The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard

Does the Angle Between Two Walls have a Happy Ending?

J. G. Ballard has both been declared Britain's most important living novelist and dismissed as a marginal figure "beyond psychiatric help". He has earned praise and condemnation, written bestsellers and obscure avant-garde works, gained coveted prizes and prosecutions for obscenity. For forty years, his extraordinary work has moved between science fiction, apocalyptic visions, autobiography and fictions of the contemporary urban landscape. Prophet or pervert? How are we to judge his work?

In this book, Roger Luckhurst reads Ballard's fiction within a series of contexts, skillfully negotiating literary, philosophical and historical terrains in order to illustrate Ballard's central works. Luckhurst suggests that the extremity of the responses to texts such as The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash is a product of Ballard's occupation of an "impossible" space in the mechanisms that dictate literary judgements. At once science fiction and mainstream, popular and avant-garge, Ballard is seen as being in the 'angle between two walls". His fictions are awkward and provoking, it is suggested, in forcing us to confront the frameworks in which we come to judge the literary.