New Statesman with uncharacteristic lyricism described as “too beautiful for bikers, too harsh for hippies.” Just right for everyone else though, it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1994. Other accolades include 1995 John Campbell Award for best new science fiction writer; and nomination for a second Clarke Award with Nymphomation in 1997.

Born in 1957, Noon is a barely-reformed punk with all the mischievous cynicism that comes with the territory. He’s also an erudite lover of the artistic avant garde. His is hip nihilism with rhythm ­ Beat with beat, a mix that’s won him star cyberpunk status in the States. Vurt, Pollen, Automated Alice, Nymphomation and Pixel Juice ­ all his works are page-turning cliff-hanging adventure stories told in slinky poetic style with a rampant and fecund imagination.

Frequent allusions to music also embellish Noon’s work and give it pace and pulse. This science fiction uses the technology of techno and the riffs of Hendrix as its stepping off point. Pop lyricism and Noon’s soulful emotional bravura puts him in a different class from the habitual technofetishism of the cyberpunks. Yet his number one fan is William Gibson.

As the dishes heap up on the table, Noon talks of his Vurt series. “The pure Vurt sequence ­ in chronological order ­ is Nymphomation, Vurt, Pollen and one other, which will come eventually. Automated Alice fits into that; and some stories from Pixel Juice tangentially. The last book will be the proper last book. It won’t be like the others. I’m not going to do it till I think there’ll be an audience for it. I’m writing these books and putting them out, and I get the impression they’re being lost to the general public because they’re being classed as science fiction.”

Hang on a minute. This is the man who took SF’s top prize with his first book. He is guest of honour at Eastercon this year and he’s dissing the genre? “Yeah. I think it turns a lot of people off. It’s unfortunate. It happens. I’m one of those writers ­ and there’s an increasing number of us in Britain ­ who are on the edges of the science fiction. And it would do us more good to get our books on to the general fiction tables.”

I’m stunned. Noon is known as the Philip K. Dick of the 90s. He’s in great company, rated alongside classic speculative fiction writers like J.G.Ballard. How can he say such things? “I’m in great company. But Ballard has managed that transition into general fiction. When the public goes into a book shop, the only people that venture into the science fiction section are hardcore fans and usually it’s on the third floor at the back.”

And then there’s the challenge of book jackets with elves and fairies. “Exactly, exactly. Even Philip Dick’s work has flying saucers all over the jackets.

“I know for a fact that my main audience doesn’t come just from the science fiction community, but from a vast amount of rock’n'roll kids. To a large extent I’m writing for and with them. Being put in science fiction, I’m losing out on kids who will walk into the bookshop, see a book and think ‘That looks okay.’ The science fiction writers in Britain, and there’s a number of us who are all on the edge, have to make a decision before it’s too late.

“It’s an extremely laddish genre which doesn’t appeal to me at all. My work sets itself up against that. If I had my way, I would define science fiction very precisely as being about two things: it’s either about spaceships or it’s about elves. And in the SF section of a book shop, I would put just those books. Now everything else, including Ballard, Dick, me, Michael Marshall Smith, Paul J. McAuley, and Pat Cadigan, I’d move into general fiction.”

But we’re talking about a noble tradition started by Mary Shelley which questions the progress of technology, genre literature that suggests new ethics and values. “Of course. But the problem is the real ambiguity in science fiction. When you open a science fiction book, it’s about change isn’t it? And opening that book is accepting that change. This is going to be different than the world I live in. I’m going to maybe learn something from that element of change.’ Which is great. And you can’t beat science fiction for that. It is the most transformative genre.

“Unfortunately at the same time as that worship of change, you’ve also got this really strong streak of conservatism in science fiction, which just goes all the way through it. I’m trying to work my way out of that conservative element, so I’m just concerned with the element of change.”

What form does this dreaded conservatism take? “On a very basic level: some people go off in space on a spaceship. And what happens on that spaceship, for all intents and purposes, it might as well be happening in some little village in England. For the amount of truth it has about contemporary Britain, or contemporary feelings, or contemporary emotions. So why it’s in a spaceship, I don’t know, except the writer gets off on this fact and the readers do, so it becomes a pure excitement thing.

“It’s not a question of wanting to get away from science fiction. It just so happens that if you write anything weird ­ and I love writing weird stuff ­ you get classed as science fiction. What I’m trying to suggest is that science fiction has got very very conservative. And that’s against the basic idea of the genre.

“It’s narrative conservatism. I was talking to an SF writer at a convention and I said I was writing this book in the present tense. The writer couldn’t believe that I was writing in the present tense. Cos when you tell a story, quite naturally, you start to write in the past tense. If you write about the future in the present tense, it’s much more immediate. The words tend to leap off the page at the reader. It’s a powerful tool to use.”

Feminist science fiction is bending the rules, surely? “Women’s science fiction writers are so concerned with gender issues that it becomes an issue-based fiction anyway. Which is fine. Male science fiction, you might as well forget it, mate. You get a lot of these incredible descriptions of female bodies, but for some reason they never describe the male body.”

Noon makes science fiction sound as hackneyed as cowboy stories or noir gumshoe tales set in San Francisco. Has SF had its day? “No. What we’ve got to do is keep moving in science fiction. And we have to glorify the fact that it is this transformative fiction. To be honest, there have been too many novels written about space travel and elves.”

Maybe Tolkein is to blame. According to legend, as he read a day’s production of Lord of the Rings to C.S. Lewis and his circle in their Oxford local, Lewis was heard to mutter into his mild-and-bitter “Not another fucking elf.” A view with which Noon would seem to concur.

Philip Dick tried a genre-crossover into what he felt was more serious literary endeavour with “straight” novels like The Transmigration of Timothy Archer and Mary and the Giant. Is Jeff Noon trying to do the same thing? “No not at all. I’m not going to go straight. If I want to go straight I’ll do it because the subject demands it.

“My next book is a fictional history of Manchester music. It’s going to be my straightest book, obviously. Because the subject demands it. That’s one of my key things. The subject demands the form of the book. I’m never going to loose the weird element in my work. Sometimes, the weirdness is going to be ultimate, but other times it’s going to be a little thread running through the story, quite a subtle thing. And I want to have the openness to move, to play with that.”

Wordplay informs Noon’s work with a shimmer of poetic puns that seem to have wandered off the pages of James Joyce, softening the blows of his sometimes harsh narrative. The attention to detail in language is thorough. Noon acknowledges the influence on his writing of Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. “His poem Pied Beauty ­ Glory be to God for dappled things’ ­ was my introduction to wordplay.”

“I try to make a book work on every level, which means from the word level, sentence level, paragraph level, chapter level to book level. I put a lot of effort into making it work on all different levels.”

Unlike Noon’s colleagues in science fiction, who are not getting off lightly. “In a lot of science fiction books, writers are working at the chapter level. You can do that, and there’s nothing wrong with it. You write chapter one and then you write chapter two till you’ve got about twelve chapters and then it’s a book, and then you put it out. But if you delve down a bit deeper and start working at the paragraph level, it gets more interesting. If you say ‘Right, this paragraph, what’s it about? What’s the reader got from this paragraph? What’s the reader got from this sentence? From this word?’ In traditional science fiction there’s not a lot of that kind of writing goes on. Because the spaceships travel from chapter to chapter, basically, not from line to line.”

It is difficult to pin Noon down. Is he seeking a specific effect with which to manipulate his readers? “Not necessarily. I’m not quite sure what the effect is going to be. What I’m trying to do is quite specific ­ excite them. Two things are going on when I write. One is that I’m trying to give the reader a bloody good time. And the other thing is that I’m trying to be brilliant.

“The very act of trying to be brilliant forces you to work hard, and to start working on this word and line level. It takes a lot of time, though. It’s using poetry to tell an action story. That’s avant pulp.”

What is that when it’s at home? “There are two ultimate avant pulp novels. One would be if James Joyce wrote Farewell My Lovely. And the other one would be if Raymond Chandler wrote Ulysses. Now I’m not quite sure which of them would be the best avant pulp. But they could fight it out, those two. That’s what the avant pulpist aims towards, one of those expressions.”

Um, yes. I wonder if he has conversations with these people in his mind about this? “No, it’s just a fantasy of mine, the avant pulp. I do take it very seriously, though. I’m a fantastic lover of twentieth century art. I’ve always absolutely adored it, the more difficult the better as far as I’m concerned. At the turn of the century, the thing split off ­ you get the sudden invention of populist art, and the invention of the avant garde. If you go back to, say, Dickens, he was an avant garde popular writer. There weren’t many books published that you could class as avant garde in those days. They tended to take the popular form and work with it, explore things within it. At the start of the twentieth century it split into two. If you look at each artform you can actually see the moment of split.

“In jazz, it’s very specific. Charlie Parker. He was the split. Up till then, jazz was a popular form. As far as I’m concerned, Duke Ellington is the highest popular artform there is. With Charlie Parker it split, and you’ve got this offshoot that said ‘Ah, jazz! It’s an avant garde artform. Charlie Parker, come on!’ They all donned their berets and got down on it. At the same time, all the other jazz fans were thinking ‘Oh we don’t like Charlie Parker, it’s not music!’ So they formed the trad jazz movement. Which went back to New Orleans. ‘This is real jazz. Guys in waistcoats playing solos all at the same time.’ So you got this sudden split.

I meet Jeff Noon in his now-native Brighton, stepping off the two o’clock from Victoria to greet a man surprisingly recognisable from his dustjacket photographs, casually dressed and affable.

You heard me. Jeff Noon, the man who made Manchester live, breathe and kill over the course of five books, has moved to Brighton. And I’m not the only person curious as hell to know what that’s all about.

But before we can settle down, Noon leads me out the station into Brighton proper, and casually asks if I know the city. I don’t; this is my first visit. So he offers a two-second whistlestop tour, in the process answering the question for me.

“Look at that sky,” he says, gesturing upward. It’s a dry but dim day, nothing special to my eyes. “Even on a sunny day in Manchester, you wouldn’t get a sky like that. It’s always grey there.”

As we walk in the direction of the North Laine area, he explains: “I’ve always loved Brighton, ever since I did my first one-man shows down here. They were always a great crowd. I could just tell they were up for it, laughing at every word.”

In contrast, he folds his arms and adopts an unnaturally grumpy face. “Manchester’s a much harder audience. ‘Go on then, impress us.’ Down here you don’t feel as if you have to prove yourself before they’ll listen to you.”

He laughs, leading on, and it strikes me that he really does seem very relaxed. Not at all the intense, edgy character I was expecting. He outlines some of the appeal of Brighton, and it becomes apparent how much Noon’s obviously enjoying himself in his new home.

“Brighton’s all about the individual. There’s a sense of youth, and a great artistic community. In Manchester, I felt isolated – here I’ve met more people, very quickly, and started working with other artists much more than I did in Manchester.”

We turn down one street in particular which Noon presents as an example: “Look at this place; Green Street. It’s all young businesses, they flock here. Here, look at this.”

He’s paused outside a small shop with wooden fixtures, old-style fittings, and…

“Beads. They sell nothing but beads, for goodness’ sake.”

He’s right. I peer in, and finally realise what he’s really pointing out; it’s quarter past two on a Wednesday afternoon. And the shop’s packed.

“And it always is,” he says with a smile. “Now you try and open a shop like that in Manchester and, well…”

Dead within a week?

“Yeah. Dead within a week.”

Down the end of the street is a small place called the TinTin Café. We step inside and take a table. Noon still hasn’t told me exactly why he moved from Manchester, his synonymous (perhaps even symbiotic) stomping ground. And it’s something which shocked a lot of people. Something I need to know.

“People are shocked, and I think that’s quite interesting. I’ve been asked that question a lot, and the fact that I’ve been asked it… That tells me something. It’s to do with the fact that hardly anybody writes about Manchester, in any medium, in such an intimate way as I have. I reckon the only other person who’s been asked so many times is Morrissey, when he left the city.”

He points out that despite the number of artists Manchester produces, nobody would think twice about Oasis leaving, “Because their work isn’t about Manchester. It could have been done anywhere, you know?” He laughs and shrugs.

“It’s not my fault that I’m one of the few that’s actually taken the city and tried to do something with it. So I think that’s actually a question you need to ask the city of Manchester. Why are there so few people writing about it in such an intimate way that when somebody who does do it leaves, people get upset?”

The answer may be simply that putting Manchester into words is such a difficult task. It was no easy journey for Noon, and he all but brought about his situation himself.

“I started to feel isolated. I’d been putting these books out, five books, all about Manchester, and I came to feel that… I wasn’t getting the kind of reaction that I would have hoped for. And it’s entirely my fault, because I kind of set out on a mission. It’s always dangerous when you do that.”

Mission? What mission?

“To put Manchester into the consciousness in terms of prose. To discover, and write in, a language that had come out of the city. And I think on my own terms, I’d succeeded in that. On my own personal terms. But it was definitely a mission.” He laughs, shaking his head. “And whenever you set out on a mission, you can only ever really be disappointed.”

Over the last few years, Noon watched his city slowly disappear. Suffocated under a blanket of rejuvenation called New Manchester.

“The poor place has been rejuvenated until it can hardly breathe. Which is great, but you have to be careful that you don’t rejuvenate into blandness. Increasingly, the city I’d been writing about started to vanish, and I have no interest in writing about yuppies living in city centre flats. I’m not putting them down, but it’s just not an area I have an interest in as a fictional subject. They even knocked down Bottletown.”

He’s referring to a location in Vurt, a planning hell of broken glass and towerblocks, a societal nightmare of accelerated residents with no concern for tomorrow. Is he saying Bottletown was real?

“Yeah, ‘Bottletown’ is this place called Hulme. Hulme was an amazing place, and very typical of what’s happened in Manchester, in a sense. It’s this 1960s council place: flats, ‘terraces in the sky.’ It didn’t work as a family place at all, so all the families moved out. And they began moving young single people in, students and so on. Short-term people.

“So it all started to change, and that’s when I lived there. Hulme became this hotbed of activity; lots of bands started there. There were recording studios in the flats, totally illegal. And it was very close to Moss Side, the large black area, so there was a lot cross-fertilisation between the cultures going on. Just a mad place.

“Eventually, they just knocked it down. They had to, it was very badly built and so on. But all that atmosphere, all that excitement, has dissipated. And they’ve built this new Hulme in its place, which is…” He pauses, choosing careful words. “I mean, I’m sure it’ll be interesting in 50 years, but at the moment it’s like a toytown. Not an ounce of atmosphere.”

Aware of what may seem to be a nostalgia trip, he adds, “Obviously, each generation has its own needs and desires. But for my personal generation, that place at that time represents the spirit of individuality, which is entirely what my work celebrates. Now it’s moved, and I don’t know where it’s gone. And I’m mostly too old to go looking for it any more.”

Does he think someone else will find it? Was this it, the generation gap catching up perhaps?

“Yeah, I think so. And one of the things which I hoped would have happened by now, was for my success to have dragged other writers up who would deal with the city in their own individualistic way. That didn’t really happen, and I think it should. I think it needs to happen. Manchester needs that voice, because it’s very hard to say anything against this New Manchester effort that’s building up. So the city needs that voice, the alternative voice. And it needs the alternative voice to be a success, to a good degree rather than just being underground.”

This voice… does it have to be a native one? He’s a Mancunian, so were Morrissey and Ian Curtis: does he feel that sort of experience is necessary to capture the “real” Manchester?

“No, no, not at all! I mean, a lot of students come into Manchester, from all over the place. It just needs people to talk about the city in a certain way. It’s time for someone younger than me to do that now, because my concerns are changing over the years, as they do.”

I mentioned that because one of the things Noon did inspire with books like Vurt was a sense that no matter who you were or where you lived, your town was as good a place as anywhere to tell a story. It’s very easy to get trapped into the feeling that interesting things only happen in “glamorous” places, like London or New York…

“Yeah, and the reason for that is quite simple, but a difficult truth for people to handle. It’s to do with stories, and the kind of environments that allow stories to happen. Obviously, with places like New York and certain areas of London, you have an environment that does very readily create stories; it’s to do with the way that people live their lives there. Once you get into the provinces, of England especially, you start to lose that melting-pot of ideas. There has to be a lot of work done. It’s much more difficult to write about Manchester than it is about Soho, for instance. But these are problems that writers in the future will have to face and sort out.”

A matter of finding the stories?

“Yeah. I think that in a place like Manchester there are a limited number of stories anyway. And a lot of the writers that have written about Manchester have tended to concentrate on these certain things.”

Is this why Noon chose to make his work ostensibly science fiction? As a way of creating a Manchester where stories are created more readily?

He pauses, contemplating his orange juice. “Difficult question, that.”

That’s the idea…

“Certainly, I’ve been writing plays…” He pauses, considering. “I’ve been writing since 1984, doing one-man shows. And that stuff wasn’t really about Manchester as such. It tended to be quite experimental, just set nowhere. My only big success as a playwright was Woundings, and that’s set on the Falkland Islands!

“So I didn’t really have that inkling to write about Manchester, and I think that was because nobody was. There wasn’t the heritage there which you get in, say, pop music. Pop’s been rooted in Manchester since 1977, the idea that this is a place where you can do that. So young generations of people automatically fall into it.”

But it seems the final impetus came from an unexpected turn of events. “I started writing a play called The Torture Garden, again set in a totally fictional environment. But the person I was writing the play for left the country for a job abroad, and I was left with this half-finished idea.”

At that point, Noon was working in a Waterstone’s bookshop in Manchester. This is the point where everything happens; this is where it all turns around. Steve Powell, the man behind the fledgling Ringpull Press, was also working there. And he needed someone to write a novel for him…

“I took the ideas of that play, and turned them into Vurt. And that’s the first time that I started to write about Manchester. I wasn’t that conscious of even doing it; I was a quarter of the way through when I suddenly realised, ‘Hey this could be quite special, no-one’s really done this before, not in this way.’ And that’s when the mission set in…”

Noon’s not the first writer to be halfway through a project before realising what the essence of the work actually is, and he agrees that it’s often the best way for a work to come about.

“The more and more books you do, the more you think about what you’re doing. I’d always been interested in Ballard and Borges, people on the fringes of sci-fi, though; and the sci-fi thing happened almost accidentally, just came out of the ideas in The Torture Garden.”

It almost sounds like one of Noon’s own fictions, the random remixing of concepts, words and spaces into something altogether different.

“I’ve always been drawn to quite experimental art. But the idea of experimental art in Manchester at the time… It’s almost impossible to imagine what Manchester was like back then. It was so dark, and grimy, and grim. You just can’t imagine what it was like from here. So yeah, when you come to Vurt, you get this quite down and grimy place — a place of shadows — mixing with this phantasmagorical world.”

Dark, but with a lot of energy, too.

“Yeah, there was that. There’s always been that, and that comes out of the punk thing.”

It will surprise no-one to learn that yes, Noon was a punk. It was the only time in his life where he was part of a crowd, a movement — “I’m just not like that naturally” — and to him it signifies the real start of his adult life. He’s at pains to point out that his work is societal, not just cyberdrugs and urban grit.

“If you actually examine Vurt, there are serious things going on in there which nobody ever talks about. It’s about escape, and facing up to the realities of what it is you’re trying to escape from. This is something that happens again and again in my work; it’s one of the themes that I pinpointed as being a typical Manchester story. The need to escape from your situation.”

Certainly, many of Noon’s characters have an introverted quality, continually faced with the temptation to retreat into a secret, safe world. His stories are about finding the courage to face what you’re retreating from.

“I think if you go back to Morrisey’s work with The Smiths, you’ll definitely key into that feeling there as well. Manchester in the ’70s, when both Morrissey and I were growing up, was just not a place to be sensitive, or to be artistic or creative; it was beaten out of you. So you do get the sense of escape going on with people from our generation.”

What about other, later generations? Are they escaping too?

“It’s quite interesting to look at what’s been coming out of Manchester since then, typified I suppose by Oasis and Happy Mondays. I mean, the escape that they’re on is just not the same at all. They’re escaping into stereotypes, for a start. There’s very little sense of exploration in their work. And it really does upset me that Manchester has become associated with that ‘laddist’ image.”

So who does he regard as closer to the spirit of the city? Joy Division, perhaps?

He laughs quietly, like a private revelation. “I regard Joy Division as being the spirit of the city! If you look at The Smiths and Joy Division, you’ve got a light and dark thing going on there, a reflection of what was going on in the city at the time. Whereas, with the new Manchester thing, the ‘New Manchester’ people, they’re trying to pave over the darkness.”

Not something Noon could ever be accused of; his Manchester is a place where tattooed addicts make love to shadows, dogs and humans carnally succumb to aphrodisiacs, where a young girl with a deadly kiss is the living embodiment of Mother Nature’s power to destroy. And the sirens never stop.

Vurt was a watershed book; upon release it, and Noon, made a leap into the consciousness of underground literary subculture. Why does he feel the book had such a strong impact? And how does he view himself, no longer the underground writer he was?

“Am I not?” He laughs. “I hope that my heart’s still there. I mean, when Vurt initially came out it reached a certain number of people, and grew from there, but it’s been very slow. Even now, my sales aren’t what you’d call massive.”

He emphasises the word. “Slow. I know that when I start complaining about this, my writer friends just say ‘Shut up, Jeff. I should have your problems!’” He laughs again. “But I’d really like to break through to another level. I’m really into reaching out to people, but in an interesting, experimental way. That’s what I’ve always tried to do. I have no desire to write books just for a few people to enjoy. That’s not really me.

“But at the same time, I have this really strong streak of experimentalism [sic] that just kind of pushes things a certain way. I just hope that one day it will happen, you know? With the kind of age that we’re moving into now, we should be discovering new ways of telling stories. And I hope my work becomes part of that. But it’s a long journey.”

Speaking of experimentation, new ages and cultures; what is it about club culture in general which appeals to Noon? Much of his work seems almost entrenched in club/dub fusion culture, the primacy of the DJ.

“That goes back to punk again. The most important moment in popular history happened in 1977, when white kids discovered dub reggae. From that moment comes everything we now listen to. And it was a complete revelation to me. I was learning to play the bass, but I’d never really listened to the bass on a record before. In pop music, it was always guitar and voice; we didn’t really know what a bassline was, because they were always turned down low.

“But suddenly, with dub reggae… It doesn’t just turn it up, it actually says, ‘This is the centre of the music.’ The bass and the drum; everything else is decoration. And I think you can follow that moment from there right into club culture. Hip-hop especially, but also house and techno, speed garage, whatever, discovering the bass and the drum and the beauty contained therein.

“So with the post-punk scene happening as well, you started to get this really experimental thing going on with groups, especially bands like Pere Ubu and XTC. You get an interesting space in music, so that when you now get to a producer like Timbaland, you can see that his spatial imagination is immense, thinking about exactly where he’s gonna place this hi-hat sound, and so on.”

Being a big experimental ambient fan myself, I couldn’t help but notice an acknowledgement to Autechre at the start of Needle In The Groove. Is it fair, then, to say he simply seeks out experimentation, no matter what the artform?

“Yeah, absolutely. I love all the stuff that happens on the fringes of the dance scene. The stuff you can’t really dance to, but it’s still a part of the scene. I’m really into German music at the moment, Oval and Mouse On Mars. Again, there’s just that interest in sound.

“So the point about club culture is, it’s not so much the rave and Ibiza scene, but more the kind of manipulation of sound that’s going on, and the way that that feeds back into the way people live and view their lives these days. I know for a fact, for example, that those young kids over there –” He points at three young skaters across the street, “– have a very different mindset to the one I had at their age. And a lot of that is to do with the way they’re experiencing the world, the way they’re experiencing music, film, TV, the internet and so on. I’m really interested in that, and that’s mainly why I tend to write young characters. And these days, that experimentation with sound is fed into the work too.”

They also have different drugs. Which is as good a way as any of bringing up the thorny subject. It’s become de rigeur to describe Noon’s work as “trippy.” Are, or were, drugs as big a part of his life as it seems?

No." He laughs; I get the impression he’s asked this question a lot, too. "Tiny, tiny part. In my work, as something that I write about, it’s just a metaphor for change. It forces the character to change. If you look at Vurt, there are loads of ‘cheat modes’ going on in there, by me as a writer. ‘Vaz’ is the ultimate cheat mode; Vaz will get anybody out of anything! But with the feathers it’s more a feeling of, ‘Okay, let’s push them onto the next level now.’ And it automatically does it, for me as a writer."

So much for that popular myth, then. If drugs aren’t part of Noon’s inspiration, what is? Who does he read, for example?

"I read and re-read Jorge Luis Borges, in fact I’m just re-reading his stuff at the moment. He’s one that I come back to all the time. The more I write, the more of his influence comes in there. And J G Ballard meant a lot to me when I was in my twenties."

What about other media, besides music?

"Painting." He says it as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. "My first and natural talent is to paint. That’s what I was born to do. I trained in painting and visual arts at University. But I haven’t painted since 1984, when I started seriously writing plays.

"So really, there’s lots of stuff going on in my work. Lots of stuff coming from music, lots of stuff coming from visual arts, and the history of visual arts. And it all kind of gets mixed up in there."

Does this mean, then, that he doesn’t "do" research as such? That it all comes from a big dub inphomix in his head?

"Yeah, that’s just what it is. I pick it up, and it all kind of gets filtered through my imagination. I don’t do a lot of research, no." He laughs quietly.

"The thing is, my work’s changing at the moment. It’s becoming more real. The project I’m working on at the moment is to all intents and purposes historical, so there’s a certain amount of research going into it. But I don’t get trapped by it… and I just exaggerate. I go over the top and see what happens. I do think those writers who are bound by the science…" Careful words again… "It produces a certain kind of work, which has a certain kind of appeal. But it never interests me, that hard science fiction."

Does this follow through into forethought? There’s a theory going round that Nymphomation, for example, was planned right from the start, back when he wrote Vurt.

He laughs again, but loud this time as his ever-present half-smile finally splits into a wide grin.

"No, not at all! Everything is retro-engineered. There’s no plan. The last sentence of Nymphomation actually came about by accident…

"I was doing a reading, and somebody asked me what I was working on. So I said ‘I’m doing the first book in the Vurt sequence, set before Vurt.’ And this person asked — completely innocently — ‘What, you mean it ends with the first sentence of Vurt?’ And I just said, ‘Yeeeaaah…’ But I did have in mind this four book sequence. Honest…"

Will we see any more? Is there another Vurt book in the works?

"No. Now that I’ve moved away from Manchester — and stated I’m also leaving sci-fi — the idea of another Vurt book becomes a bit… problematic. I might come back, but at the moment I’ve got no interest.

"What I will say is that to a certain and very important degree, Needle In The Groove is that last Vurt novel. Because all the books in the Vurt sequence have been about the same thing. Which has got nothing to do with feathers, nothing to do with anything ‘science fictional’ at all. It’s to do with the search for a new family. The escape from a broken family, the setting up of a new, alternative family, and the search to repair a broken family.

"Needle In The Groove and Vurt could almost be mirror-images of one another, in that sense. The difference being that at the end, Elliot manages something that Scribble from Vurt hasn’t got a chance in hell of sorting out; his relationship with his father. So if you take this sequence of books as being about that subject, which I do, then Needle finished it. Obviously, the hardcore Vurt fans are going to say I’m being daft with all this," he laughs, "But you know, this is what I write about. This is my subject."

It does make sense; both Vurt and Needle are ostensibly about single protagonists, whereas Nymphomation and Pollen are ensemble pieces. There is indeed a mirror-image, even though each book in the sequence has gone further back into the past.

"Yeah, and now I’m doing a historical novel! I just hope people are picking up on these elements in my work. I hope they’re not becoming so enamoured with the superficial subject matter that they can’t see, I am on a journey here, and travelling a certain road I have to go down.

"I liken my position at the moment very much to J G Ballard. Ballard built up a very rich series of techniques over twenty years or so while his work was ‘hidden’ in sci-fi. And then, with Empire Of The Sun, he started to write about things which were more real, using those techniques he’d built up. That’s quite interesting to me at the moment, with Needle In The Groove as the start of that. Using all these techniques to focus on something that’s quite real, quite emotional and to do with the way people live their lives now."

Certainly, no-one could accuse Noon of not developing his style. It’s one of the things which makes his work stand out from the crowd, a style which has become more fluid and, dare I say, "dubbed" as time goes on. In a sense, Noon’s work is more to do with the way stories are told than the stories themselves.

"I’m glad you say that, actually. I’m a storyteller, and I love telling stories, but the way that I tell the stories is what really excites me. The writers I admire are those people of whom you can read two sentences and just know it’s them. Those are the people I like. It’s the same with music, everything.

"I do think this whole kind of ‘dub fiction’ thing I’m on at the moment is exciting for me as a writer. I hope it’s exciting for the reader. You just don’t know what’s going to come out of it. It just seems right and correct that it should be happening now, at this space in time."

Right here and right now being the end of the century, the non-existent year double-zero. The year where trend itself is outdated, and there is no mode.

"Yeah. In this whole kind of pro-postmodern world we’re living in, I think it’s fruitful that people can discover new ways of telling stories. The way we live now, I call it Liquid Culture, and I think to find the prose equivalent of that is great."

And has he? Noon has another book due to be published in Autumn 2000, entitled Cobralingus. Is that his liquid fiction?

"Cobralingus takes this whole idea of remix fiction and pushes it right to the extreme. It’s based on electronic music techniques, where I take sampled text and I push them through a series of gates. Each gate has a different effect upon the text, but it’s not done using computers. It’s all in my mind. And as it works its way through, each time it’s a remix of what’s gone before.

"I’m also starting to write with another writer in Brighton here, and that extends the thought into other people — we’re remixing each other’s text. My work’s become very experimental at the moment, since coming to Brighton. Coming here was difficult, as you can imagine. Removing myself from the source of all those stories took me a long time to even start."

And Manchester meets liquid fiction — or at least, liquid music — in Needle In The Groove. I have to admit, even to a "hardened" Noon reader like myself, the first few pages of his latest novel were a shock, simply due to the extremely unconventional layout of the text and the way the narrative is presented.

"Well, it’s no more unconventional than the way Patti Smith sets her poetry out, or Bob Dylan…"

Maybe not, but for Noon it was a big step forward, and one he’s obviously happy with. Will we see more of that? Is his work going to continue, and develop, in that style?

"Certainly in these separate projects I’m talking about, yeah. Cobralingus is the first of them, and it will become more liquid. But in my ‘mainstream’ novels, there’ll still be an overriding sense of story and narrative. I’m never going to lose that. I have no interest in presenting the reader with a kind of ‘destroyed’ narrative, unless it’s specifically in an experimental setting. But obviously, the experiments that I’m doing will feed into the narrative stuff as well."

This poses a question. If he’s committed to developing this style, and now that he’s crossed the threshold with Needle, will he feel comfortable "going back" to conventional narrative?

"I think it’s to do with being honest to the story you’re telling, that’s all. I have this idea that every story has its own particular language. A lot of writers don’t consider this at all; they’ve got their style and they do it. But for me, easily the longest part of the process is discovering that language. Once I’ve done that, the book just goes.

"Needle was actually written in conventional punctuation for a while, until I started to let the ideas of the subject dissolve into the way it was written, so that the two can’t be separated. You can’t separate the form from the content in Needle. And once that happened, the book just kind of flowed out.

"So yeah, if get an idea for a more conventional story, I’ll set it in a more conventional style. It’s the language, you know? The book I’m writing at the moment has an invented language, but the punctuation is straight down the line, no messing about, because that suits the story. But the language itself is an invention."

Do I detect a bit of a Bauhaus thing going on here? Form follows function, and all that?

"Oh, yeah. Form is function. All this comes from my painting background. And of course sometimes, form can go against function for a deliberate effect. For instance, you could write about a DJ mixing, but in the style of John Donne… and I have done that at times. There are moments of that in Needle, writing very elegantly and poetically about something which is very modern and chaotic. And it sets up a kind of mix, a clash of styles."

John Donne. An odd choice of example, but works like Needle are certainly approaching poetry. Is this what we can expect from him in the future, something more akin to poetry?

"No, no, I just have an intense interest in language. This is something that’s been growing since Nymphomation. That was a difficult book for me, definitely a watershed. But in terms of my progression it’s a very important book, because that’s when things started to dissolve for the first time."

Nymphomation also feels very self-analytical in places, almost as if Noon were looking back at this younger person who wrote Vurt, deconstructing his own text from a modern standpoint.

"It is a self-conscious book, yeah. I think if anybody looked back at the progression of what I’ve done, Nymphomation is definitely where things started to change. Of course, once you do that you’re taking a pathway; and where that leads you just don’t know. I am writing a novel at the moment, but I don’t like talking about it. It’s going to shock people. It’s going to surprise people."

Is that "literary shock factor" important?

"Oh, yeah," he laughs. "I’m totally and utterly into people who surprise you, that’s me. Sometimes in your life as an artist, you have to be quite brave about that. Especially if you have a fanbase, because not everybody manages to get one. But I think at some point in your career, you have to take account of that… and then move on.

"I mean, look at somebody like Terry Pratchett… You can imagine that Pratchett would love to move on. But can he? He’s gone so far down that road now. And, you know, I never want to go so far down that road that I can’t turn off it."

He pauses for a moment, considering what he’s just let slip, and laughs. "That’s either brilliant or something that should be in Women’s Own poetry corner!"

So experimentation is very important to him, as an artist. If that’s the case, why did it take Noon so long to write an overtly "punk" book?

"Did it?"

I certainly think so. His other works may have the sensibility, for sure. But Needle is the first novel which actually reads like punk, aside from the subject matter.

"I suppose so. A lot of that comes out of me knowing it was time to leave Manchester. I think it’s fairly obvious Needle is my ‘Farewell to Manchester’ book. It’s me looking back at my life, and how music has affected it. Note that the furthest they get back on their musical trip is 1957; the year I was born. So it’s quite a conscious summing-up of that addiction to the Manchester music scene, and both the good and bad sides of that addiction."

Is this why we get the tour round the streets with Elliot, pointing out places like John Cooper Clarke Terraces, Joy Division Street, and so on?

"That part actually started out as a kind of satire on New Manchester, and the ‘heritage industry’ they’re building up there. But it turned into something quite poetic, almost a kind of prayer, especially on the CD. And it also ties into things that were in Pollen, the idea of maps in the mind, maps in reality, and how the two coincide. Again, that comes from Borges."

That’s definitely a theme of his; is it something he’s specifically interested in, the idea of mapping the mind and consciousness?

"Well, mapping the city, yeah. I’m well into this psycho-geography stuff that goes on in London. I love that, the ‘labyrinth’ idea of a city, and how the human mind corresponds to that."

Pollen certainly seems to make that match — between the city and the person — with Columbus the Xcab King, whose mind is the city. And he’s another of the introverts, almost psychologically crippled because he’s become one with the city.

"Well, there’s a large introspection in me, anyway. A lot of what I write about comes from my childhood, and knowing that I had this special thing — imagination — but not knowing how to communicate it."

Is there a danger in becoming too tied to a city?

"Oh, yeah. Definitely. I don’t think that you should in any way become tied beyond a number of years, certainly these days. There’s just no need for it any more. My Mum and Dad were born, lived and died in the same area. And that shouldn’t happen any more. We have to move on. We have to explore."

He mentioned the Internet earlier, as being one of the elements which contribute to the modern youth’s differing mindset. Does he feel the global awareness it can bring is helping this aim, societally?

"Yeah, it’s part of it. I do think we’re putting a lot of emphasis on the Net beyond what it is. But it’s another part of Liquid Culture, like the DJ remix. The remix to me is the ultimate postmodern artform, and the Net is a symptom and a part of that."

Noon has finally started experimenting in the "DJ remix" area himself. Alongside the novel of Needle In The Groove came an audio CD, executed by David Toop and released on Sulphur Records. It’s an ambient wordtrip; Noon reads passages from the novel while Toop cuts them to ribbons, adding an urban underlay of beats and soundforms. It’s certainly… different. And, on reflection, something which I’m surprised Noon hasn’t tried before. How did it come about?

"It kind of grew out of some things the publisher said, about doing a few tracks for promotional purposes. Just to give out to bookshops, initially. And I’ve always loved Toop’s music, so I asked him and that was it. I didn’t know him before this. I’d met him maybe twice, three times before we actually recorded."

Did Noon have much "hands-on" involvement with the production?

"Well, I sent him the lyrics, and notes on the musical ideas I had in my mind. Working from that, he sent me tapes, which I worked to. And then we went in and kind of co-produced it. It was amazing going in there, because I hadn’t been in a recording studio for years, and all this digital stuff they’ve got is just mind-boggling."

Noon’s voice rises a little as he becomes more animated. I get the distinct feeling we’re into a subject Noon wants to talk about a lot…

"I mean, they can do anything, absolutely anything. They can manipulate the musical input, the signal, any way they like. And then coming home again, turning on the word processor… You just think, there’s something wrong here. There’s a massive difference between the way that I can manipulate text, and the way that David can manipulate the music on his screen. And I don’t know why that’s built up.

"For instance, I’m often changing the sex of my characters. But there’s no button I can press that says, ‘Change the sex of this character all the way through.’ Ridiculous. There’s no button I can press that says, ‘Turn this into the past tense.’ And there should be."

Not that technology’s shortcoming are going to stop him. "With Cobralingus, I’m doing a lot of random manipulation. But I have to do it all by hand, either on screen or on bits of paper. There isn’t a button I’ve got that can randomise it for me. Sure, there are random text generators and so on, but they’re seen as add-ons rather than part of the process of Liquid Culture. We need to allow words to become part of that. And to do it we need the tools, like they already have with music. At the moment, all I have is my mind and a cut and paste button!"

Cobralingus is being produced through Codex Books, based here in Brighton. Is there any reason why Noon seems to favour smaller publishers? Even Anchor, his current publisher, is only a small imprint of TransWorld. Is it a control thing?

"It’s just nice for me to have those two options, really. I mean, I do want to write books that reach people, but at the same time I also want to write these books that are just for me.

"I don’t really get interfered with that much. I think TransWorld don’t really understand me that well," he chuckles. "I’m the most leftfield writer they’ve got, so I’m just kind of left to get on with it. And with Codex, it’s nice to have that intimate relationship with a publisher. So it really is the best of both worlds."

We suddenly realise the café actually closed fifteen minutes ago. There’s a big CLOSED sign on the door, and the chairs are up. The staff have been patiently waiting for us to finish, so as we make ready to set off I quickly ask the inevitable end-of-interview question: what’s next? I heard a rumour linking Noon with Hollywood…

"Yeah, we’re working on something, but it’s taking ages. I can’t talk about it. I do want that sort of stuff to happen, though. We’ve just finished the Vurt play in Manchester, which I wrote about three years ago, and seeing it now… Well, if I wrote it now it’d be entirely different. So when I write the film, I definitely want it to come through my consciousness now. I don’t want to replicate what I was eight years ago, I can’t stand that.

"So the film, if it does happen, will be interesting. It’ll be a bit of a surprise, I think, because compared to the novel and the play, it will be the most realistic of them all, with the least special effects." He gives a broad smile, knowing full well that it’s the last thing people will expect of him.

But that’s the point; Noon probably couldn’t stop re-inventing himself if he tried. He’s all about the remix, the experiment; what happens if you take this word, or that phrase, and give them new meaning? What happens when strangers overhear one another’s thoughts in subjective languages? How do you use one text to tell a different story to every person, and every single one of them is right?

And I realise, as I head back to the train station, that it’s catching. I’ve been injected with Liquid Culture.

ZS: Your story ‘After the Vision’ was in my opinion the best in the Children of Albion Rovers anthology produced by Rebel Inc. It says it was taken from something called The Far Places. Was this a novel? It seems to have similarities to These Demented Lands.

AW: Yes, a section of a novel and parts of a linked series of short stories called, believe it or not, Trend Fault Team 2, about Highland kids who were into rap music. I might rework some of these stories sometime. These Demented Lands came from some other area of my storm tossed imagination.

ZS: These Demented Lands was a little bit different from your other novels, it was more surreal and included illustrations. Did you think of it as a chance to be more experimental with your text?

AW: Well, the illustrations you mention are already in Morvern Callar, the map Red Hannah draws for Lanna, for example, or the road sign. I enjoy breaking up the language that way and it sort of takes the reader out of the delusion of the text into another delusion!

ZS: Morvern Callar attracted lots of “Highland rave” type comments. Do you think there is a point these days in distinguishing between Scottish and other writing?

AW: It’s like Duke Ellington said about music . . . there is good writing and bad writing and those are the only two types.

ZS: And do you think that the chemical generation genre has run it’s course now? Were you pleased at being included in that whole thing?

AW: That was something invented by an editor called Sarah Champion [music journalist and editor of the 1997 anthology Disco Biscuits, which included a short story, ‘Bitter Salvage,’ by Alan Warner]. I mean I think you can write a good story about a nightclub but I don’t think you can base a whole literary movement on writing about nightclub life and ecstasy use. What bothered me about it is it was getting to be more about the writers than the writing, there was something egotistical and silly about it, “Look, we go to nightclubs but we are writers,” so fucking what. I’m interested in great books not the social life of writers. On a personal level I used to take ecstasy and go to Edinburgh Zoo. It was much better than a rave, cheaper admission, prettier girls, colourful parrots and there’s even a little licensed bar there. No bouncers either, just kangaroos.

ZS: You’re currently working on a novel called At a Fair Old Rate of Knots. How would you describe it and when do you think it might be published?

AW: (First answer) SORR M COMPUTR HAS REALL ROKE DOW
(Later) Travelogue from the point of view of a homeless guy who has no choice but to travel, and a critique of past Highland/literary/historical landmarks. It could end up with a shootout at Culloden battlefield! The title is now The Man Who Walks. I don’t have a clue when it’ll be published.

ZS: You’ve said that you really got into reading with authors like Alan Paton and Andre Gide. Who or what else inspired you to start writing, and who’s work really excites you (intellectually or otherwise) at the moment?

AW: I’M SERIOUS THE KEOARD IS FUCKED
Then: Camus (see below), Sartre (ditto), Michael Moorcock, Nietzsche, Herman Hesse, JG Ballard, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, the music of Holger Czucay

Now: Same writers and Mark Richard, Annie Proulx, Juan Carlos Onetti and the music of Holger Czucay.

ZS: Morvern Callar sometimes reminds me a little of Camus’ Mersault or even Sartre’s Roquentin, particularly in terms of her connections with other people. Were you self-consciously trying to explore existential concepts or styles of narration?

AW: IT IS EITEITAIL E
You’re spot on, Nausea, The Roads to Freedom trilogy and Camus’ work were awful important to me, especially Nausea and The Outsider. I think Morvern Callar is an existential novel . . . and one that taps into the absurd, that whole opening sequence. I think Morvern is outraged at the absurdity of death, the fact she has to jump over the body to get to the sink, the fact that she suddenly needs to take a crap, even though the man she loves is dead there in the midst of their (former) domestic bliss. The whole absurdity of having to get dressed and put on makeup though he’s dead. I think it metaphysically outrages her which is why she reports it so exhaustively and perhaps that’s why she walks past the phonebox. She’s rebelling against the absurdity of death, in that way she’s heroic I think.

ZS: There’s quite a few university courses now on creative writing as a discipline. Do you think that this is a good thing or does it run the risk of reversing some of the democratization of literature which has occurred recently (perhaps particularly in Scotland with Canongate and Rebel Inc), and putting literature back into an academic context?

AW: SORR I’M REAKIG UP HERE
Well I feel guilty about my suspicions because many good writers have come out of those workshops, especially in the U.S. where there seem to be millions of them. But I’m secretly appalled by the concept, I think writing is so intensely time consuming and private an activity there shouldn’t be much time for gurus and classes to attend in universities. I don’t think writing can be taught . . . you can be given pointers . . . be told to read certain books etc. but the only discoveries the writer makes are going to be solitary ones on the page. I see writing as an existential act, an axis between how you live your life and literature, the idea that you can institutionalise that scares me. It’s also a matter of time, it might take you ten years to find your style, the idea that a uni professor of creative writing can bring out the old stylistic KY jelly doesn’t convince me.

ZS: Do you think writers have a specific role in society to educate or agitate or produce art, or are they just doing a job like anyone else?

AW: FI COMPUTER
I think intelligence should be legalised, I think, as the poet Robin Robertson says, writers write for the void. I feel I make lonely cries and sometimes someone hears me, a writer can only follow the needs of the creatures of their imagination; if writers are going to write to formulas, be it the 19th century English novel or Soviet socialist realism (or Chinese) they will be doomed to artistic failure though they might flourish with royalties.

ZS: A. L. Kennedy recently brought out a book of poetry, and Irvine Welsh made that record. Have you considered forms other than prose with your writing, or been tempted to a complete change of medium?

AW: Well I mess around with oil and acrylic painting on large canvas. Abstract stuff. I’ve done a few on empty cigar tubes and I collect out of date credit cards so I’m going to paint on top of them. I’m doing one on top of Airfix models I’ve stuck to the canvas, I melted all the Airfix models into eerie shapes with a blow torch. I reckon they should sell for millions. I’m interested in other forms of writing. I’m working on an original screenplay and I publish the odd poem.

ZS: Do you think that in the future people will have stopped reading books, that attention spans will have decreased so much that everything has to be in visual and auditory fragments? Or that everything will be virtual and interactive?

AW: I HOPE COMPUTER HAVE ZERO ROLE I THE FUTURE SORRI THIS LAP TOP HAS REALLQUIT ALL THE KEOARD IS SEIZED TR TO SED THIS MADA MADA DO SED OUT A SEARCH PARTY
Nah, you don’t have to switch books on or log on, the tactile immediacy of a book in your greasy palm will never die. That doesn’t mean people will read good quality literature though. I don’t think the book is under serious threat, but literature is. People have been sounding the death of the book for too long, when cinema became huge in the 1950’s people predicted the end of the novel but movies actually lead to more novel reading. I think the “dumbing down” in culture is worrying . . . the appeal of channel 5 and all these tits and canned laugh game, the idea that “art” is just for pretentious wanks etc. etc. . . All that worries me. But virile art forms survive all kinds of upheavals. Even with a dying readership people would still write novels and some of them, great ones.

ZS: And are you working on the script for the film of Morvern Callar, and do you think it’ll translate well to a visual medium?

AW: I think Lynne Ramsay and Michael Caton Jones are the most exciting filmmakers to come out of Scotland since Bill Douglas so I’m over the moon they’re each adapting one of my novels. Lynne is still working on her screenplay of Morvern Callar in between her busyness with the international success of Ratcatcher which is surely one of the greatest films ever made in Scotland. Alan Sharp, the Scottish novelist and Hollywood screenwriter (Rob Roy, Night Moves, Ulzana’s Raid) is working on The Sopranos for Michael. Lynne and I will probably do a bit of work together on the final screenplay, dialect and that, but I really Lynne’s vision, she’s a real artist and I just want to go with her vision of the film not mine. She’s even said she’ll let me in on the editing so it should be exciting but with someone of Lynne’s integrity you’ve just got to let them make the movie they want.

“This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish!”

It was with these ironic words that an editor at J.G. Ballard’s publisher futilely urged the suppression of Crash over a quarter-century ago, a book which many have since come to see as a visionary masterpiece. Though perhaps the first, this unnamed editor was by no means the last person to be discomfited by Ballard’s nightmarish, frequently grotesque tale of a small cadre of car-crash fetishists prone to getting their sexual kicks by staging smashups which resulted in very-real injuries and deaths. And given the impending release of horror director David Cronenberg’s film adaptation, it seems a certainty that the moral outrage is due for an exponential increase; media mogul Ted Turner and British cabinet minister Virginia Bottomley have already registered their howls of righteous indignation.

Considering his being “beyond psychiatric help,” the amiable, articulate, and consummately-logical James Graham Ballard has managed pretty well: His output to date consists of fifteen novels, seventeen collections of stories and essays, and substantial critical work for esteemed British newspapers such as the Guardian, London Times, and The Independent. Moreover, Ballard has come to be seen as one of science fiction’s principal intellectual luminaries, and his work as perhaps the best argument for the genre’s consideration as “serious” literature. The prophetic Crash, with its prescient foreshadowing of western culture’s latter-day fixation upon violence as entertainment, attests to the author’s acuity as a social critic.

While early works such as The Drowned World brought Ballard fame, it was Crash that gained him infamy. The novel’s relentless probing of the intertwined psychologies of sex and violence, presented as a grandiose and hyperbolic panorama of crushed metal and battered bodies, immediately struck a chord of primal fear. “There are many things that people don’t like to be reminded of,” Ballard muses. “People are always surprised to discover in themselves that they covet their neighbor’s wife, or that they harbor small racist feelings; they automatically think, oh my God, I’m not worthy of myself. And they immediately turn away from it. But if you look at the entertainment culture that people amuse themselves with, it’s obvious that the car crash has a very powerful role to play in peoples’ imaginations…something is happening in the imagination that tends to entangle the elements of violence and sexuality, and it’s fed by this relentless flow of appealingly-violent imagery that we get in our movies. Crash is an attempt to follow these trends off the edge of the graph paper to the point where they meet. Basically the message is ‘So you think violence is sexy? OK, this is where you’re going.’ I see the ultimate effect of crash as cautionary, as a warning against the role of violence and sex in our entertainment culture and the way the two can become intertwined.”

The concept for Crash germinated in the social confusion of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period colored by the Kennedy assassination, Manson, and Vietnam. “Violence took the place of sex, I think, as the most exciting subject available to writers and filmmakers, and became sort of the key engine of the entertainment culture. The car crash came into its own. I remember writing in The Atrocity Exhibition about the psychology involved, and people dismissed it out of hand. They just refused to see.”

As a means of testing his hypotheses, Ballard presented an art exhibition at a London gallery in April, 1970 where the “works” on display were three wrecked cars. “The behavior of people who visited the gallery absolutely convinced me that I was onto something. At the opening, people got so drunk, and over the course of the month they were on display the cars were attacked, one of them was overturned. Nobody would have noticed these cars in the street outside, but because they were isolated beneath the white gallery lighting they triggered enormous, confused emotions. So I thought, this is the green light. And so I sat down and began to write Crash.”

Provoking enormous, confused emotions has always been a goal of Ballard’s work. The reasons for doing so go well beyond simple sensationalism, however; Ballard’s stated aim is honesty via the roundabout vehicle of fiction, an honesty intended to provoke movement towards the humane. “I see myself as a neutral observer; I’m not trying to impose some kind of private or personal vision on the world. All I’m doing is looking out and seeing what’s going on in the street. And all my fiction is a fiction of analysis, where I’ve tried to identify certain ongoing trends that seem to be apparent,” Ballard asserts. “I don’t think it took a great deal of prophetic skill to guess what was going to happen as the sixties and seventies unfolded; I could see all these social trends, with an entertainment culture that thrived on violence and sensation and a rootless urban and suburban population with nothing to do other than play with their own psychopathic fantasies. Modern technology, whether in the form of a motor car or a motorway or a high rise building, was empowering peoples’ worst impulses…the technology involved pandered to and facilitated the eruption of people’s worst natures.”

Ballard’s heightened sensitivity to violence, as well as the corollary themes of isolation and social chaos which permeate much of his work, may well have its roots in his childhood in wartime China. Born in Shanghai in 1930 to English parents, Ballard’s earliest years were spent in an expatriate’s suburban idyll, a comfortable enclave of large houses, swimming pools, and servants. With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937 and its subsequent metamorphosis into World War II, the Ballard family were removed to internment camps, and their colonial paradise was transformed into a killing field; from these experiences, Ballard wrote the semi-autobiographical Empire Of The Sun, which was subsequently adapted to film by Steven Spielberg. Ballard views his years in the camps as a painful education in the barbarous capabilities of humankind. “I don’t think you can go through the experience of war without one’s perceptions of the world being forever changed. The reassuring stage set that everyday reality in the suburban west presents to us is torn down; you see the ragged scaffolding, and then you see the truth beyond that, and it can be a frightening experience. The war came, I spent three years in the camp, and I saw adults under stress, some of them giving way to stress, some recovering and showing steadfast courage. It was a great education; when you see the truth about human beings it’s beneficial, but very challenging, and those lessons have stayed with me all my life.”

Now in his sixties, Ballard may be finally tempering his apocalyptic vision. Recent works such as 1994′s Rushing To Paradise, while retaining their author’s signature dry wit and moral imperitive, stop short of blooming into nightmare worlds such as those of Crash, High Rise and The Drowned World; since Empire Of The Sun, his books have taken gradual steps in the direction of humour, and even hope. Furthermore, having explored the distant future and his own difficult past, Ballard’s writing seems to be moving in ever-tighter concentric circles around the present-day reality that most would recognize, and his characters taking upon sympathetic foibles belying an underlyng humanity as well as their external neurotic drive.

Appearances would indicate that Ballard is cautiously closing in on a central, pivotal point, perhaps the wellspring of his fertile imagination. Asked if he knows what that point is likely to be when he finally homes in on it, he demurs: “I wonder if I ever will. Maybe that will be a mistake – sort of like going into analysis and getting yourself cured; one needs the sort of support system provided by the element of mystery about oneself.” Cured or not, the sense of wonder and mystery remains in his writing – indicating that, editors’ opinions aside, the Ballard method of shock therapy is working just fine.

There’s something wrong with Estrella Del Mar, the lazy, sun-drenched retirement haven on Spain’s Costa Del Sol. Lately this sleepy hamlet, home to hordes of well-heeled, well-fattened British and French expatriates, has come alive with activity and culture; the previously passive, isolated residents have begun staging boat races, tennis competitions, revivals of Harold Pinter plays, and lavish parties. At night the once vacant streets are now teeming with activity, bars and cafes packed with revelers, the sidewalks crowded with people en route from one event to the next.

Outward appearances suggest the wholesale adoption of a new ethos of high-spirited, well-controlled collective exuberance. But there’s the matter of the fire: The house and household of an aged, wealthy industrialist has gone up in flames, claiming five lives, while virtually the entire town stood and watched. There’s the matter of the petty crime, the burglaries, muggings, and auto thefts which have begun to nibble away at the edges of Estrella Del Mar’s security despite the guardhouses and surveillance cameras. There’s the matter of the new, flourishing trade in drugs and pornography. And there’s the matter of Frank Prentice, who sits in Marbella jail awaiting trial for arson and five counts of murder, and who, despite being clearly innocent, has happily confessed.

It is up to Charles Prentice, Frank’s brother, to peel away the onionlike layers of denial and deceit which hide the rather ugly truth about this seaside idyll, its residents, and the horrific crime which brought him here. But as is usually the case in a J.G. Ballard book, the truth comes with a price tag attached, and likely without any easing of discomfort for his principal characters.

Cocaine Nights marks a partial return on Ballard’s part to the provocative, highly-successful mid-career methodology employed in novels such as Crash and High Rise: after establishing himself as a science fiction guru in the 1960s, Ballard stylistically shifted gears towards an unnerving, futuristic variant on social realism in the 1970s. Both Crash and High Rise were what-if novels, posing questions as to what the likely results would be if our collective fascination with such things as speed, violence, status, power, and sex were carried just a little bit further: How insane, how brutal could our world become if we really cut loose?

Cocaine Nights asks a question better suited to the ’90s, the age of gated communities and infrared home security systems: Does absolute security guarantee isolation and cultural death? Conversely, is a measure of crime an essential ingredient in a vibrant, living, properly functioning social system? Is it true, as a character asserts, that “Crime and creativity go together, always have done,” and that “total security is a disease of deprivation”? Suffice to say that the answers presented in Nights will be anathema to moral absolutists; the world of Ballard’s fiction, like life in the hyperkinetic, relativistic 1990s, abounds with uncomfortable grey areas.

On the surface, Cocaine Nights is a whodunit and a race against time, but as it proceeds – and as preconceived conceptions of good and evil begin to dissolve – it evolves into a thoughtful, faintly frightening look at under-examined aspects of 1990s western society. As is his wont, Ballard confronts his readers with some faintly outlandish hypotheses unlikely to be embraced by many, but which nonetheless serve to provoke both thought and a bit of paranoia; it’s a method that Ballard has developed and refined on his own, and as usual, it propels his novel along marvellously.

Cocaine Nights doesn’t have either the broad sweep or brute impact of the landmark Crash, but it retains enough social relevance and low-key creepiness to more than satisfy Ballardphiles. As is often the case in Ballard’s alternate reality, it’s a given that his most appealing, human characters turn out to be the most twisted, and that even the most normal of events turn out to be governed by a perverse, malformed logic; that this logic turns out to be grounded in sound sociological and psychological principles is its most horrific feature.