The Unlimited Dream Company

"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."