A first person narrative from what seems like a dangerous psychotic as he describes crashing a stolen private plane into the Thames in the suburb region of Shepperton and his rescue/resurrection from the crash. Once revived he begins gradually to exhibit godlike powers -changing into animals, transformative transgressive sexual energy and the capacity for flight. His powers transform the inhabitants of the suburban community. As the title suggests every dream desire is made manifest as the narrator reshapes Shepperton in his own image. Could he be dreaming the whole thing before he dies, as in Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, or Lynch's recent films Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive? It never seems to be articulated.
Crash or The Atrocity Exhibition are always talked about as his most transgressive works but they seem like intellectual exercises in comparison to this work which in it's poetic excess was as wild for me to experience as something like Lautremont's Maldoror or Jodorowsky's film El Topo. Considering that the narrator's name is Blake, it soon becomes clear that Ballard is referencing William Blake, and that's probably an important key with regard to how to read this one. I'll have to bone up on my Blake in coming months.
A wild ride of impossible excess. Upon reflection, it occurs to me that this novel could be considered a perverse cousin of The Lathe of Heaven.

Up for the John W Campbell Memorial Award in 1980. ( )

http://benjohnskinner.blogspot.com/20... ( )

I'm starting to get the spooky feeling that Ballard isn't Ballard at all, but another man of that name. Or, less cryptically, that the apex of Ballard-ism that delighted me so much and that has sent me looking for his other stuff wasn't actually written by him at all. (I'll be able to check in just over a month, when I'm reunited with several boxes of books in storage with my parents.)

Anyway, this novel is much more in line with what I understand the public perception of Ballard to be: it's deliberately shocking, especially regarding sex, and describes an urban landscape that is overtly intertwined with the pysche of the protagonist. I didn't enjoy it very much.

The point, in so far as I understand it, is a sort of mystical/theological picture that Ballard is painting of a continued existence after death, a teleological developement into a higher form of life. It's this notion of "higher order of being", certainly intended in a moral sense, which justifies much of the deliberate shock tactics; we're presented with actions which are distasteful, and deliberately so, but which the protagonist justifies by his inner sense of their rightness. It's hard to see whether we're supposed to agree with him that our morals are outmoded or decide that he is still hallucinating and be horrified or read the whole thing as irrealis (he's dead, after all) or what. I couldn't really muster the enthusiasm to try and figure out what was expected of me, especially since the character was so blandly unappealing when he wasn't in the grip of his apotheosis.

Not recommended. ( )

A really really annoying book - supposed to be surreal, which it is, but not in a Kafka type way, just in a really annoying way... didn't bother finishing it which is v. unusual for me/ ( )