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JG Ballard's Apocalyptic Art
In Empire of the Sun, published 40 years ago, the great novelist turned his childhood experiences in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp into a form of personal liberation.
Freedom is found not in bourgeois autonomy, a stately progress through successive phases of life, but in situations that shatter our idea of linear time and force us to relinquish our beliefs about the future and the past. His first successful novel, The Drowned World(1962), set in a London turned into a tropical lagoon by global warming that has rendered much of the planet humanly uninhabitable, is recognised as a pioneering work of post-apocalyptic fiction. In The Kindness of Women(1991), a sequel to Empire of the Sun, Ballard writes movingly of how after settling in England he found succour in family life with his wife – who died tragically of pneumonia in 1964 – and bringing up his beloved children.
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