marcusgipps (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} marcusgipps) wrote,@ 2006-07-15 16:13:00 |
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Kingdom Come, by J. G. Ballard
Another one of the big titles for Christmas, this one. I'm a fan of Ballard, especially some of the early sci-fi stuff (Vermillion Sands and The Drowned World are particular favourites of mine), and I have enjoyed his later works as well. This definitely fits into the same category as Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes - set a few years into the future, in a small(ish) community that is about to collapse/explode/revolt. This time we're in Surrey, where the giant shopping malls and sports centres are becoming centres of a new form of worship, and the residents are slowly developing a new form of fascism. Fairly typical Ballardian stuff, in other words.
Into this world comes Richard, a recently fired and divorced London advertising executive, whose father has been shot and killed in an apparently random attack within the Metro-centre. He doesn't understand what is going on around him - he doesn't understand why someone would attack the mall, he doesn't understand what his father was doing there, and he doesn't understand why the obvious suspect - a local mental patient with a grudge against the Metro-centre - is freed without charge. As he starts to investigate the shooting, he encounters various local personalities, and he doesn't really understand them, either: the faded celebrity who is the face of the centre, the doctor who he is attracted to despite himself, the people who are against the centre and the changes it is making to their ways of life, and those who can't understand that rampant consumerism is not the ultimate goal. And slowly, civilisation around him begins to change, as groups of people in St George shirts roam the streets, attacking non-white districts, or anybody who they feel in against the Metro-centre.
It is only when Richard decides to become part of the Metro-centre, to use his advertising skills to manipulate the public by taking control of the career of David Cruise, the voice of the centre, that he becomes truly aware of what is really happening. It isn't always entirely clear whether he is acting out of a desire for some sort of power in his now empty life, or in an attempt to lessen the harm that is being caused, or just because because he is so caught up in the mania around him that he knows no other way to act. The whole thing goes horribly wrong, in the end, as we always suspect it will, and the final act of the book, with the Metro-centre under siege from the police and army, is as apocalyptic as it is indicative of what is yet to come.
The last words of the book are "In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise". The Metro-centre may fall, but Ballard believes that he is issuing a warning about the way our culture is going. That doesn't stop this being a good book - it never has in the past, in my opinion - but the whole thing is delivered with Ballard's normal coolness of prose. The whole thing just feels so detached that it can be hard to feel quite as appalled/excited as I think Ballard wants you to. It is a formidable piece of work, and it has a lot to say for itself (the descriptions of mobs of sports fans rampaging through the suburbs, draped in St George flags, seemed particularly apposite and worrying, reading this as I was during the World Cup), but I think those who aren't used to Ballard's style of writing may be left a little cold by it.
This took me a while to get through, 28/05/06 to 14/06/06, although I paused in the middle and read something else. I read a proof, but it comes out in Hardback in September, ISBN: 0007232462.
Another one of the big titles for Christmas, this one. I'm a fan of Ballard, especially some of the early sci-fi stuff (Vermillion Sands and The Drowned World are particular favourites of mine), and I have enjoyed his later works as well. This definitely fits into the same category as Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes - set a few years into the future, in a small(ish) community that is about to collapse/explode/revolt. This time we're in Surrey, where the giant shopping malls and sports centres are becoming centres of a new form of worship, and the residents are slowly developing a new form of fascism. Fairly typical Ballardian stuff, in other words.
Into this world comes Richard, a recently fired and divorced London advertising executive, whose father has been shot and killed in an apparently random attack within the Metro-centre. He doesn't understand what is going on around him - he doesn't understand why someone would attack the mall, he doesn't understand what his father was doing there, and he doesn't understand why the obvious suspect - a local mental patient with a grudge against the Metro-centre - is freed without charge. As he starts to investigate the shooting, he encounters various local personalities, and he doesn't really understand them, either: the faded celebrity who is the face of the centre, the doctor who he is attracted to despite himself, the people who are against the centre and the changes it is making to their ways of life, and those who can't understand that rampant consumerism is not the ultimate goal. And slowly, civilisation around him begins to change, as groups of people in St George shirts roam the streets, attacking non-white districts, or anybody who they feel in against the Metro-centre.
It is only when Richard decides to become part of the Metro-centre, to use his advertising skills to manipulate the public by taking control of the career of David Cruise, the voice of the centre, that he becomes truly aware of what is really happening. It isn't always entirely clear whether he is acting out of a desire for some sort of power in his now empty life, or in an attempt to lessen the harm that is being caused, or just because because he is so caught up in the mania around him that he knows no other way to act. The whole thing goes horribly wrong, in the end, as we always suspect it will, and the final act of the book, with the Metro-centre under siege from the police and army, is as apocalyptic as it is indicative of what is yet to come.
The last words of the book are "In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise". The Metro-centre may fall, but Ballard believes that he is issuing a warning about the way our culture is going. That doesn't stop this being a good book - it never has in the past, in my opinion - but the whole thing is delivered with Ballard's normal coolness of prose. The whole thing just feels so detached that it can be hard to feel quite as appalled/excited as I think Ballard wants you to. It is a formidable piece of work, and it has a lot to say for itself (the descriptions of mobs of sports fans rampaging through the suburbs, draped in St George flags, seemed particularly apposite and worrying, reading this as I was during the World Cup), but I think those who aren't used to Ballard's style of writing may be left a little cold by it.
This took me a while to get through, 28/05/06 to 14/06/06, although I paused in the middle and read something else. I read a proof, but it comes out in Hardback in September, ISBN: 0007232462.
