My review of JG Ballard's new novel, Kingdom Come, was broadcast today on ABC Radio National's The Book Show. Transcript and audio here (you have to fast forward through David Malouf, ahem, or better still, listen to the whole thing).
I'm glad I finally got around to reading your review. Your account of the novel led me to think of a very old and now disused form, the dialogue, which we now may think of only in terms of Plato, but which also served thinkers of the Renaissance many centuries after Plato. It sounds as if Ballard here has written a discourse on ideas that's a dialogue (or maybe even just an essay) trying to be a novel.
I still think, as apparently you do, that some of his other books deserve to be looked into.
I'm glad I finally got around to reading your review. Your account of the novel led me to think of a very old and now disused form, the dialogue, which we now may think of only in terms of Plato, but which also served thinkers of the Renaissance many centuries after Plato. It sounds as if Ballard here has written a discourse on ideas that's a dialogue (or maybe even just an essay) trying to be a novel.
ReplyDeleteI still think, as apparently you do, that some of his other books deserve to be looked into.