First published in 1987, Emlyn’s Moon is the sequel to The Snow Spider, but one in which the first book’s protagonist, boy-magician Gwyn Griffiths, is now a secondary character. (Which often seems to happen with boy magicians. Once they’ve come into their powers, particularly if that has involved learning a certain amount of wisdom—which discounts you, Harry Potter—they’re too remote and powerful to be protagonists, and only come in towards the end to help the new main characters. For instance, Ged in the Earthsea books, and Will in The Dark is Rising series.)

Emlyn’s Moon is about Nia, middlemost of the seven Lloyd children (Alun Lloyd was Gwyn’s best friend in the first book). Nia feels she’s useless at everything, and is frequently told so by her teacher at school and her brothers (“Nia-can’t-do-nothing! Nia-in-the-middle! Nia’s got a funny tooth, and her nose goes squiggle, squiggle!”). When her family moves from their farm to town, where her father has taken on a butcher’s shop, they pass a former chapel (“the chapel that wasn’t a chapel now, but a home for someone”) whose door and gate have been repainted in bright pink, gold, and blue. Outside it, she sees Emlyn Llewelyn, a slightly older boy from school, but she’s told (by virtually everyone) that the chapel is “a bad place”, and not to go there, because “Something happened there, didn’t it?” Though no one will tell her what.

One day, though, she bumps into Emlyn in town, they get talking, and he invites her up to the home he shares with his father, a somewhat gruff artist currently living without his wife, who left abruptly a while ago with their new baby. Emlyn later tells Nia he doesn’t know where his mother is, only that Gwyn Griffith’s father took her away, and that she said something about living in the moon. As a result of this, there’s a breach between the Llewelyns and Griffiths, even though Emlyn is Gwyn’s cousin. Nia tells Emlyn and his father about a school project she has to do, where everyone in class has to make, write, or paint something about the town they live in. As she thinks she can’t do anything, she’s dreading it. But Emlyn’s father, Idris, questions her and discovers she can sew, so he fetches a large piece of canvas, and tells her to create a collage. She takes it home, but works on it in secret.

The growing friendship between Nia and Emlyn soon hits a snag. She’d promised that he could buy the Lloyd family’s sheepdog, which isn’t enjoying life in town, only to find her father has given it to the Griffithses. Nia feels ashamed and Emlyn feels betrayed, and it ends in a fight between Emlyn and Gwyn (who, having learned from the playground fight in the previous book, still uses a little magic, but ultimately lets his cousin win).

After this, Emlyn grows increasingly isolated, and when Nia learns about the magic world Gwyn is involved in, and sees, one night, pale child-like figures walking on the outskirts of the town, she worries they’re here to take Emlyn away, just as they took Gwyn’s sister Bethan. She decides she needs to solve the mystery of what happened to Emlyn’s mother, and reunite the two.

The Snow Spider seemed, to me, readable as both a magical tale for pre-teens and as a more complex story for older readers, and Emlyn’s Moon takes that even further. Although there’s no evident fantasy element for at least the first half of the book, the story is carried by the light comedy of Nia’s supposed uselessness, and her attempts to procure materials for her collage (including snipping a section off her sister’s music teacher’s net curtains, which is soon discovered). It’s the subtleties of the relationships—Nia and her large family, Nia and Emlyn, Emlyn and his father—and the mystery of what went on at the chapel that carries the story, rather than the first book’s moments of magical wonder. And when the fantasy does come in, it’s more mysterious and subtly threatening than in the first book. There’s no longer the possibility that the white world which took Gwyn’s sister might be an interesting place to visit, it’s much more clearly a place that people are taken to, but don’t come back from, and (unlike with the first book’s Bethan, who disappeared for seemingly no reason) it’s people who are emotionally vulnerable and isolated who are at risk of being taken. There are glimpses of adult mental illness and levels of distress you wouldn’t normally find in a book for, say, a nine-year-old readership, as in this, of Idris Llewelyn:

To Nia’s horror, the painter laughed. It was not a happy sound. On his face Nia saw a loss that was too unbearable to speak of.

And the odd creepy moment, too:

But up on the bridge something moved, pale yellow in the deadening glare of the street lights, but probably white. Small creatures crossing the bridge: children, no bigger than herself, for the stones of the bridge wall came shoulder high.

The fantastic element in Emlyn’s Moon—the presence of the fairy-like, child-like beings who take people away—is really just a heightening of an element already present in the realistic part of the story: the way people become lost to the communal human world through emotional isolation. Nia is lightly isolated by her “uselessness”, and then by her being drawn into friendship with Emlyn (which has been forbidden by her parents, because of that mysterious “something happened up there”), which even leads to her declaring herself a vegetarian (when her father has just started up a new life as a butcher); Emlyn is more deeply isolated by the split between his parents, his feeling that people think he should have gone with his mother, and his not knowing where his mother is; and his father Idris is isolated by his obsession with his art, which leads him to neglect his dwindling family. And the hint that Emlyn’s mother Elinor has gone to “the moon” implies she’s been taken to that white land, with its silvery-lunar landscape, but when she’s found, and the mystery of the “something that happened” in the chapel is revealed, it’s equally mundane. But as hers is the most extreme isolation, tinged with mental illness, she is the one the fairy-folk come for when they do come.

Emlyn’s Moon is also a novel about art, and though Idris Llewelyn’s absorption in his art is an isolating factor, when Nia’s collage is finally revealed (and surely it’s no spoiler to say that when it’s revealed, it’s a marvellous success, and she’s finally accepted as more than “useless”) art becomes a means of connection, and of escaping the trap of isolation.

With its mostly more realistic story that chimes in so well with the fantasy elements, I think I enjoyed Emlyn’s Moon more than The Snow Spider, and it certainly makes me intrigued to see how the series might be resolved in the final book, The Chestnut Soldier.

Like The Snow Spider, Emlyn’s Moon was adapted for TV, this time in five episodes, running from 6 September to 4 October 1990. Again, it was pretty faithful to the book, though whether the final supernatural events made any more sense on the screen than on the page, I don’t know.

A year or so after the Cronenberg film of Crash came out, I went into a branch of Waterstones and bought Ballard’s latest paperback, Cocaine Nights. The man behind the counter asked, with a somewhat puzzled air, what I’d made of Crash, which led me to feel I was going to have to justify this suddenly re-controversialised novel. Unused to unexpected conversations as I am, and certainly on difficult subjects, I had no idea what to say. Now, a little less than thirty years later, I thought (in l’esprit d’un très long escalier) I’d give it a go.

Crash the novel has its origins in “Crash!” the story that formed part of Ballard’s collection of condensed novels, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). Written in 1968, “Crash!” takes the form of the sort of scientific report that Vaughan, the obsessive character from the novel, would have either written himself, or would have had a supply of xeroxed copies of, to hand out to prospective co-obsessives. It led to an April 1970 exhibition of crashed cars that Ballard arranged at the New Arts Lab, a gallery and former pharmaceutical warehouse in London whose proper name, as if this wasn’t all Ballardian/Cronenbergian enough, was the Institute for Research in Art and Technology. After that, in 1971, BBC2 broadcast a short film also called “Crash!” (at 8:30p.m. on Friday 12 February—just before the watershed), featuring Ballard driving around the sort of roads that would form the backdrop for his novel, perusing cars both new and wrecked, accompanied/haunted by a young woman played by Gabrielle Drake. (Who was best known at the time as the purple-wigged Lt. Gay Ellis in Gerry Anderson’s UFO. She was also the sister of ill-fated folk singer Nick Drake, and may have bonded a little with Ballard as she, too, was born out east—in Lahore—and lived in Burma before coming back to England as a child. She evidently made an impression, as Ballard apparently mentioned her by name in an early draft of the novel, as one of the celebrities the obsessive Vaughan was pursuing. Her name lingered in the published version as one of Vaughan’s clique.)

The novel Crash was first published in 1973, though the first draft had apparently been completed towards the end of 1970. It would become the first novel of his “urban disaster triptych”, followed by Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975), and is, perhaps, his most famous novel nowadays (depending on whether Empire of the Sun is still being read)—and certainly his most infamous.

Its first-person narrator is one James Ballard (to avoid confusion, I’m going to call him James; Ballard will refer to the author). He works at a studio in Shepperton producing TV ads; his wife Catherine works for Pan Am’s foreign tours division. The couple spend their time pursuing a series of affairs, which they talk about openly: “Before my accident,” James says, “our sexual relationship was almost totally abstracted, maintained by a series of imaginary games and perversities.” They live in an apartment near Heathrow (which Ballard refers to as London Airport, as it had been known till 1966), nestled amongst a network of conjoining carriageways, flyovers, turnoffs and roundabouts. One day, James loses control of his car and collides head-on with a married couple in another vehicle, killing the man and injuring the woman, Dr Helen Remington.

Convalescing in nearby Ashton Hospital, James encounters Dr Robert Vaughan, whom he at first assumes is a medical consultant. In fact, Vaughan is—or was—“one of the first of the new-style TV scientists”, currently pursuing with fetishistic intensity an obsessive interest in car accidents. This is no detached scientific study: Vaughan (“this hoodlum scientist”, as the novel calls him), judging by the network of scars on his face and body, has been through a fair number of collisions himself—incidents he seems to actively encourage—and has utterly invested all his energies, intellectual, creative and sexual, in the notion of the car crash as some sort of ultimate meaningful experience, with the road-death of a celebrity (his current target being Elizabeth Taylor) being, for him, the ultimate of ultimates.

Vaughan has a small coterie of followers, including the permanently concussed stunt driver Seagrave, Seagrave’s equally sozzled wife Vera, and Gabrielle, a young woman left permanently disabled by a major road accident. James and Helen soon join this group, as they get drawn in by Vaughan’s domineering obsession.

Vaughan is absolutely a Ballard type, what David Pringle, in his 1979 study Earth is the Alien Planet, has described as “these regal madmen” who make up the third in a Ballardian trinity of Lamia, Jester, and King. I tend to think of the archetype of this figure as Hathaway in Ballard’s short story “The Subliminal Man”, a combined philosopher-scientist and terrorist, with all the mad, nervous energy of Dennis Hopper at the end of Apocalypse Now!, combined with the dark certainty and purpose of Marlon Brando’s Kurtz. (In a way, all of Ballard’s novels could be read as variations on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, being about a character who over-adapts to a new or changed environment.)

Here, though, Vaughan starts to show a somewhat different side. Hathaway in “The Subliminal Man” is eloquent about his obsession (the dominating effect of subliminal advertising on modern city-dwellers), but Vaughan, as far as I recall, never justifies or explains his fixation on the car crash. He convinces not with words, but the magnetism of his own obsession. In fact, as the novel progresses, Vaughan speaks less and less, until soon he communicates entirely through his presence and the actions he takes. Combined with his increasingly dishevelled appearance (his stained clothes, multiple minor injuries, and the fact that he basically lives in his beat-up car), he starts to feel less like a “hoodlum scientist” and more like some half-starved feral child forced to come up with his own highly individual response to what can only have been a traumatic entry into adolescence. Described as “a strange mixture of personal hauntedness, complete confinement in his own panicky universe, and yet at the same time open to all kinds of experiences from the outer world”, he feels, in fact, rather like the young Jim of Empire of the Sun, but with a (troubled, and fatally warped) adult sexuality. And swapping occupied 1940s Shanghai for the roads, car parks, and hospitals around 1970s Heathrow has made no difference: both, in the eyes of these Ballardian characters, are post-traumatic landscapes, heading towards some transcendent apocalypse indistinguishable from death. (Jim in Empire of the Sun is ultimately freed from the Japanese POW camps by the dropping of the atom bomb; this novel’s hinted “autogeddon” blurs woozily between a world-wide motorway pile-up and some sort of LSD-fuelled ascension into the skies.)

(There’s an element of Ballard’s best friend, the real-life TV scientist Christopher Evans, in Vaughan, as Ballard writes in Miracles of Life: “In appearance he resembled Vaughan, the auto-destructive hero of my novel Crash, though he himself was nothing like that deranged figure.” At one point, Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars was going to be more of a performance, which Evans was going to narrate—somewhat as Vaughan does in the novel. As well as being a prophet of the microcomputer revolution—in the late 1970s he predicted our lives would be transformed by wristwatch communicators—Evans was also the scientific advisor for The Tomorrow People.)

To me, Crash makes best sense when viewed as an essential next step in the overall movement of Ballard’s oeuvre at the time, a deepening exploration of the theme of modern-life-as-post-traumatic-daze, initially put forward in The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard at that time pointed out that his fiction was often about isolated individuals, and the car is a particularly potent symbol of modern isolation. People shield themselves in the steel and fibre-glass shells of their vehicles, insulating themselves from the thousands of others they pass on roads and motorways as they head about their daily lives. (Early on, James uses his car’s safety features as a form of distancing from the secretary he’s been having an affair with: “the safety belt I had deliberately fastened to save her the embarrassment of embracing me”.) Within such isolating units, specifically designed to encase and protect, the only way for people to interact as warm, living beings is through collisions violent enough to crack these all-enclosing carapaces. The alternative is to invite someone into your car, but in Crash, at least, driving together is only done in search of sex or car crashes, or some combination of both.

There’s a feeling, in the novel, of modern life being so divorced from authentic experience that it’s only in the extremes—the car crash—that the characters reawaken to what it means to be alive. James’s head-on collision becomes “the only real experience I had been through for years”, which to me recalls Bessel van der Kolk on the suddenly reduced range of meaningful experience suffered in PTSD:

“Somehow the very event that caused them so much pain had also become their sole source of meaning. They felt fully alive only when they were revisiting their traumatic past.”

Another van der Kolk quote—“traumatized people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them and have trouble deciphering whatever is going on around them”—feels like it comes through in Ballard’s novel in the moments immediately after James’s crash: “the narrow angle between the bonnet and fenders seemed to my exhausted mind to be repeated in everything around me”, as though the world had shattered into a million fragments of reflective glass.

Vaughan, James, Helen and the others have all had their range of meaningful experience reduced to the ultra-narrow window of the car crash and nothing but the car crash, into which they funnel the entirety of their emotional and physical energies. Squeezed as they are by such a tiny aperture, everything becomes an undistinguished super-heated jumble (“hostility and affection, emotions which had become interchangeable”) instantly drained of all meaning (encounters between human beings—sexual or violent—become “conceptualised acts abstracted from all feeling”).

In Earth is the Alien Planet, David Pringle identifies two of Ballard’s key themes as imprisonment and flight, and, in a way, the car is the perfect combination of the two. Cars are (like Hawkwind’s “Orgone Accumulator”) social isolators, moveable protective boxes, but their speed and smooth movement gives them a hopeful hint of dream-like flight. And towards the end of the novel, James has visions of the many automobiles around London Airport yearning to take to the skies from the flyovers and feeder roads, as though the novel were about to move into some Unlimited Dream Company-style transformation of magical flight.

For me, the essence of Crash isn’t in its story, but its prose, which is absolutely where its roots in Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition-era fiction show. Encounters between characters are described with a remorseless medical precision, with sex scenes reading more like instructions for assembling some particularly challenging piece of flat-pack furniture, and Ballard’s well-bred dialogue is never used to better (affectless) effect, as it leaches the emotion from all human exchanges. Nevertheless, there are moments of pure Ballardian poetry, as in this transcendent description of a traffic jam:

“The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.”

It’s for this reason I find it so difficult to process David Cronenberg’s film version of Crash, which came out in 1996. There are only hints of the filmic equivalent (obsessive close-ups of car parts) of Ballard’s prose. And as soon as you put Ballard’s dialogue into the mouths of good actors, they can’t help but add more emotion than it should have. (Which is perhaps why James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger, as James Ballard and his wife Catherine, speak so quietly, as though to deaden as much of their humanity as they can. It doesn’t quite work, for me. The adaptation needs crash test dummies, not actors.) The characters who do work, in the film, are the ones who were most defined in the novel by their physical presence: Vaughan, and the disabled Gabrielle (whose mix of human flesh and straps, supports and buckles pushes her the most into Cronenbergian “new flesh” territory).

I’m sure the film works better when viewed purely as part of Cronenberg’s oeuvre, though I see it too much as an adjunct to Ballard’s to do that. (Perhaps a run-up of other Cronenberg films might help.) I have no idea how people who are into neither Ballard nor Cronenberg processed the film, though that may be demonstrated by the controversy around its release back in 1996. (Neither the novel nor the film are as extreme as earlier works from these two creators.)

I don’t know if Crash is the first novel to read if you’re thinking of getting into Ballard’s writings, but perhaps that’s just because I approached it by way of the early environmental disaster novels and short stories. Who knows, an in-at-the-deep-end approach (to this drained concrete swimming pool) might produce different results.

Published in 1986, Jenny Nimmo’s The Snow Spider is the first in a trilogy of pre-teen fantasies about a boy who discovers he’s a magician, and the glimpses he gets of another world of Welsh myth and magic. But if that makes it sound like a light, early Harry Potter-style adventure, I think it’s got a bit more depth than that.

For his ninth birthday, Gwyn’s Nain (grandmother) gives him a set of strange gifts: a tin whistle, a twisted metal brooch, a yellow scarf, a piece of seaweed and a broken wooden horse. Among these, the only thing he recognises is the scarf, which was worn by his sister Bethan on the night she disappeared—the night of his birthday four years ago, when he convinced her to go out in a storm to find his favourite ewe. Gwyn’s father blames the boy for Bethan’s disappearance, resulting in an “unbearable emptiness” between them. But Nain’s gifts, odd as they are, have a purpose: she wants to see if Gwyn, who she says is descended from the legendary Gwydion fab Dôn, is a magician. He has to offer these objects, one by one, to the wind, and in return, if he is a magician, he’ll get his heart’s desire.

Gwyn takes the brooch onto the mountainside and the wind snatches it from his hand. It’s snowing, and on the way back he thinks a particularly large and beautiful-looking snowflake has landed on his shoulder, but when he touches it, it proves to be a glittering white spider. That night, the spider spins webs in Gwyn’s room in which he can see another world, entirely white, as though made of ice and snow.

Gwyn, then, knows he is a magician. But his Nain has warned him what this means:

“You’ll be alone, mind. You cannot tell. A magician can have his heart’s desire if he truly wishes it, but he will always be alone.”

Being a nine-year-old boy, though, he of course tells his best friend Alun. Alun doesn’t believe him, and is a little annoyed at what he thinks is his friend trying to bring attention to himself (not to mention the fact Gwyn gets him out of bed to tell him he’s just given the seaweed to the wind and saw a ship sailing through the sky). Gwyn makes Alun promise not to tell anyone, but of course, being a nine-year-old boy, he does, and soon everyone at school thinks Gwyn is mad. Bullied by some of the boys in his class, he’s finally forced to use his magic for a practical purpose: to bash one of the bullies on the nose from a safe distance. In a more wish-fulfilling type of story, that might be the end of the bullying. Instead, the other boys pile on Gwyn and beat him up, after which the parents of the boy whose nose was bashed come round to complain to Gwyn’s parents. Being a magician, it seems, isn’t a lot of fun.

It’s at this point, though, that another character enters Gwyn’s story, a new girl at school, who helps him home after his beating. Eirlys (meaning “snowdrop”) is an orphan who has recently moved in with a local couple. But there’s something familiar about her, both to Gwyn and his father, who takes an instant liking to the girl. Although Bethan was dark-haired and ought to be older by now, and Eirlys is pale and white-haired and of Gwyn’s age, both Gwyn and his father start to suspect this is Bethan, back from wherever she went. (Gwyn’s mother, on the hand, gets distressed when it’s suggested Eirlys sleep in Bethan’s room—she’s evidently not ready to accept what is happening.)

But what is happening? It’s a long time before Gwyn asks Eirlys directly if she is his sister, and when he does, she says:

“I’m not Bethan… I might have been Bethan once, but now I’m Eirlys. I’ll never be Bethan again. I’ve been out there… Further than the mountain! Further than the sky!”

And she intends to return to that white otherworld that is now her home, a world populated entirely by children, “Only they’re not really children, they’re quite old, and very wise.” The fact that they’re small (little people) and that they and their world are entirely white (like Machen’s “white people”) all implies that Bethan wasn’t snatched away to some Narnia-like magical otherland or even the land of the dead, but to faerie. And that changes everything about The Snow Spider, from being a story about a boy magician, to being a story about a boy entangled in the difficult and deceptive Perilous Realm.

Things get even more complicated when Gwyn’s mother, discovering the snow spider and thinking it’s just a spider, throws it down the sink. Desperate to get it back, Gwyn takes up the only one of Nain’s presents he’s not used, the broken horse. But this is the one his Nain warned him not to use:

“I’m afraid of that horse,” she said thoughtfully. “I tried to burn it once, but I couldn’t. It was still there when the fire died, black and grinning at me.”

The horse’s broken-off ears and tail tie it to the legendary story of Efnisien, who, offended that the King of Ireland had come to marry his sister Branwen without asking his permission, cuts off the king’s horses’ ears, tails, lips and eyelids. It’s one of those savage images from myth that capture an almost ineffable degree of anger and pain, and which would be more at home in the adult work of Robert Holdstock than a book for children.

Giving the horse to the wind unleashes a dark, wild power in the valley, which rages as a storm, breaks into Nain’s house, wrecks the place and kills her pet bird, then kills Gwyn’s family’s cat. And, in a replay of Bethan’s disappearance, Alun gets lost in the storm, and Alun’s parents blame Gwyn for it.

Even if Gwyn’s heart’s desire wasn’t the return of his sister, it was at least the hope for “something that would change the way things were, to fill the emptiness in the house below” (the coldness between himself and his father), but it seems that involvement in the world of magic has only led to, as his Nain warned, loneliness: bullying at school, the loss of his friend Alun, and the revelation that his returned sister is only here temporarily. There are other moments that underscore Gwyn’s isolation even beyond his involvement in magic, such as:

“He tried to respond to his mother’s probing chatter without giving too much away for he felt he had to protect her. He did not want her to know that his friends thought him mad.”

But, as if that final unleashing of rage and destruction into the valley was what was really needed all along—as if that power wasn’t just from ancient Welsh myth, but represented all the unspoken anger and betrayal surrounding Gwyn, his father, Alun, and Bethan—things change. Gwyn recaptures the angry power back into the broken horse, Alun returns, and everything is, somehow, resolved. But Eirlys says she’s returning to the white land, and even, faerie-like, tries to persuade, then drag, Gwyn with her.

All this might sound as though The Snow Spider were about nothing but isolation, peril and darkness, but Nimmo presents it in such a way that it can easily be read as a straightforward tale of a boy magician encountering the thrills and exciting dangers of the world of magic. The faerie-like perils, and the deeper emotional currents beneath it all are treated lightly, as though leaving them there for the reader to notice, if that’s the sort of tale they’re ready for. I’m certainly interested to see where Nimmo takes the next two books, and what light it throws on the people of the white land, and their true nature.

The Snow Spider has been adapted for TV twice, once in 1988 for ITV (when it was followed by adaptations of the other two books in the trilogy), and once more in 2020 by the BBC. The 1988 adaptation is quite faithful, while the 2020 adaptation, though it feels a bit more polished, makes a number of minor changes. (For instance, in the novel, when Gwyn’s father sees Eirlys, he’s keen to offer her a lift home after her visit, and later says he’ll drive her back whenever she wants to visit. In the 2020 adaptation, it’s Gwyn’s mother who gives her a lift home—the Beeb evidently didn’t want to encourage girls to get into cars with men they don’t really know. Another change is that it’s not Gwyn’s mother who throws the snow spider away: its clearly magical, so she never gets to even see it. Instead, it’s Eirlys who temporarily banishes it, underlining her moral ambiguity as a character.) The only change I really didn’t like is the fact that the snow spider makes cute squeaking noises.

The 2020 adaptation has a title sequence and music oddly reminiscent of A Game of Thrones (pounding drums while the camera hovers over close-up rotating objects), which makes the ash-blonde Eirlys start to seem like a young Daenerys. The ending, clearly setting this up to be followed by further adaptations, makes it clear Eirlys and the other “White People” aren’t to be trusted, but presumably the pandemic put paid to any further adaptations, which is a pity.