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Kingdom Come

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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.

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

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.

I adore J.G. Ballard's writing and thought "empire of the sun" was one of the best books I ever read. This one however left me a bit blank. It plays with the notion of citizenship and how it is that people can feel more of a community on the basis of where they shop and the forces of consumerism, than they feel for their nation as a whole. It's set not too far in the future, and yet you can see how patriotism and citizenship in England are fraying today and how England's problems in adapting to diversity have the ability to force the nation apart. The themes of this book were very compelling but the characterization was much less so. Hence, the two stars.

Over the years, JG Ballard has often written about inner space and psychology. With his last fiction novel, KINGDOM COME, he's finally moved from having his main character be the observer of someone influencing the social change and breakdown to being the one who is orchestrating it. When Richard Pearson first comes to the town of Brooklands and its shopping Metro-Centre, he's trying to discover who was the shooter behind the mall rampage that killed his father. But after the main suspect is released, Pearson begins to investigate the town leaders and the 24-hour mall itself, finding a strange and lurking culture of consumerism and sports clubs. The more he tries to understand and disassemble it, the more he becomes a part of the expanding and unraveling dystopia.

Like some of the other reviewers, I am a J.G. Ballard fan and have read most of what he's written. I consider some of his books to be great--Concrete Island, High Rise, Empire of the Sun--and some of his books to be bizarre--Hello America, Crash. In all of his books except Empire of the Sun, there is a remote feeling to the characters and action, a sort of dystopia at a distance. Sometimes this works well, such as in Concrete Island where this remote feel reinforces the central character's dislocation, but other times this does not work well, such as in Kingdom Come, where the central character seems to be observing his own naiveté from across the street.

Which doesn't mean that the themes of Kingdom Come are not worth the investment of time, just that those who are not regular readers of Ballard will probably struggle with the story and the style. Also, Americans who have not spent time in the UK may not understand all of the fascist references, hooliganism, and sports fervor that exists there. I mean, I've seen some Pittsburgh Steeler fans get pretty rowdy, but nothing on the scale of what English sports fans are capable of. The human race is potentially quite dangerous, Ballard says in an interview for the book. Even along the seemingly placid retail strips and shopping malls of suburban London, violence seethes just below the surface as any urban sense of community involvement and social evolution is replaced by a culture of consumption; shopping as an addiction that is at once insatiable and imminently vacuous and unsustainable. Ballard's scenes of modern retail mayhem seem a bit exaggerated, but then one remembers the crushing, free-for-all havoc that has occurred at Wal Mart stores during pre-Christmas sales and the wanton violence that has occurred around football (soccer) events in the UK.

Ballard's social commentary is right on, but the style of Kingdom Come will be a struggle for some readers.

An intelligent friend recently asked me where is the British Don Delillo. I suggested J.G. Ballard. The pairing is not perfect, but like Delillo, Ballard is an archly modern writer, a dweller in the suburban jungles, with his ear close to the ground, following the beat of a strange tom-tom.

Kingdom come deals, as with much of late period Ballard, with the cultural wastelands of M25 commuter towns. As he explains in the novel, this is the real Britain. Sophisticated, metropolitan inner London is a tiny slice of British life. Take the train or, even better, the car, outside the ring road, and you are greeted by a cultural wasteland - commuter towns without libraries, museums, theatres, churches. Barely a cultural edifice between them.

What they do have, is vast shopping malls. The Metro Centre, a giant shopping mall, is the principal character of this novel of ideas. Richard Pearson, and advertising executive, starts to investigate the shooting of his father in the shopping mall while he was out buying tobacco. He is led into a labyrinth of telemarketing, cultural brainwash, consumerism and fascism - the sort of lunkenheaded nationalism that sprouts its ugly head whenever England football team qualifies for a major tournament and the summer becomes a sea of George Cross flags hanging out car windows.

A suburban landscape where sports clubs become the dominant cultural pastime (a glowing indicator of a bored society) and race riots erupt against Asians and other ethnic minorities on a daily basis. A future dystopia? Nah, it's pretty much Britain as we know it.

One final word on Ballard. He has recently announced he is suffering from advanced prostate cancer. Kingdom Come, while certainly not his best work, may well be his last novel. If so, we should be grateful to him for what he has done. He is one of the few contemporary writers with the brains, talent, courage and imagination to stare modernity in the face, and bring forth a fascinating fictional output that helps us understand the times we are living through.