Whose story is this? What is it about? (p. 395)

Nina Allan writes this almost four hundred pages into The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds Of J. G. Ballard, but the reader will have already been pondering these questions for some time.

They may even have been pondering the nature of this work since seeing the front cover and its enticing strapline: “3 SF writers, two deaths, one attempt to turn back time.” But how many books is this? Not one, despite the physical artefact that sits on my desk beside me. Its front and back covers, its table of continents, its index—they are all an illusory scaffolding for what is three books in an overcoat. This makes The Illuminated Man a unique—uniquely moving and uniquely frustrating—read.

The first book—and also the worst book—belongs to Christopher Priest, the British science fiction writer who died in 2024 whilst working on The Illuminated Man. He is an important novelist, both within science fiction (as author of The Inverted World [1974], The Prestige [1995] and The Separation [2002] amongst others) and in British literature generally (as part of Granta’s original Best of Young British Novelists list alongside Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie). His biography of J. G. Ballard was to be his first significant work of non-fiction.

Priest helpfully lays out his motivation for the book in the introduction.

I contend that Ballard was one of the most important writers in English in the twentieth century […] However, I believe he has so far not been afforded the final step: the acknowledgement of true and permanent greatness. (p. 9)

[…] This book is a celebration of the work of one of the most varied, unpredictable and entertaining authors of the decades that covered the end of the twentieth century. But it is also an attempt to understand the Ballardian effect by closely examining his work  and the aspects of his life which fed subtly into the work. (p. 10)

But he also returns to his motivation later in the book too:

This book is a work of biography, focused on the life and work of one writer. It is not a psychological analysis, nor an investigation […] My concern throughout this book is to examine and evaluate the literary work J. G. Ballard produced in his lifetime, taking into account only known events or experiences that might have had an impact on the work, or the lives of other people close to him who can be shown to have had a significant influence on his writing. (p. 171)

Collectively, this is fascinating on a number of levels. There is the desire to canonise someone already in the canon—someone in the dictionary, for heaven’s sake—driven by an insecurity about the status of science fiction (and, by extension, the status of Priest’s own writing). There is the desire for celebration by a writer who is not naturally celebratory and throughout these pages comes across as blunt, prickly, and not even particularly enamoured of Ballard’s work. There is the desire to write a biography that is not really a biography and instead a work of literary criticism, and which seeks to disavow a strong direct connection between a writer’s experience and their work (again, hard not to read this as insecurity). Yet this is a book born from an unpublished chronology by the British editor David Pringle in which much mundane biographical detail makes it onto the page and much richer, “subtler” detail does not.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of J. G. Ballard’s life as a child in Shanghai during the Second World War and as a young adult in postwar Britain. It is a helpful summary which concludes: “What had happened to him in China was to provide him with the creative energy of his adult writing career, but those drab postwar years of austerity were not the right time to dwell on it. The images and memories of his childhood and adolescence had to be packed away.” (p.24) And yet despite this—and his claims in the introduction—Chapter 2 sees Priest returning to the beginning of Ballard’s life and documenting it in unnecessary and repetitive details. So we have:

Jim Ballard was attending the Cathedral School, sometimes being driven by the chauffeur in the family Packard, his hapless White Russian governess beside him as an ineffectual protection from possible kidnap. (p.18)

Followed closely by:

When he was by himself in the family car, as he was when being driven to and from school, they always made sure his White Russian nanny was with him … How much help the frightened young nanny would have been if the soldiers turned against him was never clear. (p. 29)

It is indeed likely his governess would have struggled with armed soldiers but Priest’s evidence for her being “hapless” is unclear. In fact, Priest later says that Ballard had “a series of White Russian governesses” (p. 254). Perhaps they were all hapless.

Priest’s omniscience with respect to minor incidents recurs. This passage describes a mundane event once the Ballard family have been interred by the Japanese:

His agnostic father gave a talk on “Science and the Idea of God,” which Ballard found impressively tactful, and which led to several conversations later with parsons, who had felt challenged but also involved by the talk. (p. 46)

It is not clear how Priest knows this. Much of this chapter provides endnote references to Miracles Of Life, Ballard’s 2008 autobiography, but this doesn’t. However, a quick reference to my bookshelves show it is clearly taken directly from that book:

My father once delivered a lecture on ‘Science and the Idea of God’, a tactful dismissal of the Almighty from human affairs, which drew many of the English missionaries in the camp… Until the day we left Lunghau I was frequently stopped by one or other of the up-country parsons and told what an excellent lecture it was, so interesting, and I wonder if any of them or their high-minded wives had seen the point. (Miracles Of Life, p.71)

Do we believe—or, if that is too loaded a term, take at face value—the seventy-six-year-old Ballard writing about his twelve-year-old self? Priest seems to, but translates the frankly unlikely projection of Ballard into a blander form which attempts to imbue it with objective reality. Perhaps he would consider anything else an exercise in psychological analysis or investigation.

My own investigation continued. I flipped back a few chapters and, sure enough, there was Ballard’s hapless governess. Or rather his “White Russian nanny Vera (supposedly to guard against a kidnap attempt by the chauffeur, though how much of her body this touchy young woman would have laid down for me I can’t imagine” (Miracles Of Life, pp. 5-6). Ballard goes on to describe his nanny as “morose” and “sullen” later on the same page.

You could get a whole essay on the gap between Ballard’s words and Priest’s words but I won’t go down that rabbit hole. Priest could presumably justify the inclusion of these sanitised regurgitations of dubious anecdotes on the grounds they were important enough to Ballard for him to include in his autobiography. Other choices seem lacking in such a rationale. A couple of chapters later, Priest muses on the “minor unanswered questions” (p. 68) of Ballard’s life. such as what method of transport he used as a travelling salesman in post-war Britain. Unanswered and indeed unasked.

It is not till Chapter 8 that we get to literary criticism and the examination of Ballard’s work Priest claimed to prioritise. This is long on synopsis, short on analysis and surprisingly devoid of quotes given the praise Priest heaps on Ballard’s prose. This book, the first book, then continues to the end of Chapter 10—115 pages, approximately a quarter of the published text—ending in 1964 with the publication of Ballard’s short story collection The Terminal Beach and the sudden, unexpected death of his wife Mary.

Which brings us to the second book contained within The Illuminated Man and the third SF writer advertised by the cover. But it also requires us to go backwards—because Priest’s introduction is not the first thing we read. It is preceded by both a prologue and a preface by Nina Allan. Allan is another British science fiction writer and critic, active since the start of this century. (I reviewed her first short story collection, A Thread Of Truth, for Strange Horizons in 2009.) She was also Priest’s partner (and became, over the course of writing The Illuminated Man, his wife). It had not been anticipated she would have any role in the book Priest started in January 2023. But then:

Six months later, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. We believed even then that he would have time to complete the book, or at least a passable draft of it. Sadly, we were wrong. When it became obvious Chris would run out of time, we agreed between the two of us that I should finish what had - so tragically and unexpectedly - turned out to be his final work. (unnumbered)

Allan’s first chapter proper does not exactly pick up where Priest leaves off. It seems likely Priest expected his Chapter 10 to go straight into the present book’s Chapter 12. Instead, Allan fills in some of the blanks: focusing more on the women in Ballard’s life, directly interviewing those who knew him, generally going deeper than Priest. This will be a recurring theme.

Allan writes: “Those chapters that are his—minor copy edits aside—remain untouched and completely intact, the way he wrote them. The rest is down to me” (unnumbered). This initially appears to be reflected in the table of contents. The Priest chapters use numerals (10); the Allan chapters use words (ELEVEN). But this isn’t actually the case.

Chapter 17 is a Priest chapter by this style convention. The content is focused on The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard’s 1970 mosaic novel, and it is one of Priest’s best. Then there are three asterisks and a change in tone but no other indication that we have switched to another writer halfway through the chapter until Allan refers to “Chris.” These hybrid chapters then become the rule rather than the exception and make for a rather odd reading experience.

The weirdest impact of this is at the end of Chapter 19. This chapter covers the novel Crash (1973) and also a car crash of Ballard’s own (he is clearly a habitual drunk driver though never openly named as such). In a now familiar pattern, Priest opens the chapter but it is Allan who has the final word, concluding by saying: “This feeling of alienation—as well as its inciting incident—was to feed directly into his next novel, Concrete Island” (p. 216).

The reader expects to move to a discussion of Concrete Island (1974) and that is what happens at the start of Chapter 21. But first we have a very short and flimsy chapter written solely by Priest on Vermillion Sands (1971), a short story collection bringing together work discussed earlier in The Illuminated Man. The justification for this is that Vermillion Sands was first collected in 1973 and that this is therefore chronological order. But it wasn't, that was just the British first edition; it was first collected in 1971. But this is less important than the fact it just doesn’t fit here.

Perhaps the chapter could have remained "intact and untouched” but elsewhere in the book, closer in time to when the stories were written. However, ideally it would have been touched, would have been integrated into another chapter—though I completely understand why Allan did not. Later in the book—in a context we will come on to—Allan writes: “Chris was a writer. He told his own stories. The fact that he can no longer speak for himself is one I must respect, accept, protect, keep in mind always” (p. 372).

I will not labour the point on the benefit of integration but that does leave two large questions which I think I do need to explore. Firstly, do Priest’s words here represent the best of his ability or were they impacted by his illness? Secondly, does the close proximity of Allan’s words throw the weaknesses of Priest’s words into sharper relief?

Towards the end of The Illuminated Man, Allan quotes Ballard on a posthumously completed Douglas Adams book:

There’s a lot of magic involved in writing a novel. Like Houdini, we try to pull off a surprise ending, and I think that, in the same way, nothing should be performed unless it’s perfect. Cobbling together a first draft that would have been subject to a huge number of further drafts and revisions is a bit like turning the novelist into a secondrate conjuror. (p. 438)

Allan goes on to note: “Chris’s practical working methods were remarkably similar to Ballard’s: his strict insistence on writing proper second drafts, also his tendency to augment successive drafts … what my Chris called ‘thickening’” (p. 440). However, it is not at all clear that Priest had a chance to thicken his parts of this text. Of Chapter 27, Allan writes that Priest:

told me he had finished writing the chapter, and it was only when  I came to examine the manuscript after his death that I discovered he had in fact been able to complete only a small section of it, which he had entitled “Chapter Z.” Immediately following his own text he had cut and pasted a section of the plot summary from Wikipedia (clearly labelled as such) as an aide memoire. I felt deeply upset when I saw this, because it  was so untypical of him: a grabbing at words, a kind of panic-buying, a final attempt to shore up a dam that was about to break. (p. 331)

Let’s first pause to admire the elegance of Allan’s words (“a kind of panic-buying”), the harmony of her emotional and intellectual response. There are many such moments inside The Illuminated Man. But there are also many such grabbing at words moments and the one side-by-side throws the other into sharper relief.

This is true when comparing Priest and Allan’s criticism but even more acute when it comes to biography. There is a fundamental problem for the book in that Priest has very little interest in biography as a form. This is obvious from his own words but also confirmed by Allan: “Chris had a vexed relationship with the idea of biography, with writing non-fiction in general” (p. 430). In contrast, from the opening Allan demonstrates a deep love for the form, describing it as the equal to fiction (something Priest clearly doesn’t believe).

The Illuminated Man is considerably improved by Allan’s approach to biography but it also generates an amount of tension. There is a startling moment halfway through the book when Priest writes: “From the point of view of a biographer, the latter part of his life, which is to say the many years following the death of his wife, is relatively free of external incident” (p. 249). It is an almost comically narrow view of biography and his disinterest in his medium is translated into a dullness to his words. It is also given the lie by Allan’s every biographical intervention, her every shading in of the richness of life which Priest closes his eyes to.

Allan writes in the preface: “As things turned out, we each ended up writing the parts of this book that we wanted to write. The result … is a beast with two heads, a species of twin biography that is itself an exploration of the form” (unnumbered). I would judge it a more hydra-headed work than that but it does bring us to the third book contained within The Illuminated Man: a memoir. Or perhaps a minor and a major memoir.

Priest rather grudgingly writes in his introduction: “This book is also, from time to time, a personal memoir” (p. 11). You get the impression that the only reason this is the case at all is because of Allan. “Even before we knew he was unwell, I found myself increasingly trying to persuade Chris to put more of himself into the book … Chris was more ambivalent” (unnumbered). Later in the book, she goes      further: “Chris distrusted all forms of autobiographical writing” (p.430). As a result, The Illuminated Man ends up being much more Allan’s memoir. It is also notable that while Allan writes of Priest, this doesn’t really happen in reverse, and it is particularly fascinating to compare their introductions side by side. Allan is actually the instigator of The Illuminated Man but Priest doesn’t mention this.

Allan had been commissioned to write an essay on Ballard for Writing the Future: Essays on Crafting Science Fiction (2023), edited by Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst. Talking with Priest about this essay, he shared the Pringle chronology with her. Priest: “I’d forgotten I had this.” Allan: “I became obsessed with it” (p.5). Another stark contrast. Ultimately Priest took forward the wider book-length project with Allan’s blessing, but it remains a bit of a mystery as to why he did. It also seems unarguable that Allan was better suited to the task. “‘It sounds like you should be writing it,’” she reports a friend as saying. “She was responding, I suppose, to my enthusiasm for the project, for the excitement I still felt for it, in spite of everything” (p.170).

The prologue—or PROLOGUE to indicate its ownership—showcases what this book could have been, what it partially still is, in its deft blend of criticism, biography, and autobiography. It is then a wrench to have to endure a hundred pages or so of a considerably worse book. It is with Chapter FOURTEEN and Chapter SIXTEEN, bracketing Priest’s own memoir in Chapter 15, that the better book re-emerges. These chapters focus on the accident that precipitated Priest’s diagnosis with terminal cancer and the couple’s individual response to this.

“I suggested that I should take over those parts of the story, he agreed immediately. ‘I can’t write about that stuff, but you can,’ he said. He seemed incredibly relieved” (p. 430). The final hundred pages of the book from Chapter THIRTY are simply remarkable. This book is entirely Allan’s book and interleaves an intensely affecting memoir of the period around Priest’s death with a critical evaluation of Ballard’s late work and finally a culminating synthesis of all the elements of The Illuminated Man. That these pages were written under such devastating circumstances makes the accomplishment even greater. Allan’s description of Priest’s death will stay with me for a long time but if I was to pick one quote to encapsulate this section, it would be:

You keep calling me Renee. I’m not averse to it. I wonder if it’s Renee Zellweger you’re thinking of her pile of blond hair. Or just some random mix-up. Either way, it does not matter. Nothing matters now. Our love for one another, it turns out, is stronger than any of it. Does that happen often, or are we as lucky as I think we are? (p. 385)

I love “I’m not averse to it” here, as powerful in its lightness as her plain-stated declaration is powerful in its weight. Allan has captured so many fragile things that could easily have been crushed by the act of writing, pinning them precisely to the page for the benefit of others.

Because of this, The Illuminated Man is profound and deeply moving. It is also inconsistent and confounding. It is sometimes outright bad. It would ideally have been Allan rather than Priest who started the project. In artistic terms, leaving Priest’s initial book intact rather than fully incorporating it was a mistake. But “artistic terms” aren’t really important here, are they? “We came to think of this book as ours, a shared endeavour that sustained us and maintained our togetherness even as Chris’s work and life came to an end” (unnumbered). That is an impregnable statement to which the lens of literary criticism cannot be applied. This book—this interlocking trilogy of books—couldn’t exist independently of the context that led to its creation and, ultimately, it is a privilege to read this shared endeavour.