Indeed sadness comes with the passing of a courageous writer. Courageous because he attempted the difficult feat of overtly connecting the strange erotic and violent internal world of unconcious (and not so unconscious) fantasy with patterns in and products of human civilisation. His more surreal and difficult work sometimes proposed that the human condition, if not genetics, were somehow pre-ordinately composed with information which could be expressed biologically, in not always adaptive ways, to socially or environmentally bizarre changes and crises. His melding of the more basic human urges with technological sophistication drew a range of extreme responses amongst avid readers and critics, which perhaps suppressed a wider appreciation of some of his predictive ability and linguistic adeptness.
It could be argued that a proportion of his surreal writing was a product of the horrors he witnessed in concentration camps as a child, but if so, he took a long time to tell his story in direct terms - in 'The Empire of the Sun'. But even if so, we have been enriched by his foretelling of perspectives on humanity in allegory which few others have attempted.
Vale, to a generous story-teller.
