John Gray explores the role of memory in giving meaning to our lives. Through the writings of J.G. Ballard, he reflects on how we struggle to preserve our past but at the same time sometimes long to leave it behind.

Gray praises the power of Ballard's imagination - and his enchanting fables - to make good all this.

His conclusion is upbeat. "Through the alchemy of memory the leaden buildings in which [Ballard] wandered as a boy became the golden vistas of his fiction, and the traumas of his childhood were transmuted into images of fulfilment".

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