Kingdom Come by J G Ballard
Kingdom Come comes hot on the heels of J G Ballard's previous work, Empire of the Sun and Crash
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Monday, 18, Sep 2006 04:29
Published by Fourth Estate, out now, hardback, 280 pages, £17.99
In a nutshell.
Disquieting. Bleak. Violent. Faintly horrifying.
What's it all about?
One-time advertising executive Richard Pearson gets down to the coalface after his estranged father is shot dead at one of the suburban shopping domes his efforts have helped encourage. In his search for the killer he becomes inextricably bogged down in the machinations of the Metro-Centre, which breathes a very dangerous, consumer-focussed life into the starkly-depicted, anodyne and fed-up towns skirting the M25.
The fictional town of Brooklands, in which the action is set, is a swirl of organised madness as brain-numb consumers bring order to their lives through chaos. The Metro-Centre acts as the focal point for sports events which turn into race riots and inspires curiously militaristic followings from a cabal of surrounding towns. Pearson gets right into its core in his bid to understand his father's death, penetrating a bizarre junta of questionably-motivated local figures and managing to become the puppeteer behind what he ensures is the centre's increasingly wild, driving, almost feral influence on its herd of followers. Has he gone too far through obsession with a psychological case-study or is he knowingly willing his own baby to self-destruct?
Who's it by?
The Shanghai-born Ballard's name trips off millions of fiction lovers' tongues - usually if they've uttered the word "dystopia" in the previous few seconds. As the writer of Empire of the Sun and Crash - perhaps now best known as films - and many other novels such as the more recent Millennium People, the veteran author is known for his aptitude at probing the nightmarish prospects for the near future, the consequences both of boredom and distraction, and the human inability to fully sate our desires.
Empire of the Sun, published in 1984, is based in part upon Ballard's own three-year spell in a prison camp, which he spent after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. It is a period which is said to have influenced much of his work, from his younger days towards his current status as the 'seer from Shepperton'.
As an example.
"People are deliberately re-primitivising themselves. They yearn for magic and unreason, which served them well in the past, and might help them again. They're keen to enter a new Dark Age. The lights are on, but they're retreating into the inner darkness, into superstition and unreason."
"People are capable of the most wonderful madness. The kind of madness that gives you hope for the human race."
Likelihood of becoming a Hollywood blockbuster
It's not too much of a plot spoiler to suggest that the idea of a finale which sees scores of fanatics desperately defending an ablaze shopping empire as if it were the sole reason for human existence might appeal in some form to film directors.
What the others say
"Crash - perhaps Ballard's best-known work - was wonderfully strange. Kingdom Come is not-so-wonderfully strained. It doesn't quite work on any level, though it tries hard." - Lionel Shriver, Daily Telegraph
"Kingdom Come looks like a report on the state of modern Britain, but it's really a report on the state of JG Ballard's head, and the good news is that it's as fertile as ever." - Phil Baker, the Guardian
So is it any good?
Yes, and genuinely unsettling to begin with as Pearson trawls a series of suburban towns which seem beset by a nameless, faceless dread. The conclusion of the book does not quite realise these latent apocalyptic possibilities but then this, in a sense, says something about the fairly parochial (Thames Valley/Heathrow Airport belt) nature of the consumerist threat which the book portrays. Consumerism eats itself for the meantime but may grow big and strong enough to come back for seconds.
Pearson, as narrator, provides only one - not always acutely-sighted - set of eyes for the unfolding mess, and does not seem to vary enough from the other, fairly caricatured, main characters in the core facets of his personality and trains of thought. Something of the main character is thus projected on to everybody else, although perhaps - given that the Metro Centre's rise and fall seems loosely to follow the pattern of Pearson's fatally-flawed advertising career in the City - this is not unintentional.
Ballard is as fascinating as ever, though, with an obsession with the effects of inactivity and boredom which harks strongly back to Joseph Conrad. If this novel has a Mr Kurtz then it is probably Tom Carradine, the sprightly and ultimately dictatorial PR manager for the Metro-Centre whose out-on-a-limb pride in his consumer conquests ultimately does for him - and the infuriating, but sometimes savvy, Pearson would not make a bad Marlow, either.
7/10
Nick Ames