SOURCE: “Return to the Source,” in New Statesman & Society, September 11, 1987, p. 26.

In the following review, Priest offers praise for The Day of Creation.

One of the familiar smaller pleasures of a J. G. Ballard novel is the way in which the chapters are named, a surreal blend of fanciful Freud and boys' action/adventure stuff. For example, five consecutive chapters in The Day of Creation are called ‘Piracy’, ‘Out of the Night and Into the Dream’, ‘The Naming of New Things’, ‘The Helicopter Attack’ and ‘Escape’. Readers who discovered Ballard's work through his 1984 novel Empire of the Sun might have been slightly disconcerted there by the same kind of thing (‘The Refrigerator in the Sky’ and ‘The Bandits’), but Ballard veterans usually turn to the Contents page first for a quick preview of the happy and fruitful madness to come.

Empire of the Sun was the anomaly in...