Category: Books

Ben Goldacre masterfully dismantles the dodgy science behind some of the great drug trials, court cases and missed opportunities of our time, but he also goes further: out of the bullshit, he shows us the fascinating story of how we know what we know, and gives us the tools to uncover bad science for ourselves.

You’re twelve years old. Your mother’s a junkie and an alcoholic, your father might as well be dead. You can’t read, you can’t write, and you don’t go to school. While most kids your age are playing kiss-catch and computer games, you’re sniffing glue. An average day means sitting around a bonfire with your mates smoking drugs or stealing cars. You’ve spent years running away from children’s homes, but now you can run to the shed, where the crew is your family.

In June, I mentioned that I had just finished John Rechy’s autobiography About My Life and the Kept Woman. Now, I’ve finished J. G. Ballard’s autobiography Miracles of Life. They are polar opposites in the style of writing, but I loved them both. Rechy’s writing often verges on being prose poetry, while Ballard’s seems almost dry and matter-of-fact in comparison. And yet, Ballard has this knack of writing apparently very simple direct prose that nonetheless gets to the heart of the matter.

It’s clear that his youth in Shanghai shaped both the man and the writer. The themes of many of his stories – the drained swimming pools, deserted streets, atrocity as entertainment – have their roots in what he observed as a boy. In later life, the work that he did, first as a medical student, and then as a writer, enabled him to deal with the impact of both his childhood and adult experience of the world.

My years in the dissection room were important because they taught me that though death was the end, the human imagination and the human spirit could triumph over our own dissolution. In many ways my entire fiction is the dissection of a deep pathology that I had witnessed in Shanghai and later in the post-war world, from the threat of nuclear war to the assassination of President Kennedy, from the death of my wife to the violence that underpinned the entertainment culture of the last decades of the century. Or it may be that my two years in the dissecting room were an unconscious way of keeping Shanghai alive by other means.

As Sam Leith wrote in his review of Miracles of Life:

If Ballard sometimes reads like Mapp and Lucia on a day-trip to Belsen – reader, there is a good reason.

Despite the dystopian majority of his fiction, Ballard comes across in his autobiography as a genuinely nice man, who dotes on his children (they are the "miracles of life" of the book’s title). And I don’t think that this is a case of an author presenting himself in a favourable light, this seems to be the measure of the man. The book closes with a two-page chapter in which he explains that this will be his last work. He has advanced prostate cancer.

ARVs reduce people’s viral load, she agrees, making them less likely to infect someone else – as long as they don’t miss a single dose. "But it also keeps them alive longer, and healthy enough to want to have sex. You only have to look at the experience of the UK or US gay communities where we’ve had more or less universal access to ARVs for at least eight or nine years, and the number of new infections are rising. More people are living longer with HIV, and there is what we call behavioural disinhibition: ‘Fuck the condoms, I don’t need them any more, because if he’s positive he’ll be on drugs, so he probably won’t infect me. And if I do get infected, it would be annoying, but not the end of the world.’

 

"But having Aids is not a picnic. Yes, it’s great that all this stuff on treatment is happening. But it becomes all the more urgent to have effective prevention. And that’s not happening."  

I’ve just finished John Rechy’s autobiography About My Life and the Kept Woman, and can thoroughly recommend it. Although, perhaps "autobiography" is too fixed a term. The frontispiece bears the warning: This is not what happened; it is what is remembered. Its sequence is the sequence of recollection. And indeed, the book feels as though the reader is inhabiting the author’s dream; for the most part solid, but now and then turning into myth.

The "kept woman" refers to Marisa Guzman, mistress of Augusto de Leon. A person whom the 12-year old Rechy saw, almost as an apparition, at his sister’s wedding, and whose image and mannerisms he never forgot. Again and again the memory of his meeting her and watching her smoke her cigarette recurs as a leitmotif throughout his subsequent life. The same moment also transfixes and shapes a girl, Alicia Gonzales, whose story unfolds as a counterpoint, told as gossip by Rechy’s beloved sister, to his own. The climax, when the two meet as adults in a San Francisco restaurant, is again dreamlike and ultimately disastrous for one of them.

I loved it.

In a way it shows the lengths that human beings will go to survive, the instinct for survival is intensely strong, no doubt about that, people will give up everything: every shred of dignity, every dream, every illusion, they will give up their most cherished fantasies, just to live for another half-an-hour. It’s a terrible thing to have to face but it’s true — war is a corrupting experience, it’s corrupting in the sense that violence is quite seductive, it has an appeal, In that, you can understand a world entirely given over to brutality and violence, whereas, sort of, peace — civilised life in the everyday sense of the term — is much more ambiguous, in fact, because we keep discovering there are things about ourselves that don’t quite accord with this notion that we are — civilised inheritors of the whole enlightenment tradition, and that we live in welfare societies and, you know, care for each other, but then something happens that reminds us that maybe it’s not quite that straightforward — war is very corrupting because it is so clear cut — people have a ruthlessness about the need to survive that is unmistakable really.