A masterpiece of fiction from J. G. Ballard, which asks could Consumerism turn into Facism? Richard Pearson, unemployed advertising executive and life-long rebel, is driving out to Brooklands, a motorway town on the M25. A few weeks earlier his father was fatally wounded at the Metro-Centre, a vast shopping mall in the centre of this apparently peaceful town, when a deranged mental patient opened fire on a crowd of shoppers. When the main suspect is released without charge thanks to the dubious testimony of self-styled pillars of the community -- including Julia Goodwin, the doctor who treated his father on his deathbed -- Richard suspects that there is more to his father's death than meets the eye, a more sinister element lurking behind the pristine facades of the labyrinthine mall. Determined to unravel the mystery, Richard soon realises that the Metro-Centre, with its round-the-clock cable channel and sports clubs, lies at the very heart of his father's death. Consumerism rules the lives of everyone in the motorway towns and feeds the cravings of this bored community with its desperate need for something new, whatever the cost. Riots frequently terrorise the streets, immigrant communities are set upon by roving bands of hooligans and sports events mushroom into jingoistic political rallies. Gradually, Richard finds himself drawn into this world, caught up in the workings of the mall, exposed to the insides of the consumer dream, and starts upon dismantling this wayward vision his advertising career helped to found! In this gripping, dystopian tour de force, J.G. Ballard holds up a mirror to middle England, reflecting an unsettling image of suburbia and revealing the darker forces at work beneath the gloss of consumerism and flag-waving patriotism.
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Editorial Reviews
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'Dystopias are Ballard's stock-in-trade and, when on song, he animates them better than anyone else!it takes a master novelist to pick out the small details!fascinating.' Sunday Telegraph 'It is his ability to summon a deteriorated but recognisable modern world into being that makes him among the finest dystopians at work.' Sunday Times 'We're in Ballard-land, his old archetypes at war in a familiar-yet-strange terrain, and that should be compelling enough for any reader!Ballard, paradoxically, with all his characters gripped by obsession and necessity, is one of the great novelists of freedom.' Financial Times '"Kingdom Come" looks like a report on the state of modern Britain, but it's really a report on the state of J.G. Ballard's head, and the good news is that it's as fertile as ever!"Kingdom Come" is impressively packed with brilliant apercus.' Observer 'Mesmeric!you read this novel for his prescient vision, his acute insights and his shards of wit.' Tatler 'The magus of Shepperton is on tip-top form. No-one writes with such enchanted clarity or strange power as James Graham Ballard.' Scotsman '"Kingdom Come" encapsulates everything for which J.G.Ballard is admired!Simply put, "Kingdom Come" distils the best of Ballard to confirm he is still one of our finest living novelists.' Metro '"Kingdom Come" is important, germaine, timely and creepy, a tidal wrack of ideas washed up on the artificial beach of our resort culture.' Will Self '"Kingom Come" is a worthy addition to an extraordinary body of work. It is impossible to read one of JG Ballard's books and not to marvel at his style and ability to capture the times in which we live. His writing has been a source of excitement and inspiration to me since I was reading library books under the covers by the light of a battery torch.' Louise Welsh 'Entertaining!fragmented narratives!emerge as perfect, threatening little Ballardian vignettes.' TLS 'J.G. Ballard is the undisputed laureate of suburban psychosis!"Kingdom Come" is a brilliant novel.' Literary Review
About the Author
J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. His 1984 bestseller 'Empire of the Sun' won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. His most recent novel was 'Kingdom Come', published in 2006.
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More About the Author
Born in Shanghai in 1930, J. G. BALLARD is the author of sixteen novels, including "Empire of the Sun," "The Drowned World," and "Crash." He lived in London until his death in April 2009.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ballard's most evocative for years,
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This review is from: Kingdom Come (Hardcover)
Kingdom Come
By J.G. Ballard 4th Estate/Harper Collins In his astonishing new novel J.G. Ballard has discovered the apocalypse in the form of washing machines, stereo units and every other form of what his characters have dubbed, with both political and religious fervour, Consumerism. Ballard's novels have often touched a nerve, from his erotic-schizoid Crash to his semi-autobiographical The Empire of the Sun. Much of his earlier work was decidedly fantastical and often generically dubbed science fiction. But in his recent novels Ballard has been investigating the present. Often dubbed a Futurist, his conclusions are unnerving indeed. In some ways Kingdom Come is a return to form for Ballard. His three previous novels - Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People - seemed somewhat anchored by his attempts to grapple the strangeness of contemporary suburban life. But in Kingdom Come Ballard is both terrifyingly insightful and at his most phantasmagorical best. Kingdom Come in its 280 pages seems to achieve a strangely heroic, epic scale. In essence it is the story of a rather ineffectual, unemployed advertising executive, Richard Pearson. But when Pearson's father is murdered in a labyrinthine shopping mall in suburban Brooklands near the Heathrow Airport he sets out to investigate why the initially accused shooter has been set free. Thus begins a surreal journey into the heartlands of English suburbia, thuggish sports riots, racism, terrorism, hostage-taking, contemporary politics, consumer greed, religious extremism, family relations and far more. Where Kingdom Come succeeds is in its fine high-wire act of balancing pure farce, surreal imagery and real world events. One suspects that Ballard, who lives in suburban Shepparton outside of London, may have personally witnessed some of the racist attacks that have become commonplace during soccer riots; he depicts the senseless vandalism and violence with solemn clarity. He is equally acute in describing the culturally void environs in which such violence occurs. His satellite suburbs are essentially devoid of, libraries, art galleries or traditional places of worship. His Brookland is dominated by a central grand edifice, a vast shopping mall dubbed the Metro-Centre, the site of what he comes to believe is his father's deliberate assassination. Brooklands has become dominated by the semi-martial football gangs. The populace wear clothing adorned with the cross of Saint George, without which one is invariably a target of the hooligans. Ballard's tale builds powerfully as Pearson's paranoia grows apace, leading to a hostage situation replete with a virulent form of Stockholm Syndrome. On the wild ride we encounter many of Ballard's favourite tropes and his increasing tendency towards self-referentiality. Pearson's father was an airline pilot, leading to riffs reflecting Ballard's fascination with flight - "a reverie of wings that overflew deserts and tropical estuaries" - references to his earlier books, The Drought and The Day of Creation respectively. The near-by racetrack features a monument to the 1930s; "the heroic age of speed, the era of the Schnieder Trophy seaplane race and record-breaking flights." Ballard's nostalgia for the '30s and the notion of flight and freedom are personal touchstones for the author. He was born in 1930 in Shanghai and shortly afterwards his family were interred in a civilian prison camp. Like the author himself, it doesn't take long for Pearson to be similarly entrapped, as much psychologically as physically, when he visits the Metro-Centre. The mall has become the town centre. "No one attends church. Why bother?" a character muses early in the piece. "They find spiritual fulfillment at the New Age centre, first left after the burger bar." Pearson's initial attempts to leave Brooklands and return to London are thwarted early on as all roads seem to lead back to the Metro-Centre and its immediate environs. Initially panicked, Pearson soon concludes that the Centre "smothered unease, defused its own threat and offered balm to the weary." But the muzak played in the mall has a distinctly martial edge to it, which is more stringently replicated when the football hooligans begin marching in step and wearing uniforms emblazoned with the cross of St. George. As always Ballard rewrites the rules. Rather than Modernism being followed by Postmodernism, in Kingdom Come Modernism is followed by Consumerism which at its extreme is compared to Nazi Germany and fundamentalist Islam and Christianity. All, his central character posits, are "states of willed madness." As a new regime emerges from the chaos of football violence we are led through a thinly veiled analysis of disinformation that is easily read as a metaphor for Tony Blair's government. The new regime take over the Metro-Centre, holding the mass of consumers hostage, many of them joining the insane campaign to establish a new Consumerism. The Centre becomes a tropical sauna, an enclosed environment where cargo-cult style shrines appear in the mist. This is Ballard's most evocative writing for many years, a descent into madness that sees the ultimate shopping mall meet Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Ideal Atrocity Exhibition,
By Adrian Stranik "Ade" (London) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Kingdom Come (Hardcover)
J.G Ballard's new novel Kingdom Come is set in an ultra-modern shopping centre where the consumerist dream of ideal homes and endless sporting events has reached their inevitable apotheosis as a new form of fascism. The shopping centre in question is the fictional Metro-Centre located off the M25, but Kingdom Come could so easily read as an admonitory tale implying a retail dystopia which is very real and somewhat closer to home.
J.G Ballard is the writer of Crash and Empire of the Sun, both of which have been filmed by the `Bergs' (that's Speil and Cronen) and has been described as the `Seer of Sheperton', an `autobahn prophet' and our `greatest living author'. In his 1968 novel The Atrocity Exhibition he predicted that Ronald Reagan would become president of America a good thirteen years before said governor of California achieved assassination status. Certainly no other writer seems to have his finger as firmly on the pulse of the 20/21st century's psycho-sociological state of play. But with Kingdom Come Ballard appears to be writing the same book as if caught in a time glitch from one of his short stories of the 1950's. His last four novels have all been set within high-concept living environments where the attainment of a perfect life loses out to an inherent will to violence. In the fourth of what I'd call the `modern life is rubbish' "quadrilogy" (Thank you 20th Century Fox) Cocaine Nights, Super Cannes, Millennium People and now Kingdom Come all begin with a seemingly meaningless murder in a perfect enclosed society with an outsider arriving to solve the mystery which turns out to be no real mystery at all because it's always a barely concealed conspiracy involving all the residents; and it's not Ballard's first exploration of ideal living environments which, in `Ballard world', inevitably degenerate into chaos; High Rise was written during his `golden period' in the early 70's, as a reaction to the explosion of tower blocks which threatened to be the de rigor living experience of the future. This said, even when Ballard doesn't appear to be trying he still urinates from a great height on the likes of your Iain Banks' and Alex Garland's. Which I suppose goes some way to illustrating that the great are only great when they have to be. But Kingdom Come is recommended reading for residents of `designer towns' like Milton Keynes (U.K) and Celebration (U.S) who yearn for meaning in increasingly meaningless times. Adrian Stranik
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Unconvincing novel about interesting ideas,
By
This review is from: Kingdom Come (Hardcover)
When ad exec Richard Pearson's father is shot dead by a seemingly deranged man in a shopping centre in Brooklands - a motorway town on the outskirts of London - Richard comes to town to settle his father's affairs. But with the killer released without charge, and apparently under the protection of powerful locals, Richard soon suspects there is more to his father's death than anyone is telling him. He decides to dig deeper. Casting its shadow across his investigation is the Metro-Centre - a 24x7 consumerist heaven, which seems darkly linked to a spate of racist attacks and flag-waving hooliganism. Fascism is afoot and consumerism, it seems, is to blame... Ballard fans like me will recognise the plot and preoccupations from recent novels such as "Cocaine Nights", "Super Cannes" and "Millennium People". This kind of thing is Ballard's bread and butter these days. There's plenty going on here at an intellectual level, but it never comes together as a novel: the plot is forced and clunky; the characters contradictory and weak; the situations faintly ludicrous. The wonderful premise simply never takes flight. Ballard wants us to accept that consumerism, with its constant imperative for "the new" whatever the cost, leads inevitably to fascism. Cool. A nice idea. But where's the evidence? Where's the narrative journey that shows how it happens? The novel shouldn't just state and restate the connection, but instantiate it, take us inside that lifestyle and show us how it happens at the level of the individual. But "Kingdom Come" doesn't do this. Consumerism is only ever rendered at the level of a social force. It never loses its status as an abstraction, an "ism". It never becomes convincing as an individual affliction because we never see it from the inside; we never get access to the interior world of someone suffering from this disease. So when characters behave at the behest of this "force", it doesn't convince. Indeed, it all becomes rather ridiculous. What we get is Richard's cynical, pompous narration of townsfolk suddenly transmogrifying into gun-toting stormtroopers and building altars out of electrical appliances. When other characters do speak, it's often in such familiar tones that you suspect Ballard is simply ventriloquizing what he'd much rather be expressing in an Op-Ed piece. Not that these are uninteresting conversations - they're just unconvincing as conversations. This lack of instantiation - the lack of a plot and characters that bear the argument out - proves fatal. Of course, any writer is perfectly entitled to jettison the traditional novelistic aesthetic, but he or she needs to replace it with something else - as Ballard himself did so beautifully in "The Atrocity Exhibition". Here, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd much rather be reading an essay by Ballard on the same subject, rather than an essay masquerading as novel. I love Ballard, but this is one of his least impressive works.
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