![]() ![]() (The irony was not that the avant-garde were a traditionally city-dwelling tribe but that he was an urban type: well-informed, up-to-the-minute, angry.) If The Atrocity Exhibition was cited, it was for its penultimate item, "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan", and even that was cited for its irreverence, and used as fodder for allusive headlines. In the nickname 'seer of Shepperton' it was the image of the suburbs that cast the stronger spell. His language was flat (he even claimed not to have "thought much about style"). Later on, there was the memoir-novel Empire of the Sun, adapted by Spielberg, which belonged firmly to the middlebrow, another of progressive literature's mortal enemies. ![]() Ballard's early work - an idle consensus said - emerged from SF, one of progressive literature's mortal enemies. But I doubt it would have won at the time, not because of the possible competition-B S Johnson's House Mother Normal, Ann Quin's Passages, and Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat were all published within a year on either side-but because it took Ballard a long while to gain the recognition as an innovator alongside those writers. The Atrocity Exhibition, the book of definitions, "notes", dreams, and vignettes published by JG Ballard in 1970, now seems an obvious candidate for a retrospective Goldsmiths Prize. ![]()
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