Science Fiction

A concern with different modes of thinking and feeling is also manifest in the novels of J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock. Both began by writing conventional science fiction; both transcended its barriers to write novels which, retaining the genre's virtues of directness, imaginative freedom and intellectual enquiry, discarded its reliance on arbitrary and whimsical resolution of narrative.

Both Ballard and Moorcock are prolific – at one time Moorcock was writing a novel a month. This is the way they have come up, through the science fiction magazines. It has a curious double consequence. On the one hand, each is capable of writing with a direct lucidity which makes for easy reading; on the other both are capable of mandarin opacity, the result perhaps of fast writing against deadlines: Moorcock's A Cure for Cancer (1971), for instance, is, in his own words, "too pretentious and obscure, too many private jokes, everything I dislike in someone like Nabokov."

The great strength of these writers is that they look beyond the world of orderly social fiction. They are both conscious of the imminence of a dehumanized world, dominated by technology, a world in which traditional values appear to be obliterated. Neither welcomes this; quite the contrary. Yet they are willing to confront it. Both have at the same time a range which makes it possible for their work to change direction abruptly: Ballard has written a realistic novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), about a Japanese internment camp. Moorcock is engaged on a series of novels set in Edwardian England.

They have weaknesses in common too. Both appear to find little difficulty in turning out well-structured and convincing novels; at the same time these seem insufficiently pondered. They have written so much that they can resolve difficulties of narrative by their mastery of structure rather than by the force of imagination.

Moorcock has an exuberance Ballard lacks. Though Ballard is pleased to deploy pop images throughout his fiction, he does so as an act of criticism, revolted by the naive acceptability of his original image. His novels accordingly are rarely affirmative; he is dismayed by the squalid commodity-dominated urban world. He has suggested that "the writer's job is no longer to put the fiction in ... people have enough fiction in their lives already." He sees it as the writer's job to question the subliminal goods which pass for reality. When he employs realistic techniques, he does so as a means of criticism of conventional notions of what is real.

Spy Fiction

... The idea that shadows can assume a superior reality is central to the concept of spy fiction. The unquestioned modern master of this genre is John Le Carre, unquestioned at least since his early rival Len Deighton temporarily deserted the spy novel in favour of thoroughly researched and documented recreations of war, Fighter (1987) and Bomber (1970), and alternative history, SS-GB (1978).

Le Carre is the legitimate heir of John Buchan and Eric Ambler. Like them, he uses the form of the spy novel as a means of assessing the moral condition of the nation. Like them he is aware of the precarious nature of civilization. Yet he has taken the form further, perhaps beyond a valid point. Whereas Buchan and Ambler characteristically portrayed the murky world of secret politics as an interruption in the decent and orderly lives of their heroes, Le Carre makes it an image sufficient in itself. There is no world beyond it for his characters, who have been so formed and corrupted by their experiences in the secret world that they are incapable of conceiving any decent way of life as a practical possibility. At times Le Carre seems to share this delusion. The Secret Services of which he writes have lost their reason for existence: they have come to protect nothing except themselves.

Yet there is a moral force in Le Carre's fiction, particularly evident in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) and Smiley's People (1980), his best two novels, which makes a great deal of conventional literary fiction seem trivial. If Robert Nye shows how the erotic nerve disturbs and reforms moral attitudes, Le Carre in a very different manner never allows us to forget how the lust for power, even in a stale bureaucratic world, can become a dominating and subversive force.

This is the strength of his fiction, and it is scarcely vitiated by the frequently pretentious and convoluted style in which he writes. Le Carre has taken the spy novel so far from being in any normal sense of the term a novel of action that one might more exactly describe his world as one of mandarin inaction. His fondness for the indirect approach makes a virtue of secrecy and of deception of the reader, which serves as a parody of the moral attitudes that he critically dissects.