The Unlimited Dream Company
by J. G. Ballard
Buy on Amazon"A remarkable piece of invention, a flight from the world of the familiar and the real into the exotic universe of dream and desire." ― New York Times Book Review When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to have come back from the dead. Within hours everything in the dormitory suburb is transformed. Vultures invade rooftops, luxuriant tropical vegetation overruns the quiet avenues, and the local inhabitants are propelled by the young man’s urgent visions through ecstatic sexual celebrations toward an apocalyptic climax.…
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"It’s absolutely amazing. It operates purely by dream logic. A guy called Blake has stolen a Cessna and crashed it into the Thames, near Shepperton. When he emerges from the plane, there’s a scene of characters that are like Jungian archetypes: a Jesuit priest, who’s a sort of father figure; a doctor, who is sort of like a mother… Anyway, he moves through Shepperton, which is where Ballard lived, and it’s never clear whether he is dead or alive. There’s a body in the Cessna: is it Blake? We don’t know. There’s no explanation for anything. Images succeed one another, it’s really rich and also erotic in the sense that it’s steeped in it, the way that dreams can be sexual on a weird level that you can’t put your finger on. Sometimes it’s literal: Blake wants to mate with everybody in Shepperton. It’s astonishing. He sustains it for a whole book. It’s visually stunning. Shepperton is transformed into a jungle. He is transformed into a whale at one point, into birds… It’s metamorphic, fluid, properly surrealist. It’s not always mentioned. Empire of the Sun and Crash are the big noises. And High Rise —the ones that have been adapted into films. I think it gets slightly sidelined. But there are people who go for it."
The Best J. G. Ballard Books · fivebooks.com