Kingdom come

J. G. Ballard's final novel envisions the collapse of consumerist culture. NOBODY ever hated the contemporary world with as much intensity and conviction as J. G. Ballard. In five decades of unforgiving literary production, he drowned it, scorched it, flayed it with whirlwinds, deluged it with Martian sand, even transformed it into a crystalline jungle populated by jewel-skinned crocodiles, people and parrots. His characters have been sodomized in car crashes, driven crazy by scientific researchers, hounded by billboards and forced to observe atrocities looping endlessly on movie screens until even Zapruder's exploding bullets seemed as mundane and predictable as elevator music. For Ballard, who died in 2009 at the age of 78, the true horrors of our collective future don't concern what might happen hundreds of years from now in a spaceship; rather, they reverberate in the very ordinary now-ness of freeway overpasses, sports stadiums, high-rise apartment complexes and gated communities. In other words, don't bother watching out for zombies or mutant beasts or whatever. The ones you really need to watch out for are those mall-walkers. In "Kingdom Come" (published in Britain in 2006), Ballard's latest batch of preapocalyptic savages are happily clad in freshly ironed soccer jerseys and getting ready to fight for the only thing they believe in anymore - shopping at the Metro-Centre, a domed and cathedral-like supermall somewhere off the M25 just west of Heathrow. During the day, they randomly purchase everything from refrigerators and toasters to "reusable cat litter," but when nighttime comes and the doors silently slide shut behind them, they go elsewhere for action: beating up Asian shopkeepers, attending sports matches, drinking high-octane lagers around the indoor swimming pools of franchise hotels and watching their own product testimonials on the Metro-Centre's privately operated cable channel - which, in the evenings at least, enjoys "higher ratings than BBC2." But then, BBC2 is part of the old order, while the Metro-Centre is a glorious harbinger of the new one. Like most of Ballard's late-era novels, from "Cocaine Nights" (1996) through "Millennium People" (2003), "Kingdom Come" is framed as a mystery, but the eventual solution isn't quite so satisfying or precise as what you'd expect from Agatha Christie or Rex Stout. The protagonist - a typically shut-down, middleclass Ballardian antihero named Richard Pearson - goes looking for the killer of his estranged father (who was shot, perhaps assassinated, while buying tobacco at the Metro-Centre) but uncovers nothing more surprising than the serially bland, well-fed faces of other shut-down, middleclass professionals like himself. There's the attractive female cop, trying to keep a lid on the crowds of leaderless consumers; a charismatic, lipsticked and deeply suntanned television host, "the Wat Tyler of cable TV, leading a new peasants' revolt"; a burly lawyer, Geoffrey Fairfax, who sees the Metro-Centre as an invading beast roiling up from the lower orders. Before the mega-mall, Fairfax recalls, "we had a real community, not just a population of cash tills. Now it's gone, vanished overnight when that money-factory opened. We're swamped by outsiders, thousands of them with nothing larger on their minds than the next bargain sale. For them, Brooklands is little more than a car park." Even the otherwise respectable apartment of Pearson's dead father, a retired airline pilot, reveals tidy stacks of literature about Nazis, Mussolini and the British Union of Fascists. To solve the mystery of suburban violence, Pearson gradually realizes, you don't need to find out who's causing it; it's more a matter of who isn't. As a local teacher who witnessed the shooting explains, middle-class professionals need to change with the times and "prepare our kids for a new kind of society. There's no point in telling them about parliamentary democracy, the church or the monarchy. The old ideas of citizenship you and I were brought up with are really rather selfish. All that emphasis on individual rights, habeas corpus, freedom of the one against the many. ... What's the point of free speech if you have nothing to say?" On the other hand: "Consumerism is a collective enterprise. People here want to share and celebrate, they want to come together. When we go shopping we take part in a collective ritual of affirmation." As you might suspect, there's a lot of irony in Ballard. If his late (and very funny) books sound peculiar to American ears, it's probably because of his very English tendency to play almost everything he says, however outrageous, at moderate to low volume. Unlike the noisier, New Yorkerish avant-garde types who like to shock and awe their readers, Ballard doesn't shout or swear or get in your face. Even his most disturbing obscenities - the porn film sequence in "Cocaine Nights," say, or the endlessly salacious car-sex scenarios in his unforgettable 1973 novel "Crash" - are as mannered and concise and unimpassioned as a GPS device's soothing, digitally modulated voice describing how to reach the next gas station. (Excuse me -maybe that should read "petrol station.") Ultimately, the Metro-Centre's new and improved, radically futurized citizenry do what most Ballardian characters do: hunker down in their prisons and embrace their chains, take themselves hostage and refuse to be set free, secretly conspire with their victimizers and worship just about anybody who comes along to tell them how. This is where the future really happens, Ballard reminds his readers -way out in the suburbs where everybody looks like everybody else or faces the consequences. As the bullet-headed psychiatrist, Dr. Maxted, explains (just before he tries to lock the narrator into his asylum): "This isn't Islington or South Ken. There are no town halls or assembly rooms. We like prosperity filtered through car and appliance sales. We like roads that lead past airports, we like airfreight offices and rent-a-van forecourts, we like impulse-buy holidays to anywhere that takes our fancy. We're the citizens of the shopping mall and the marina, the Internet and cable TV. We like it here, and we're in no hurry for you to join us." PEARSON is like many of Ballard's protagonists, the ironic, semidetached observers of cataclysms, who don't feel any personal investment in either the normal order of things or their obliteration by random apocalypses. In some ways, they all hark back to Jim, the autobiographical character in "Empire of the Sun," wheeling around his prison camp observing the sorrows of people who don't seem to know how lucky they are. Because in Ballard's universe - which patiently assembled itself over decades of remarkable novels and stories and essays - words like "atrocity," "disaster," "terminal" and "catastrophe" aren't necessarily bad. Things could be worse, and the world as we know it might never change at all. Or, as Pearson remarks late in the novel, "Think of the future as a cable TV program going on forever." You always got there way ahead of us, guy. J. G. Ballard, you will be missed. 'We're the citizens of the shopping mall and the marina, the Internet and cable TV. We like it here.' Scott Bradfield's latest book is the novel "The People Who Watched Her Pass By."

With all the attention paid lately to terrorist narratives and novels of suburban malaise, the prescience of Ballard's last novel, receiving its better-late-then-never American publication after six years, will come as a shock even to hardened veterans of the late author's psychosexual parables and visceral sci-fi. This is a pitch-black comedy of consumer fascism hooked to wary hero Richard Pearson, a recently unemployed advertising exec who returns to suburban London to investigate his father's death inside the monolithic Metro-Centre mall at the hands of a machinegun-wielding madman. But something much more sinister is at play, an evil that lurks inside boutiques and car parks, transmitted by commercials that make it seem as if everyone is a suspect except for the killer. Racial violence is on the rise, suburban assassinations and bombings have become as ubiquitous as strip malls, and Metro-Centre looms as a new church awaiting its messiah (or its fuhrer?). Pearson goes deep into a bizarre conspiracy that extends beyond mere capitalist critique to a murderous vision of 21st-century Britain. But it is the connections Ballard makes between anti-Muslim violence, elective insanity, and governments complicit with autocratic corporate agendas that make this novel a compulsory read and a wicked masterpiece of postmodern post-9/11 literature, a chilling vision of things as they are. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Ballard (19302009) creates a world reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange and V for Vendetta in this novel of suburban fascism. At the heart of the narrative is the Brooklands Metro-Centre Mall, a monstrosity that feeds excess and consumerism. In a recent incident, not atypical of the violence that pervades this vision of modern British life, a man has been shot and killed at the mall. Held for his murder is Duncan Christie, a mental patient who was on day release when the incident occurred. This seems to be a cut-and-dried case, even to Richard Pearson, narrator and son of the victim, but a few anomalies crop up. For example, three witnesses emerge who claim that Christie was at one of the entrances to the mall at the time of the shootingand these witnesses just happen to be Christie's physician, his psychiatrist and one of his former teachers. Pearson is not wrong in assuming this to be overly coincidental. In addition to the loss of his father, Pearson has other problems, for he has recently lost his job, pushed out of his position in an ad agency by his own wife. Pearson watches with some amazement the rise of quasi-fascist elements in this quasi-suburban setting that's starting to create its own reality, for "leafy Surrey" is no longer a suburb of London but rather a suburb of Heathrow. Troops dressed in St. George's shirts march in the streets, encouraging hooliganism and attacks against immigrant businesses; riots break out in sports arenas; and Pearson finds out his father might have had sympathies with the brown-shirted St. George's movement. Ballard writes brilliantly about the nightmarish underside of modern life, and this novel makes us poignantly aware of the loss of his voice. ]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.