Kingdom Come - JG Ballard

[Freewheeling Andy]

Anyone who's previously read any JG Ballard will be very familiar with the trajectory of this book. The ideas remain fascinating but it feels like almost a pastiche of a JG Ballard novel.

 

If you were coming fresh to it, it might still be exciting and shocking, but if you're coming to it after reading Super-Cannes, or the excellent Cocaine Nights, or earlier stuff like High Rise or Concrete Island, it will be a let down. The writing is less strong, the characterisation weaker, and it feels like someone is writing a "JG Ballard novel" rather than it being JG Ballard writing a novel.

 

As always, it seems, it starts in quiet suburbia, in a relatively normal environment. This time the central point is a shopping mall out near Heathrow. Richard Pearson, advertising executive, visits the mall after his father, and ex-airline pilot, is shot in what appears to be a random shooting. The more time he spends there, the more he realises the disconnect with "normal" London society, and how the society in the orbital towns is fragmenting.

 

Here, the fragmentation is a near-fascist reorganisation, but based around consumerism. And perhaps the problem is that Ballard tries too hard to explain it, and tries too hard to make it current, whereas with Cocaine Nights just the very fact of living in the isolated "perfect" modern society is enough to see the decay.

 

The advertising executive begins to engage with the strange neo-fascist processes atatched to the shopping center, whilst various apparently normal people both help and hinder. Even the culmination is uninspiring.

 

As someone who loves Ballard's work, I have to say I was very disappointed. This is Ballard-by-rote, rather than Ballard the genius innovator.

[JudyB]

I've read and enjoyed Empire of the Sun and the sequel The Kindness of Women but I've not read his more recent novels.