complete fiction

The Independent on Sunday celebrated its 1000th edition yesterday and its literary editor Katy Guest wrote that the paper's first lead review, of The End of Nature by Bill McKibben, had been written by Martin Amis.

'He fitted in a bit of environmental outrage, then, in between publishing London Fields (1989) and Time's Arrow (1991).'

Over the weekend, Amis was again touching on an environmental theme when he wrote that the question J. G. Ballard (who died last week) had kept asking was:

'what effect does the modern setting have on our psyches - the motion sculpture of the highways, the airport architecture, the culture of the shopping mall, pornography and technology? The answer to that question is a perversity that takes various mental forms, all of them extreme.'

The master himself, J. G. Ballard, was quoted (in this Sunday's Observer) as saying:

'The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction.'

pic: Christian Bale as the young J. G. Ballard in Empire of the Sun