Book Review – J G Ballard – The Atrocity Exhibition

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Spoiler alerts – 1969 – Panther Press One of the strangest, surrealist and most disturbing books ever in so far as its fragmented nightmare shards can be interpreted at all. The book follows an art professor through his nervous breakdown as he sees the major events of the post-Second World War society as a swirling, changing pop-art, symbolic painted landscape, incorporating Vietnam, the Kennedy Assassination, drugs, movie stars, and automobile car crashes as erotic fantasies – a theme Ballard would expand on in the novel Crash later. The character names change, figures die more than once, and everything is reduced to such fragmentation that the pages could be virtually read in any order. This was Ballard’s tribute to William Burroughs, and it is deeply disturbing stuff. Unusually, not only are chapters titled, but so are each and every individual paragraph. Seriously weird. Still not totally sure what the Hell I read, but it was very intriguing nevertheless. Arthur Chappell