In chapter 15 the narrator dives into the River Thames at Shepperton and turns into a whale. He cavorts in the sun-emblazoned water and his example inspires the good citizens of Shepperton to follow suit. From the park adjoining the river a young man throws off his shirt and trousers, dives into the river and is changed into a swordfish. A woman in tennis gear slips into the water and is turned into a graceful sturgeon. An elderly woman and her husband are pushed into the river by laughing teenagers and are transformed into a pair of dignified groupers. A dozen children jump in and are changed into a shoal of silver minnows.
The Unlimited Dream Company is like that all the way through, weird and visionary things happen on every page for no reason.
Complete lack of narrative logic
Ballard’s disaster novels – Drowned World, Drought and Crystal World – have a kind of personal, psychological appeal: a disaster occurs and part of the complex pleasure of reading about it is, on some level, the way the reader correlates what is happening with their own guess or sense of what is likely. If the world is flooded, then is it likely that x or y would happen? How would people behave? How would I react?
And then the stories follow a certain logic, almost always Ballard’s familiar one of entropy and decay – the protagonists of all three disaster novels go mad but the stepping stones of their descent are carefully marked; there is a narrative and psychological logic to the course of events and Ballard artfully arranges significant incidents and twists to take the reader along with him on the journey.
In The Unlimited Dream Company the whole idea of narrative logic is for long stretches completely abandoned. There’s a basic set-up but after that, anything goes.
Blake steals plane, crashes in river, drowns, comes ashore, hallucinates
The basic set-up only takes about five pages. A disturbed young man named Blake was expelled from school for his sexual irregularities, has had various odd jobs, finally working at Heathrow Airport, and from here he one day steals a Cessna light aircraft, having previously chatted up small-plane pilots and blagged his way onto a few trips with them. He’s picked up enough to know how to take off but not about how to actually fly, and so scoots low over the ground for only a mile or so before hitting a tree in a park beside the Thames. The plane’s tail is ripped off and the rest of the plane crashes into the river and quickly sinks.
Blake comes ashore transfigured into a god, angel, bird, fish, visionary
Blake swims from the wreck and stumbles up the bank and onto the lawn of an impressive mock-Tudor mansion, watched by five figures who become highly symbolic and meaningful: young attractive Dr Miriam St Cloud, who is supervising three small children, one of whom is blind, one who has Downs Syndrome, one whose legs are in metal clamps; the older Mrs St Cloud who is watching from an upstairs window; the town’s vicar, Father Wingate.
From this point onwards the text is bewildering, not in its formal structure – it’s divided into conveniently short chapters, each with an appropriate title – nor in the actual prose, which is – as always with Ballard – formal and correct, with no slang or swearwords.
It’s that every paragraph contains the very weird and the uncanny, and that the sequence of events follows little if any logic. When Blake tries to escape from Shepperton by walking over the footbridge, the field which leads to it keeps getting wider and wider, eventually so wide that he cannot see the bridge anymore. When he gets in a rowing boat to cross the river, the harder he rows, the wider the river becomes. As he walks down the street, exotic flowers bloom in his footsteps. He spends the first night at the big St Cloud house where:
1. The older Mrs St Cloud comes to his room, Blake is naked in bed, one thing leads to another, and they have sex, but very rough sex, him manhandling her into various positions, while she drinks the blood from his still-bleeding knuckles.
2. Later that night he has a wild dream in which he is transformed into a condor and takes flight over the sleeping town of Shepperton, only for almost all its inhabitants to also be transformed into birds and come flying up into the sky to meet him.
None of this means anything or moves the narrative forward, because the narrative doesn’t seem to have any particular place to go. It just piles one surreal episode on top of another. When Blake arrives the town church next morning it is to discover that the birds of his dream were true – it did happen – the town’s inhabitants did turn into birds and flock the skies – and some of them tore off the numerals on the church tower clock, in order to abolish the past.
A plot of sorts
Instead of a plot the narrator has one or two concerns which keep recurring. 1. Blake wants to find out whoever seems to have given him the kiss of life after he’d blundered ashore and collapsed. Whoever it was had big hands which bruised his chest, so he tends to measure the hands of all the characters he meets.
2. Dr Miriam early on blurts out to him the shock revelation that Blake was trapped inside the cockpit of the plane, trapped underwater for eleven minutes! In other words, he must have died. He must be a dead man. A ghost. Yet Blake remembers swimming ashore and angrily rejects the suggestion. Later, swimming over the drowned Cessna in the form of a frolicking whale, he looks down and sees a man still trapped in the cockpit. Is it him, his corpse, or some double?
3. He keeps saying he wants to leave Shepperton, and makes repeated half-hearted attempts to do so, but in the next paragraph or chapter expresses the conviction that he has been sent to Shepperton for a purpose, to liberate the inhabitants from their shackles, to set them free, freedom envisaged as a series of ever-weirder concepts: at one stage he seems to use his magic to make them all strip naked and cavort in the street with each other, wife swapping, young maidens inviting passing young men to join them on the beds in shop windows. An orgy, fair enough. But in a later sequence he persuades the entire town that they can fly and leads them one by one into the air until the entire population is flying high high over the Thames Valley, before he returns them peacefully to earth. In the weirdest version, Blake incorporates people by somehow assimilating them into his body, merging their bodies with his until they have been kind of sucked inside him: he does this to a few unsuspecting individuals, and then to the entire town.
The point is, If this were a more traditional novel, some of this might matter and provide important clues to what is going on – but in this novel, that kind of rationality and logic emphatically does not apply. It is a sustained fantasia, 200 pages of delirious hallucination, the possibility that the narrator is dead not a matter of concern as it might be in a ghost story, but instead one more trippy idea which is just part of an unending flow of meaningless and weird events which unfold with a dissociated stoned logic of their own.
Towards the end Blake finally gets his way and sets himself and Miriam up as some kind of god figures. She wears a wedding dress (all the women in the town have become obsessed with sex and pregnancy, partly in response to Blake’s overwhelming sexual urgency) and he has been crowned by the town’s inhabitants with a complicated and heavy headpiece made from bird’s feathers attached to enormous wings and both of them – here’s where it gets trippy – are hovering off the ground above the altar in the local church, while the population, also I think hovering off the ground, are worshipping and venerating them.
But here’s the thing: into this scene erupts Stark, a character we’ve been introduced to right from the start who maintains a run-down funfair and is seen at various points maintaining spooky circus rides, hunting the myriad exotic birds which Blake has brought to infest Shepperton and, finally, trying to dredge up the crashed Cessna. Anyway, Stark erupts into the church and proceeds to shoot both Blake and Miriam through the heart. They crash to the floor. Miriam really does seem to be dead, he skin slowly yellowing and flies coming to lay eggs in it. Blake also appears to have died but not in any ordinary sense, as he carries on narrating the novel, although all the colour, the tropical vegetation and the exotic birds start to pale and die as if his power has all waned.
By this stage, nothing surprises the reader any more and, I’m afraid, none of it seems to matter.
First-person narrative
Part of the reason it’s such a strange and disorientating book is that it’s told by a first-person narrator. Almost all Ballard’s novels and stories are told in the third person, and not any old third person, but in a voice which is dry, clinical and detached. So there is usually a dynamic contrast between the events being described – such as the weird psychological states entered by the protagonists of the disaster novels or the extreme psychological degradation of the figures in High Rise – and the detached and formal prose of the omniscient narrator.
But here the first-person narrator is the one undergoing the extreme hallucinations and dissociated effects and so the reader is thrown right into the deep end of his trippy, surreal visions and delusions and compulsions and there is something, in the end, exhausting and at the same time, utterly disbelievable about the experience.
Lots of sexual fantasy
The narrator is plagued by sexual thoughts, feelings and urges quite as much as the narrator of the much more famous Crash. They are so heavily mixed up with his general hallucinatory state as to be less prominent but it’s very much there. Blake fantasises about having sex with Dr Miriam while she’s still treating him, actually does have sex with her mother who he nearly kills he’s so violent with her, fantasises about impregnating every single female inhabitant of Shepperton, as he walks down the street eyes every single woman with a view to sex, is permanently conscious of his semi-erect penis.
In one scene Blake is so turned on by the hind quarters of a deer that he considers mounting it, and in another, deliberately shocking scene, early on holds the little girl among the three playing children fiercely against his loins in an overtly sexual embrace.
I knew then that I would stay in this small town until I had mated with everyone there, the women, men and children, their dogs and cats, the caged birds in their front parlours, the cattle in the water meadow, the deer in the park, the flies in this bedroom had fused us together into a new being. (Chapter 13)
So the lead character is continually thinking about his penis and imagining having sex with more or less anything that moves and yet these sexual feelings aren’t anywhere as prominent as in Crash because: 1. they are swamped by the weirdness of events 2. they are not enacted, they remain perfervid fantasies.
Already responding to the nervous irritation of this Sunday morning light, I felt a new surge of sexual potency… I wanted to celebrate the light that covered this still drowsing town, spill my semen over the polite fences and bijou gardens, burst into the bedrooms where these account executives and insurance brokers lazed over their Sunday papers, and copulate at the foot of their beds with their night-sweet wives and daughters.
Whereas the sex fantasies in Crash are harsh and brutal, the ones here are so exaggerated as to be laughable, almost sweet.
By coupling with [the elderly patients waiting outside the closed clinic], with the fallow deer in the park, with the magpies and starlings, I could release the light waiting behind the shutter of reality each of them bore before him like a shield. (Chapter 14)
At some moments the text’s endless circling around this little town with its high street, church and recurring characters reminded me a little of Under Milkwood and the endlessly recurring sexual urges are so fantastical as to seem fantasies, harmless.
I dreamed of repopulating Shepperton, seeding in the wombs of its unsuspecting housewives a retinue of extravagant beings, winged infants and chimerised sons and daughters, plumed with the red and yellow feathers of macaws, antlered like the deer and scaled with the silver skins of rainbow trout, their mysterious bodies would ripple in the windows of the supermarkets and appliance stores. (Chapter 14)
Semen everywhere
That said, anyone who is uncomfortable with the word ‘semen’ should avoid reading this book, semen is a recurring substance, especially in the middle chapters. Here Blake abruptly turns into a stag, antlers sprout from his head and he proceeds to mount every deer in sight, which is quite a few, his semen sticking to their fur and his.
In the next chapter, restored to human form again, Blake walks through Shepperton naked and masturbating pretty much continually, scattering his semen across the pavement and wherever it lands wreaths of vibrantly coloured tropical flowers burst from the pavement.
People turning into birds
‘There’s a vulture on the lawn. Look, two white vultures.’
In Ballard’s early story, Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer (1965) the narrator dresses in the eviscerated thorax, wings and feathers of a giant seabird. An unexpected element of High Rise (1975) is the fact that up at the top of the eponymous building its architect, Anthony Royal, tends a flock of seagulls which perch along the railings and antenna of the building, waiting for scraps of food, sometimes swooping down inside the building to terrify the traumatised inhabitants.
Well, birds are to the fore here again, in the dazzling chapter where, in the depths of the night, Blake is transformed into a giant bird and flies up over the rooftops of Shepperton, and finds himself joined by the night-time bird forms of all the town’s sleeping inhabitants. Next morning unusual birds are everywhere in evidence, a brutal fulmar, a colourful macaque, pelicans, two white vultures, orioles and so on, and from then until the end of the book, vivid and exotic birds throng the town and the text.
Over-excitement
I noticed in My Dream of Flying to Wake Island (1975) that the word ‘calm’ is used a lot. The narrator needs to be ‘calmed down’ a lot, the implication being that he becomes unhealthily over-excited, a symptom of his mental disturbance. Same here: every couple of pages someone else is trying to calm Blake down or he himself realises he’s becoming feverishly over-excited and attempts to calm himself down.
Abandoned planes in Ballard’s fiction
Small flying machines seemed to be important to Ballard at this period: My Dream of Flying to Wake Island (1975) is all about a mentally disturbed astronaut who becomes obsessed with digging a ruined World War Two bomber out of the sand dune where it’s become buried. Low-Flying Aircraft (1975) as the name suggests, rotates around a character who takes off from a half-ruined airfield each day to herd the few surviving unmutated cattle to a safe zone up in the mountains. The Ultimate City (1975) is told by a narrator who builds and flies a glider from his post-industrial commune into the heart of the abandoned city and there persuades a gifted engineer to help him on the promise that he will teach him how to fly; which is how the story ends, with the engineer flying off in the reconditioned glider.
So this story about a disturbed young man who steals then crashes a small plane fits right in to the theme which seemed to concern Ballard at this period.
LSD and light imagery
Ten feet from me the sand glittered with silver light, a dissolving mirror leaking into the river.
When you take acid, light and the quality of visual stimuli assume a power and importance which is impossible to convey to people who haven’t experienced it. It is a transcendent, shattering experience. Most of the hallucinations are visual, a deep sense of dazzlingly bright colours fragmented into an infinite number of points or cells, pulsing and rotating like a living kaleidoscope which seem to enter your central nervous system directly without the need of any external senses. The multicoloured lights are right inside your brain, they are the fabric of your existence.
Each leaf was a shutter about to swing back and reveal a miniature sun, one window in the immense advent calendar of nature. I could see the same light in deer elms.
The text of The Unlimited Dream Company is continually reverting to descriptions of the light, sunlight, light off water, light is continually depicted as unnatural, weird, intense, angled and refracted and dazzling, even minor details are acid-tinged, throughout.
The lawn glistened like chopped glass.
The book reads like a description of one extended, madly delirious acid trip.
Repetition
I think the most harmful aspect of the book is its repetitivity. Maybe if you consciously decide to write a book which will be a phantasmagoria, which will proceed with a dreamlike logic instead of a rational narrative, then one part of that is rising above the traditional narrative need for forward momentum, and for individual events to be unique and have a special significance. Not to be afraid, in other words, of things recurring, as they very often do in dreams.
Thus the reader begins to get the sense that some things happen over and over – like humans changing into birds or Blake absorbing other people. Certainly the narration circles round and round and round the same parts of central Shepperton.
But for the reader who is not on drugs it got a little boring when Blake was alive, then dead, then we’re told he’s alive, then he’s shot dead, except he’s still alive.
Repetition may be what happens in dreams, and when you’re in a dreamlike state can seem rather wonderful – but when you’re fully awake and alert, repetition can quite quickly become just plain boring.
Thus the scene where Blake incorporates another human being into his own body, not by eating her but by kind of pressing her against him till she merges into his body – that scene could have been the centrepiece of a horror or science fiction story by a different writer. But here it is just one among many marvels and – crucially – it happens multiples times.
He does it once, he does it twice and then at some point he appears to do it to the entire population of Shepperton which, as a result, he appears to be carrying around inside the capacious landscape of his body, and then… he lets them all out again, one by one, emerging stunned into the acid-bright sun and the multi-coloured foliage… except for a handful of children he keeps inside, much to the brief anger of their mothers… and then, later, he does it again, luring a teenager into the back of a limousine in the town’s multi-storey car park (shades of Crash) and does it again.
My point being this extraordinary event doesn’t seem to have any consequences, doesn’t lead anywhere, unhappens as easily as it happened, and then happens again for no particular reason. Eventually this sense of complete inconsequentiality wears the reader down and I really struggled to care enough about any of the characters or the narrative to manage to finish reading it.
In the end Blake is shot dead hovering above the altar, but carries on living although a lot of his magic seems to desert him. He staggers to the grave the three handicapped children made for him some chapters earlier. The authorities are trying to get into Shepperton with helicopters hovering overhead and the army around the perimeter trying to break through the thick barricade of bamboo and other tropical plants which by this stage surround and infest the little town. Then Blake lets all the townspeople go, I think.
The Unlimited Dream Company is an extraordinary farrago, it’s amazing his publishers let it be published, and it signals some kind of mental watershed. Ballard really let himself go in this book, he gave in to a kind of carefree, heedless side of his daemon, stopped worrying about plausibility or narrative logic.
The absence of any logic or restraint make you realise how important those qualities of restraint and discipline had been to his earlier books, which all felt taut and focused and driven, and so capture the reader and drive us along with the narrative.
The Unlimited Dream Company marks the start of a steep decline in the quality of Ballard’s writing which, from this point onwards, becomes increasingly lightweight, silly, self-parodic and long.
If the Atrocity Exhibition is gripping because it consists of condensed novels, his books from the 1980s onwards feel increasingly expanded – extended, uncondensed, long and inconsequential.
Credit
‘The Unlimited Dream Company’ by J.G. Ballard was published by Jonathan Cape in 1979. Page references are to the 1991 Paladin Books paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.
Related links
Related reviews
- J.G. Ballard reviews
- Science fiction reviews
Books & Boots 