Starsky & Hutch by J. G. Ballard

Ballardian has posted the winning entries of the competition for the best pastiche of the writing style of J. G. Ballard. The task was to write a 500 word extract from an imagined novelisation of Starsky & Hutch as Ballard would write it.

 

There is something about Ballard’s prose that makes it unmistakeable, and the winner and runner-up of the competition have delivered the true essence of the style.

 

I’ve started Ballard’s latest – Kingdom Come – and while I’m only on page 43 at the moment, I’ve found it a rattling good read, although the reviews have been mixed. From my point of view, all his usual motifs are there, of course, but he has lovingly burnished his prose on the whetstone of his preceding novels, and the result (so far, and to me) is numinous. Ballard strikes me as a novelist analogue of Mahler, who really (it seems to me) wrote only one giant symphony, but in ten parts.

 

My problem at the moment is a question of so many books, so little time. I have too many books on the go at the moment (Kingdom Come, Breaking the Spell, Genetic Destinies, Unspeak, Don’t Tell Mum, Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew, and The Year of Magical Thinking). Then there’s a whole pile of books building up that are clamouring to be read: Evil in Modern Thought (An Alternative History of Philosophy), The Kite Runner, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear, Be Near Me, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, A Game of Thrones, White Mughals, The Vanquished Gods and Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation – to name but a few… Help!