Impulsive, shifty and at times apparently psychopathic, Blake cannot be expected to give any remotely reliable account of himself. He may even be dead and dreaming the place into existence.

It is left open whether anything like the transformed Shepperton he describes exists or is no more than Blake's delusion. Everything that Ballard's character sees is seen through the eyes of the imagination. In a letter the poet William Blake declared 'to the eyes of the Man of the Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself'. It is no accident that the narrator's name is Blake. Hosts of brightly plumed birds – 'flamingos and frigate-birds, falcons and deep-water albatross' – have flocked into the town, and when the narrator leans against a pillar box, trying to straighten his flying suit, an eagle 'guarding these never-to-be-collected letters snaps at my hands, as if she has forgotten who I am and is curious to inspect this solitary pilot who has casually stepped off the wind into these deserted streets'. The Shepperton that appears in these pages is that same Thames suburb more magically transmuted. But whereas Hello America is full of deadpan humour, the mood that pervades The Unlimited Dream Company is joyful and rhapsodic.Įarly this year when the floods hit Shepperton, where Ballard lived from 1960 until his death in 2009, the town became for a time like one of his disaster areas. Only Hello America (1981), where he pictures New York swathed in golden sand-dunes and Las Vegas as the jungle capital of an almost deserted country, is similar in style. With its short chapters, some only a page or two long, it reads at times like modernist verse. Where The Unlimited Dream Company differs from his other novels is in its strongly poetic quality. The exotic landscapes he conjures are often as important as the characters who inhabit them. Surrealist painting is a pervasive influence in his work – more influential than that of any writer, he used to say – and he followed the surrealists in believing that the world could be remade by the human mind. The Unlimited Dream Company is a succession of images held together by a single landscape, a succession more brilliant and more hallucinatory than anything else in Ballard's fiction. Photograph: Eamonn Mccabe for the Guardian

The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard