Human Folly in The Wind from Nowhere

His first novel, The Wind from Nowhere, was disowned by JG Ballard during his life time and remains suppressed by his estate. There have been no new printings since the 1970s, despite its being recognised as the first of his thematic quartet of disaster novels. Quite why when it stands up to contemporaneous fare from John Wyndham and John Christopher can only be guessed at. Perhaps the circumstances of its composition irked Ballard. He had to produce this to make enough money so he could write the novel he wanted to write, which was The Drowned World. Did he regard it as necessary hack work to put food on the table? Or could it be that he saw flaws in it that only a meticulous obsession with detail and style would reveal? Whatever the case, The Wind from Nowhere is a debut worth anyone's time.

In the best traditions of show-not-tell, the Earth is wrapped in the envelope of a globe-spanning hurricane. No one knows why except everywhere is affected. The wind tapers off toward the poles, but its strength defies all meteorological projections and keeps getting stronger. Cities are smashed to pieces, free standing structures pulverised, and movement on the surface is virtually impossible. A dank future of survival underground scrapping over diminishing supplies awaits those who survived the wind.

The intertwining plots don't require much elaboration. Characters struggle across the storm-lashed landscape, fall in with a murky private army, and end up holed up in a vast, wind-proof pyramid-cum-Bond-villain-lair. The huge glass walls might be able to stand up to the increasing force pushing against it, but can the same be said for its sandy foundations?

For a first novel, all the Ballardian elements are present. A lot of the action take place in the liminal spaces of modern life - elevator shafts, tunnels, cellars. These back rooms that make everyday life possible quickly become the only spaces for survival. And because this is a Ballard, there are flying chunks of masonry, broken glass, cracking and crumbling concrete, power cables that dance in the wind, and human bodies pummelled, hurled, and dashed against collapsed buildings or whisked off into nothingness. There is some distance between this and the later Ballard of the urban trilogy, and above all Crash, but the familiar flavourings are present.

Also present in embryo is the decentering of the human (of humanism). The subjectivity, the agency of people only exists in relation to one another. As indifferent as the wind is, there's also the uncertainty about its origins. Might it be a Frankenstein's monster, an unintended consequence of modernity as per The Drought or the reversion to barbarism in High-Rise and Super-Cannes? The helplessness in the face of a hostile universe of reinforced by the fate of the glass pyramid and its architect, the partially deranged industrialist Hardoon. Sat behind impossibly thick blocks and having gathered around him a private army, he confounds expectations by refusing to accept the role of a megalomaniac who would rule a post-disaster Britain. His motivations for building the pyramid was to show the primacy of the will over the nature, a defiant middle finger that would easily withstand whatever wind speeds his cyclonic nemesis can throw. It is inevitably a foolish conceit and soon collapses, with our heroes just about surviving and realising that, as the glass falls from the sky, that the wind is abating of its own accord. Another underlining of the self-centred fruitlessness of human agency. The glimmer of hope comes regardless of what we did and didn't do.

Despite Ballard disowning The Wind from Nowhere, it sits in his oeuvre like a hand in a leather driving glove. It remains a superb and accomplished exemplar of the English disaster novel, and one that deserves a reissue.