SOURCE: “The Sage of Shepperton,” in New Statesman & Society, September 27, 1991, p. 52.

In the following review, Kimberley offers a positive assessment of The Kindness of Women.

There is only one rule in literature: beware of sequels and autobiographies. The Kindness of Women appears to be both, and yet manages to be stimulating and substantial. JG Ballard never was one to abide by the rules.

Ever since he published Empire of the Sun in 1984, Ballard has enjoyed status and esteem within the somewhat circumscribed world of English literary culture. It is as if that novel, with its themes of boyhood, war, the end of Empire, had tapped into the mainstream, thereby allowing us to forget the aberrant imagination that had produced Ballard's work until that point.

Yet, although Empire of the Sun did embrace themes that could be labelled Bookerish, their imaginative transformation was quite in line with every novel...