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"I'm about to reach out and touch the infinite"

Adapted by director Richard Curson Smith from J.G. Ballard's short story 'The Enormous Space', Anthony Sher stars as 'Gerald Ballantyne' who decides to cut himself off from the outside world and live off the contents of his house.

We follow Gerald through his slow transformation / degredation via his video diary and in the more traditional manner as he destroys many of the trappings of his former life, navigates hunger and as the house expands and reveals it's hidden dimensions to him.

"Are you on drugs, Gerald?"

Obviously Ballard has a fondness for using buildings as microcosms - as in High-Rise - and there is an obvious ecological metaphor here as Gerald voraciously consumes the limited resources of his 'world'.  Essentially a one man play - peppered with occasional visits from the outside - Sher is fantastic as the deteriorating Gerald, pragmatic in the face of hunger, fearful of intrusions from the terrifying outside world and astonished by the revelations being presented to him.  It's a performance that elevates what is already a bold and artful creation made with love on an obviously limited budget that Curson Smith has simply to great effect allowing us to share, at both first and second hand, Gerald's experiences.

NB - I'm not much for trigger warnings but cat and worm lovers beware.

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The Garden of Time

J.G. Ballard
4th Estate

Recently used as the theme to the cavalcade of shallow excess that is the Met Gala this promotional chapbook (heralding a new series of reissues) of Ballard's short story - originally written in 1962 - of the death of beauty amidst the inexorable advance of the masses and their crass consumerist ways was a delightful read.

The story of a husband and wife holding back the inevitable by plucking the flowers of time from their garden in a knowingly futile attempt to delay the advancing hordes.  These immaculate but anachronistic lovers, with their elaborate clothes, beautiful music, and perfectly curated collections, fearful of change and trapped in the amber of an unchanging, untainted, romanticised past, are eventually swamped by the advance as time marches ever on, trampling all before it except, perhaps, love.

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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.

The Drought

J.G. Ballard
Triad Granada

The world is threatened by dramatic climate change in this highly acclaimed and influential novel, one of the most important early works by the bestselling author of 'Cocaine Nights' and 'Super-Cannes'. Water. Man's most precious commodity is a luxury of the past. Radioactive waste from years of industrial dumping has caused the sea to form a protective skin strong enough to devastate the Earth it once sustained. And while the remorseless sun beats down on the dying land, civilisation itself begins to crack. Violence erupts and insanity reigns as the remnants of mankind struggle for survival in a worldwide desert of despair.

I've read one and a bit Ballards before this, a novella called 'Running Wild' and an aborted attempt at an audiobook version of 'The Drowned World' which I didn't take to or rather I didn't take to the reader.  Recently though two events coincided, I finally got round to watching 'High Rise' and then two days later I stumbled across a huge stack of his books in a charity shop.  Of them all this is the one that spoke loudest to me and so I dove straight in.

In contrast to that previous novel here it's lack of water that's the problem as the worlds oceans have, as a result of pollution, acquired a 'skin' which retards rainfall and causes an apocalyptic worldwide drought.  Through this increasingly parched world we follow Dr Charles Ransom as he drifts from his home to the coast and back again.  Along the way we meet various eccentrics all of whom adapt to the increasingly brutal world in their own idiosyncratic ways.  In many ways I was reminded of the oddball Spike Milligan movie 'The Bed Sitting Room' as a cast of larger than life characters pantomime the creations of their new, flawed and doomed societies amidst the salty bones of the old one.

It made for a fascinating read.  I found myself losing track of the characters occasionally and the plot is thin to say the least but this is very much a character piece and watching the cold and detached Ransom retain his self in the face of the violent, the venal and the insane in a brutal new world was compelling.

Buy it here -  The Drought

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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Running Wild

J.G. Ballard
Flamingo

The thirty-two adult members of an exclusive residential community in West London are brutally murdered, and their children are abducted, leaving no trace. Through the forensic diary of Dr. Richard Greville, Deputy Psychiatric Adviser to the London Metropolitan Police, the brutal details of the massacre that has baffled the entire police department unfold.

I've only ever tried to dig into one other Ballard story before, an audiobook of The Drowned World which really didn't grab me.  I'm a creature of fickle whims as far as books are concerned, if the mood's not right it goes back on the shelf and the mood wasn't right.  I recently stumbled on this little novella in a charity shop and the mood was definitely right.

The story tells of the investigation of a mass murder at an ultra modern housing estate and the apparent kidnapping of all the children.  The story unfolds through the report of investigating psychiatrist, Richard Greville, who has been brought in to help think around the problem. Unfortunately it's not a problem that needs a lot of thinking around and you'll have probably worked the problem out within the first couple of pages.  It's then a matter of waiting for him to catch up.

So, with the whodunnit aspect in the toilet, this is a polemic, a castigation of the nanny state, a rebuttal against the eye of Big Brother and a prediction of the lengths people will go to to be free of tyranny and truthfully it's better that way.

Buy it here -  Running Wild