Tunis – Blood and Porridge

December 17, 2022

Jim Mountfield heads upstairs

© Hiraeth Books

The December 2022 issue of ParABnormal Magazine, containing fiction, poetry and articles, has just appeared and I’m delighted to report that I have a short story featured in it. It’s entitled Upstairs, is a horror story and is thus attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I publish scary fiction.

Upstairs was inspired by the three years I spent living in Tunisia. Anyone who visited the ground-floor apartment I occupied at the time, in Rue d”Egypte in historical central Tunis, will recognise this description of the area behind the apartment that’s home to story’s main character:

“Behind the kitchen were nine square metres of courtyard. Stone tiles covered the ground. The courtyard walls possibly hadn’t seen maintenance since the day in colonial times when the French finished building them and their cracked stonework provided homes for geckos that emerged nightly to hunt for cockroaches. There were also stains caused by leakages from the drainpipes straddling the walls left and right of the back doorway, which resembled beanstalks as they climbed and sprouted smaller pipes at each new floor.

“The courtyard formed the bottom of a shaft running up the middle of the building. At its top was a square of fading light. Two of the shaft’s walls contained windows. The wall on his right was punctured by the windows of the building’s stairwell. The wall behind him, above the doorway, was punctured by the windows of the six apartments above his. It was from one of those windows that his tormentors kept dropping stuff.”

Just as I did in real life, the hero of the story has to contend with people in the flats above him dropping pieces of rubbish into his little courtyard. Unlike me, however, he gets sufficiently riled about it to make a point of going upstairs to knock on doors and track down the culprit or culprits. And it’s while he’s on this quest upstairs, in this old, crumbling apartment building, that the story’s horror element starts to materialise.

I should add that though my apartment building was rundown, it was certainly an atmospheric place to live. I remember arriving back from work one evening and finding a TV crew, watched by a big crowd, filming something in front of the building’s front door. My living room and bedroom windows were in the immediate background. It turned out they were shooting an external scene for some gritty, hardboiled TV crime series set in the ‘mean streets’ of Tunis.

Published by Hiraeth Books, the December 2022 edition of ParABnormal Magazine can be obtained here.

September 18, 2022October 24, 2022

It’s all gone J.G.

© Fay Godwin / The Paris Review

Recent events have inspired me to update and repost this, which first appeared on this blog in 2019, on the tenth anniversary of J.G. Ballard’s death.

The visionary writer James Graham Ballard, known to his readers as ‘J.G.’, officially succumbed to prostate cancer and ceased to be a presence in our universe in April 2009. However, the past 13 years have been so baroquely and surreally insane that at times I’ve had a troubling thought. In 2009, did Ballard cease to exist in the universe or did the reverse happen? Did the universe stop existing as a physical entity at that moment and, since then, has it continued only as a figment of J.G. Ballard’s imagination?

Could we be living now as ghosts in Ballard’s fiction without realising it?

Recent historical trends have suggested this is not merely a crazy hypothesis on my part. The fact that people are finally talking seriously about the dire threat to human civilisation posed by global warming – talking seriously but, alas, still doing very little about it – makes me think of Ballard’s 1962 novel The Drowned World, where climate change has jacked up the temperatures, melted the ice caps, inundated London with water and turned the city into a balmy and hallucinogenic landscape of lagoons and tropical flora and fauna; or the following year’s novel with the self-explanatory title The Drought; or his 1961 short story Deep End, where ‘oxygen mining’ has drained the oceans and a few remaining humans skulk around their dried-out beds at night-time, when the heat and radiation levels aren’t as lethal as they are in the daytime.

Meanwhile, our ever-spiralling-out-of-control and ecologically suicidal dependency on the internal combustion engine, and the social maladies (like road rage) that go with it, make me think of 1973’s Crash – the initial manuscript of which caused one publisher’s reader to splutter, “This author is beyond psychiatric help.” Whereas the increasing fragmentation of society through the proliferation of social media platforms and devices brings to mind Ballard’s short story The Intensive Care Unit, which turned up in the 1982 collection Myths of the Near Future and contained the prophetic line, “All interaction is mediated through personal cameras and TV screens.” And the tendency among the elite to shut themselves off in gated communities, where they not only relax, play and sleep but also, increasingly, work, evokes such novels as 1975’s High Rise and 2000’s Super-Cannes – where in both cases the set-up memorably ends in tears.

© Penguin Books / David Pelham

More generally, spending a few minutes channel-surfing through TV’s 24/7 news outlets is enough to make you feel you’re inhabiting Ballard’s experimental, narrative-less collage of ‘condensed novels’, 1970’s aptly-titled The Atrocity Exhibition. And the sorry state of America, where the now openly authoritarian Republican Party could easily win the presidency in 2024 and return Donald Trump to the White House, reminds me of his 1981 novel Hello America, which has an ecologically devastated USA run by someone calling himself ‘President Charles Manson’.

And as I witness the madness of Brexit in the UK, facilitated by a cadre of rich, privately-educated posh-boys like Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees Mogg and Boris Johnson, I can think of half-a-dozen Ballard stories that have rich, privately-educated Britishers losing their marbles, becoming unhinged and embracing chaos and catastrophe.

Indeed, events in the UK at the moment, with all of its media, most of its politicians and a large part of its public indulging in near-deranged displays of grief over the death of a 96-year-old lady worth something between 370 and 500 million pounds while the country totters into a potentially disastrous cost-of-living crisis, are all very ‘Ballardian’. ‘The Queue’ – the term applied to the line of mourners spending 24 hours shuffling across ten kilometres of London in order to view the Queen’s coffin at Westminster Abbey – could easily have been the title, and plot-premise, of one of Ballard’s novels or short stories. Meanwhile, the much-publicised behaviour of the Centre Parcs holiday-villages company, which first tried to evict its vacationing residents on the day of the Queen’s funeral, then relented but warned them to stay inside their lodges on the day, prompted author Paul McAuley to send out a tweet slightly rephrasing Ballard’s most famous opening sentence, the one that kicked off High Rise: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this Centre Parcs village the previous three months.”

Occasionally, the idea that we could be living unawares in a giant virtual-reality system dreamed into existence by J.G. Ballard strikes me on a personal level. For example, while I was living in Tunisia just after the 2011 revolution and the advent of the so-called Arab Spring, I arranged one afternoon to meet up with friends in Carthage, the swankiest of Tunis’s suburbs. My friends hadn’t appeared yet when I got off at the TCM station, next door to Carthage’s branch of the French supermarket-chain Monoprix. So, I waited there and passed the time by reading a few pages of Ballard’s final novel, 2006’s Kingdom Come. It took me a minute to notice that the Monoprix was closed. And not just closed. During the revolution, it’d been trashed and looted and left a razed shell. Its ruins looked sinisterly incongruous in the middle of this plush neighbourhood of high white walls and thick iron gates, four-by-fours and swimming pools, orange trees and jasmine plants. And what was Kingdom Come about? A community succumbing to dystopian chaos thanks to the arrival of a fancy new shopping centre.

It’s been claimed that Ballard’s writing wasn’t influenced so much by other fiction (except perhaps that of William S. Burroughs) as by visual forces like surrealism and Dadaism and the ‘media landscape’ of modern-day advertising and consumerism. But I have to say I find him a very traditional author in some ways. Reality may be crumbling around the edges of his scenarios, but at the same time he shows an admirable commitment to telling a gripping, old-fashioned yarn. Stiff-upper-lipped British types – emotionally-repressed, able only to address each other by their surnames as if they were still back at boarding school – have adventures in exotic locales while they try to do the right thing, though as some hallucinogenic apocalypse unfolds and madness leaks into their thought processes, they invariably end up doing the wrong thing.

© Penguin Books / David Pelham

Ballard’s work calls to mind – my mind, anyway – the work of another storyteller not adverse to spicing his highbrow themes with derring-do and intrigue, Graham Greene. Indeed, I’ve sometimes thought of Greene as a mirror image of Ballard. That’s with Greene in the real world, though, posing before a fairground mirror and with Ballard as his warped, twisted reflection. While Greene’s characters are usually tortured by Catholicism, Ballard’s usually have to contend with creeping and finally overwhelming psychosis.

And besides Greene, another literary influence on Ballard is surely Joseph Conrad. I wouldn’t say Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) lurks in the DNA of every Ballard story, but a good many of them feature darkness of some form and, yes, a character who feels duty-bound to journey into the heart of it. When I was in my mid-teens, the first book by Ballard I ever read was his short-story collection The Terminal Beach (1964) and its opening story, A Question of Re-entry, begins with these deliciously Conradian lines: “All day they had moved steadily upstream, occasionally pausing to raise the propeller and cut away the knots of weed, and by two o’clock had covered some 75 miles… Now and then the channel would widen into a flat expanse of what appeared to be stationary water, the slow oily swells which disturbed its surface transforming it into a sluggish mirror of the distant, enigmatic sky, the islands of rotten balsa logs refracted by the layers of haze like the drifting archipelagos of a dream. Then the channel would narrow again and the cooling jungle darkness enveloped the launch.”

Those introductory lines so captivated me that, from that moment on, I was completely hooked on Ballard’s work.

Now, 40 years later, I still haven’t quite read everything by him. For the record, though, here are my favourite things among what I have read. Among his novels, The Drowned World, Crash, High Rise, Hello America, Empire of the Sun (1984) and Rushing to Paradise (1994).

Good though his novels are, I think his short fiction is even better. Picking a favourite dozen from his short stories is a near-impossible task, but I’ll have a go. Off the top of my head, I would nominate A Question of Re-entry, Deep End, The Illuminated Man – later expanded into the 1966 novel The Crystal World – and The Drowned Giant from The Terminal Beach; Chronopolis, The Garden of Time and The Watch Towers from the collection The 4-Dimensional Nightmare (1963); Concentration City and Now Wakes the Sea from The Disaster Area (1967); The Smile from Myths of the Near Future; and The Enormous Space and The Air Disaster from War Fever (1990).

Meanwhile, of his 19 novels, I have yet to read 1961’s The Wind from Nowhere, 1988’s Running Wild and 1996’s Cocaine Nights. And there’s at least one of his short story collections, 1976’s Low-Flying Aircraft, that I haven’t read either. Which is good. I might be an old git now, but I’m glad that reading some new stuff by J.G. Ballard is still one of the things I can look forward to in life.

August 26, 2022August 29, 2022

What kind of asshat stabs a writer?

During the fortnight since August 12^th, when author Salman Rushdie was attacked and seriously injured before he was due to give a lecture in Chautaugua, New York, I’ve been trying to write something here about the incident. But to be honest, I can’t express my reaction any more succinctly than Stephen King did when he tweeted a day afterwards: “What kind of asshat stabs a writer, anyway? F*cker!”

The asshat and f*cker in question, a 24-year-old called Hadi Matar, was inspired by the fatwa issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, and reaffirmed in 2017 by Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Rushdie, of course, received the fatwa on account of his supposedly blasphemous-against-Islam novel The Satanic Verses (1988).

I have to admit that my knowledge of The Satanic Verses is limited. When I tried reading it, I found the opening section, in which the two protagonists Farishta and Chamcha are thrown from an airplane as it explodes over the English Channel, pretentious and badly written and felt disinclined to read the rest of the book. I remember Rushdie using the phrase ‘like titbits of cigar’ to describe how the two men fell from the fragmenting fuselage, and thinking to myself what a bloody horrible simile it was.

Still, I persevered with The Satanic Verses and thought the part that came next, describing Bollywood, was quite engaging. But that dodgy opening section had fatally weakened my interest in it. I was preparing to move to another country at the time and, unfinished, the book got stashed away in a box with some things I wasn’t taking with me. Neither the box nor book have been opened since. I’ve heard that the plot later on has Farishta and Chamcha transforming into an angel and a devil, which sounds intriguing, if a tad similar to what happens in Mervyn Peake’s fantasy novel Mr Pye (1953).

Still, I read 50 pages of the book, which is probably 50 pages more than 99.99% of those clamouring for Rushdie’s execution over the years have read of it. One person I met who definitely had read The Satanic Verses was the CEO of an oil company in Tunisia whom, many years later, I was hired to give English lessons to every week. As his English was already excellent, ours was hardly a teacher-student relationship and I suspect he just wanted a regular opportunity to blether with someone in English about whatever caught his fancy. In addition to being a cerebral and erudite man, he was an observant Muslim. Our lessons took place in the middle of Friday afternoons and were sometimes delayed by 10 or 15 minutes because he was slightly late getting back from Friday prayers at his mosque.

One afternoon, he wanted to talk to me about an incident at the Printemps des Art Fair in La Marsa, a few miles along the coast from Tunis. A couple of the artworks displayed there had caused a riot by hard-line Islamic Salafists, who believed them to be ‘blasphemous’, and during the protests the venue had been looted. My student was incensed by this and particularly incensed at how the Salafists had targeted a painting by the artist Mohamed Ben Slama. This featured God’s name spelt out in configurations of tiny ants which, the Salafists claimed, sacrilegiously reduced Allah to the level of puny insects that scurried about in the dirt. But in fact, my student pointed out, the Koran depicts ants as an intelligent and noble species, even in possession of their own language, and arguably the artist was trying to glorify God through the marvellous intricacies of His creations, even the smallest ones. “Those people who attacked the painting,” he snorted, “haven’t read or understood the Koran properly.”

Then, not missing a beat, he continued, “It’s like Rushdie’s book. Those people calling for him to be killed, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They haven’t even read The Satanic Verses. I have read it and I don’t think it’s blasphemous.”

Meanwhile, depressingly but predictably, the attack on Rushdie has been hijacked by a lot of extreme right-wing, GB News-watching, Enoch Powell-worshipping morons who are trying to peddle it as yet more evidence of the need to stand up against the woke mob. Because apparently that’s what those hideous, Guardian-reading Wokerati will do if they’re not able to cancel your right to free speech – they’ll stab you instead. Oh, and of course it provides them with another excuse to bash Muslims.

Never mind the fact that Rushdie finds their right-wing views abhorrent and indeed, in The Satanic Verses, referred to their heroine Margaret Thatcher as ‘Mrs Torture’. And never mind the fact that their right-wing counterparts in the USA are currently getting onto school boards and purging the libraries and curriculums of the schools under their jurisdiction of books they don’t approve of, usually books that have non-white or gay people as characters, touch on issues such as racism and homophobia, and generally imply that life in the USA isn’t as hunky-dory as it’s supposed to be. Those right-wing gits are as twisted and blinkered as Rushdie’s would-be assassin.

One consequence of this horribleness – I’m now planning to dig out that old copy of The Satanic Verses and give it a second try. And apparently I’m not alone in my new-found desire to read it. Reports say that, in the UK alone, sales of The Satanic Verses have surged so much that Rushdie’s publisher is currently rushing out a reprint. So, Hadi Matar, not only did you fail in your attempt to kill Rushdie, but you’ve given a huge boost to the book you detest so much (though you’ve probably never read it) and more people than ever are being exposed to its blasphemous musings. Well done.