SOURCE: “Modernity and Its Discontents,” in New Statesman, May 10, 1999, pp. 41–2.

In the following review of Iain Sinclair's Crash: David Cronenberg's Post-Mortem on J. G. Ballard's “Trajectory of Fate,” Gray discusses Ballard's literary significance and the major themes and disturbing cultural observations in his work.

Derelict airfields, drained swimming pools, encroaching sand dunes, mangled cars, drowned cities—if these images remain in collective memory, as ciphers for what it was like to be alive in the closing decades of the 20th century, it will be the utterly individual vision of JG Ballard that put them there. Ballard's work fits comfortably into no known genre. A more prolific and consistently inspired short story writer than HG Wells, a novelist more unblinking in his insight into solitude and the flimsiness of character than Joseph Conrad or Graham Greene, an “experimental” writer more unsettling and often funnier than William Burroughs, Ballard has...