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the sea, the drowned flowers that come back to the city, along with the corpses.
    Empire of the Sun
is a rich, complex, heartrending novel, in characteristically Ballardian prose – a prose with a curiously metallic quality, cold as steel, that makes the imagery shine out, as he wants it to, with the hallucinatory clarity of that of naive painters. The image of those paper flowers decorating the corpses, not of the Chinese dead, but of British sailors dying in the Yangtze River; the mask of flies on the face of the dead airman; the silvery shapes of the American bombers Jim sees from the corner of his eye when he is sick with fever, that are the emissaries of death.
    It is easy to think of
Empire of the Sun
as the logical culmination of a career, the book towards which Ballard has been working all his life. Since he is far too young to retire, to think that would be an error. The novel has the look of a significant change of direction for Ballard, yet its appearance of naturalism is only superficial – it is, once again, a triumph of the imagination. The imaginative recreation of that ‘terrible city’ and the resurrection of its teeming population of dead are to do with the notions of transformation that have always informed his work.
    It is hard to imagine – top that! – what he will do next. But, then, it always has been. Meanwhile, here is the fruit of that obsessiveness Ballard so much admires, the obsessive single-mindedness of, as he puts it, ‘long-incarcerated mental patients who remain totally faithful to their few obsessions throughout their long lives, the sort of dedication shown by Japanese soldiers hiding out in the jungle for 30-odd-years . . .’ The obsessive pursuit of his own imagery to its origins has brought us this riveting and sombre and, yes, funny (humour blacker than black, this time) and humane novel, that is the kind of novel we used to think we no longer had the energy to write, that Ballard was writing all the time.
    (1984)

•   12   •
Walter de la Mare:
Memoirs of a Midget
    Memoirs of a Midget
presents itself as the first-person account of the early life, in particular the tempestuous twentieth year in the life, of a Victorian gentlewoman who has the misfortune to be, although pretty and perfectly formed, of diminutive size. This year includes death, passionate infatuation, some months as a lion of high society, suicide, and attempted suicide. It ends in temporary madness. This summary gives the impression of melodrama yet
Memoirs of a Midget
seduces by its gentle charm and elegant prose. It may be read with a great deal of simple enjoyment and then it sticks like a splinter in the mind.
    Miss M.’s fictional autobiography is introduced with the nineteenth-century imitation-documentary device of an editor’s preliminary note. Here the reader learns something of Miss M.’s life after the end of her own narrative, and of her – not death, but vanishing. She has, she explains to her housekeeper in a note, been ‘called away’. Called away, perhaps, to a happy land where all are the same size as she, where she is not a stranger in a world designed for clumsy giants with sensibilities of a cruel clumsiness to match.
    For Miss M. is always a stranger in
this
world. She, literally, does not fit in. The novel is a haunting, elegiac, misanthropic, occasionally perverse study of estrangement and isolation. Miss M. herself describes her predicament: ‘Double-minded creature that I was and ever shall be; now puffed up with arrogance at the differences between myself and gross, common-sized humanity; now stupidly sensitive to the pangs to which by reason of these differences I have to submit.’ She may stand as some sort ofmetaphor for the romantic idea of the artist as perennial stranger, as scapegoat and outcast – the artist, indeed, as perpetual adolescent, with the adolescent’s painful sense of his own