The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1. Adam Thirlwell
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1 - Adam Thirlwell страница 4
Название: The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1
Автор: Adam Thirlwell
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Классическая проза
isbn: 9780007369386
isbn:
Although I think it’s also important to point out that, for all the international roaming of his fiction, from the Apartamentos California to Cannes, the true location is always, somehow, Britain. Just think, even, of ‘The Voices of Time’: that entropy is cosmic, sure, but it is also the entropy that Ballard discovered in the postwar suburbs of a dying empire. Britain, in fact, was the most modern country on earth, precisely because it was the world-leader in entropy – and therefore also the leader in ressentiment, rancour, sadness, twilight, concrete. Dystopia! You only needed to look around you: among the flyovers and multi-storey car parks in the rain.
In his later stories, this strange form of visionary politics became more and more pronounced, culminating in the late novels, beyond the chronology of this collection: his studies of financial hyper-reality in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, then the bourgeois darknesses of Millennium People and Kingdom Come. And it came with a technical shift. The interest in vocabulary formation that had marked his early stories gradually became a more overt interest in the general culture’s linguistic deformations. Ballard became the impresario of official registers: a story could be a simple exercise in style – like the punk brilliance of ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, which he wrote in 1968, soon after Reagan became Governor of California. The story is a carnival of vocabularies – the medical, the psychoanalytic, the opinion poll – gleefully stuffed with impermissible fantasy: ‘Multiple-track cine-films were constructed of “Reagan” in intercourse during (a) campaign speeches, (b) rear-end auto-collisions with one and three-year-old model changes, (c) with rear-exhaust assemblies, (d) with Vietnamese child-atrocity victims.’
With that kind of shock tactic, Ballard offered new possibilities to the short story: beyond the intricate psychology of the Chekhovian mode.
5
For instead, Ballard’s subject was the system: physically, the vast urban spaces and their freeways, and mentally the vast interior landscapes of psychosis and neurosis. In his Ronald Reagan extravaganza, Ballard first perceived how the era’s separate preoccupations converged, and were even mutually complicit: the virtual worlds of cinema, of politics, of analysis, were all forms of the same violence. And that’s why his late style is so tonally acrobatic. Each closed system was revealed as a version of another.
One of his last stories, ‘The Object of the Attack’, was written in 1984. As always, it has its patina of genre fiction (‘Events are moving on apace.’). But in this story of an assassination attempt, the reader can observe all Ballard’s obsessions reacting with each other, as inside some miniature and hyper-modern laboratory: the outward tone – British, and bourgeois – encloses violent energies, where the Royal Family, the American Presidency and Space Travel are ways of encoding a manic form of pathology.
But then, why not? A mandala is an image of the world, so in a way every story is a mandala, too. Which would mean, according to the terms of Ballard’s fiction, that every story is therefore also a cosmic clock – counting down the minutes to the final catastrophe.
London, 2014
I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us. Certainly I can’t believe I could make myself as ridiculous now, but then again, it might have been just Jane herself.
Whatever else they said about her, everyone had to agree she was a beautiful girl, even if her genetic background was a little mixed. The gossips at Vermilion Sands soon decided there was a good deal of mutant in her, because she had a rich patina-golden skin and what looked like insects for eyes, but that didn’t bother either myself or any of my friends, one or two of whom, like Tony Miles and Harry Devine, have never since been quite the same to their wives.
We spent most of our time in those days on the balcony of my apartment off Beach Drive, drinking beer – we always kept a useful supply stacked in the refrigerator of my music shop on the street level – yarning in a desultory way and playing i-Go, a sort of decelerated chess which was popular then. None of the others ever did any work; Harry was an architect and Tony Miles sometimes sold a few ceramics to the tourists, but I usually put a couple of hours in at the shop each morning, getting off the foreign orders and turning the beer.
One particularly hot lazy day I’d just finished wrapping up a delicate soprano mimosa wanted by the Hamburg Oratorio Society when Harry phoned down from the balcony.
‘Parker’s Choro-Flora?’ he said. ‘You’re guilty of overproduction. Come up here. Tony and I have something beautiful to show you.’
When I went up I found them grinning happily like two dogs who had just discovered an interesting tree.
‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Where is it?’
Tony tilted his head slightly. ‘Over there.’
I looked up and down the street, and across the face of the apartment house opposite.
‘Careful,’ he warned me. ‘Don’t gape at her.’
I slid into one of the wicker chairs and craned my head round cautiously.
‘Fourth floor,’ Harry elaborated slowly, out of the side of his mouth. ‘One left from the balcony opposite. Happy now?’
‘Dreaming,’ I told him, taking a long slow focus on her. ‘I wonder what else she can do?’
Harry and Tony sighed thankfully. ‘Well?’ Tony asked.
‘She’s out of my league,’ I said. ‘But you two shouldn’t have any trouble. Go over and tell her how much she needs you.’
Harry groaned. ‘Don’t you realize, this one is poetic, emergent, something straight out of the primal apocalyptic sea. She’s probably divine.’
The woman was strolling around the lounge, rearranging the furniture, wearing almost nothing except a large metallic hat. Even in shadow the sinuous lines of her thighs and shoulders gleamed gold and burning. She was a walking galaxy of light. Vermilion Sands had never seen anything like her.
‘The approach has got to be equivocal,’ Harry continued, gazing into his beer. ‘Shy, almost mystical. Nothing urgent or grabbing.’
The woman stooped down to unpack a suitcase and the metal vanes of her hat fluttered over her face. She saw us staring at her, looked around for a moment and lowered the blinds.
We sat back and looked thoughtfully at each other, like three triumvirs deciding how to divide an empire, not saying too much, and one eye watching for any chance of a double-deal.
Five minutes later the singing started.
At first I thought it was one of the azalea trios in trouble with an alkaline pH, but the frequencies were too high. They were almost СКАЧАТЬ