Millennium People [Audiobook] [Audio CD]

J. G. Ballard (Author), Tim Pigott-Smith (Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2004

Violent rebellion comes to London's middle classes in the extraordinary new novel from the author of 'Cocaine Nights' and 'Super-Cannes'. When a bomb goes off at Heathrow it looks like just another random act of violence to psychologist David Markham. But then he discovers that his ex-wife Laura is among the victims. Acting on police suspicions, he starts to investigate London's fringe protest movements, falling in with a shadowy group based in the comfortable Thameside estate of Chelsea Marina. Led by a charismatic doctor, the group aims to rouse the docile middle classes to anger and violence, to free them from both the self-imposed burdens of civic responsibility and the trappings of a consumer society -- private schools, foreign nannies, health insurance and overpriced housing. Markham, seeking the truth behind Laura's death, is swept up in a campaign that spirals rapidly out of control. Every certainty in his life is questioned as the cornerstones of middle England become targets and growing panic grips the capital!

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for 'Super-Cannes': 'Sublime!The first essential novel of the 21st century.' Independent Praise for 'Cocaine Nights': 'Britain's number one living novelist. This adds a glinting new facet to his achievement -- Ballard, detective-novelist extraordinary.' Sunday Times Praise for 'The Complete Short Stories': 'Compelling!one of the most haunting, cogent and individual imaginations in contemporary literature.' William Boyd, Mail on Sunday Esquire -- Sept 2003 "Ballard, acutely fierce as ever, detonates a bomb under Middle England in his continuing attempt to shock the middle classes out of complacency and into violent struggle" Bookseller -- 20 June 03 "[Ballard's] work has lost none of its power to disturb. Millennium People dissects a society without purpose, in which a population is numbed by an infantilising culture and invigorated only by the appeal of violence!" Daily Telegraph -- 23 August 2003 "!a horribly riveting work from a writer of rare imaginative largesse, a bearer of bad tidings unforgettably told." Literary Review -- Sept 2003 "Once again Ballard offers a masterly portrayal of a society coming apart at its civilised seams. And his text shimmers with the totems of modernity! There's still no disputing that Ballard is one of the most intelligent, important and thought-provoking writers this country has to offer. He tackles the modern human condition like no other writer. It is only a matter of time before Ballardian enters the English language." TLS -- 5 September 2003 "One of the novel's most successful aspects is the plausibility with which Ballard sketches the possible crossovers between political motivation and motiveless sociopathy, and Markham's attempts to resolve both the situation and his own mind are also rendered with a convincing giddy energy, as the plot moves to an inevitably violent conclusion." The Independent -- 6 September 2003 (article entitled 'Dystopian Rhapsody') "Millennium People is a Thames-side thriller which opens with a bomb that explodes at Heathrow!The attack on Terminal 2 turns out to be the work, not of Islamic terrorists, but of British professionals! Britain's middle-classes are the 'new proletariat'! Few writers find poetry in burning Heathrow freight offices and car-rental depots: Ballard can!. Ballard is a moralist apparently troubled by the shape of things to come and a literary saboteur of unswerving fierceness! Millennium People will compete with the best of contemporary British fiction." Evening Standard -- 1 September 2003 "Reading it is like having all the planks that underpin your life removed one by one and being forced to confront the brutality and emptiness that lies below" Guardian (Magazine) -- 6 September 2003 "Millennium People is a wonderful miasma of Ballard land." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 controversial novel Crash was also made into an equally controversial film by David Cronenberg. His most recent novels are the Sunday Times bestsellers 'Cocaine Nights' and 'Super-Cannes'. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Imprint unknown (July 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0754096297
• ISBN-13: 978-0754096290
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 7.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)

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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Forget Foucalt and Baudrillard: Read Ballard, August 4, 2008

By 

Jon Morris (Binghamton, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Millennium People (Paperback)

If you have already read "High Rise" or "Running Wild" you will easily guess the course of events in J.G. Ballard's "Millenium People:" a seemingly docile and idyllic community of educated professionals willingly regresses from the neurotic to the primitive, revealing itself capable of committing the most abject and perverse of atrocities. True, those of you familiar with Ballard's work will find little novelty here at the level of plot. What makes Ballard such a compelling author, one that we most urgently need to read, is his propensity for cultural anthropology. Ballard has always been more of a psychologist than a poet, a gifted diagnostician who is able to discern society's ailments, to outline and lucidly articulate the symptoms so that, if we so desire, we may find a cure.

This is not to say that "Millennium People" is not literary or poetic; indeed, this book is at once less vulgar than many of his early novels, and more eloquent, with few digressions and superb attention to detail, especially with regard to his characters' psychological eccentricities and nuances. Still, this book's greatest appeal lies in its cultural, psychological, and philosophical insights. For example...

On Travel: "All these trips? Let's face it, they're just a delusion. Air travel, the whole Heathrow thing, it's a collective flight from reality. People walk up to the check-ins and for once in their lives they know where they're going. Poor sods, it's printed on their tickets."

On Hollywood: "Hollywood flicks are fun, if your idea of a good time is a humburger and a milk shake. America invented the movies so it would never need to grow up. We [Brits] have angst, depression and middle-aged regret. They have Hollywood."

On Police: "Remember, the police are neutral--they hate everybody. Being law-abiding has nothing to do with being a good citizen. It means not bothering the police."

On Academia: "There's too much jargon around--'voyeurism and the male gaze', 'castration anxieties', Marxist theory-speak swallowing its own tail."

Most of these reflections appear within the first fifty or so pages of the book, which is rich with jargon-free commentary of this sort. And this puts Ballard in a curious position: thematically, while ostensibly the book about terrorism, most of the arguments are commonplace in postmodern theory, to the extent that when one reads--"Look at the world around you, David. What do you see? An endless theme park, with everything turned into entertainment. Science, politics, education - they're so many fairground rides"--one has the uncanny feeling of rereading Jean Baudrillard's essay on simulation and simulacra. Later, when one hears--"Remember, David, the middle class have to be kept under control. They understand that, and police themselves. Not with guns and gulags, but with social codes. The right way to have sex, treat your wife, flirt at tennis parties or start an affair. There are unspoken rules we all have to learn"--one might as well be reading Michel Foucault. Various other characters' "flights from the real" call to mind Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek. That said, while Ballard is often considered postmodernist, stylistically (but also in terms of content) he might be the last modernist writer left. Not only are his books conventionally structured, but they are replete with Freudian psychology and dialogues that could easily be found in any novel by Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre, among others.

In fact, one leitmotif of "Millennium People" is the belief (of some characters) that "The social conventions that tied people to their cautious and sensible lives had to be leared away." This need to shock people out of their sheltered bourgeois illusions becomes one of the primary motives of the terrorists, and seems to fulfill their own psychological need. Terrorism, we are told, "isn't a search for nothingness. It's a search for meaning. Blow up the Stock Exchange and your're rejecting global capitalism. Bomb the Ministry of Defensce and you're protesting against war. You don't even need to hand out the leaflets. But a truly pointless act of violence, shooting at random into a crowd, grips our attention for months. The absence of a rational motive carries a significance of its own."

In essence, random acts of violence, according to Ballard, don't destroy meaning, they create it, filling in the void left by the death of God and the failure of science. One of the terrorists tells us: "The gods have died, and we distrust our dreams. We emerge from the void, stare back at it for a short while, and then rejoin the void. A young woman lies dead on her doorstep. A pointless crime, but the world pauses. We listen, and the universe has nothing to say. There's only silence, so we have to speak."

At a psychological level, for Ballard's characters, murder--in the form of random terrorist acts--becomes a rite of passage, and herein lies one of the problems with the book. The characters, both terrorists and victims (all of them adults but, psychologically speaking, sick children) seem to benefit from the events that take place. True, not everyone survives, but those characters who do are rewarded at the end, either materially or spiritually. While this might make for cynical commentary about contemporary western society, it is ambiguous enough to be troubling.

In an interview published together with the British edition of the book Ballard is asked: "What is your greatest fear?" He replies, "Terrorist attacks." It seems odd, then, that we should hear of one of the dead terrorists: "In his despairing and psychopathic way, [his] motives were honourable. He was trying to find meaning in the most meaningless of times, the first of a new kind of desperate man who refuses to bow before the arrogance of existence and the tyranny of space-time. He believed that the most pointless acts could challenge the universe at its own game." While Ballard condemns the man, he cannot help but sympathize with him, and this ambivalence translates into some awkward characterization.

Ballard cannot seem to decide where his sympathies lie, and so in a two-page span the main character first says, "I knew I was waiting for Richard Gould to call me" and then "I knew that I would soon be returning home." Without retelling the whole story, I'll merely say that the two options are so far apart that madness does not quite explain it. Poor editing may.

These few faults notwithstanding, "Millennium People" is blissfully disturbing, rich in thought-provoking discourse, and nothing less than erudite. This is a smart book, one sure to be enjoyed by academics as well as by a philosophically-minded lay audience. Ultimately, what Ballard says of one of his characters might just as easily be said of him: "He was the caring physician on the ward of the world, encouraging and explaining, always ready to sit beside an anxious patient and set out a complex diagnosis in layman's terms." This is precisely why it is so imperative that we continue to read Ballard: forget Foucault and Baudrillard, Ballard is all you need.

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Still at (or near) the Peak of his Powers, March 22, 2004

By 

Russ Wellen (Sleepy Hollow, New York, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Millennium People (Hardcover)

Just about finished with the English version of Millennium People. (Since there's no translation involved, why does an English book like this take so long to come out in America? Does it really take a year to change double quotes to single quotes?) Like his two previous novels, Ballard uses the mystery for a plot device, and while in Cocaine Nights and Super Cannes, he came to the form cold in his old age, but immediately asserted his mastery, in Millennium People, he falters somewhat with his resolution of the mystery.

Moving away from his familiar theme of how the jaded West has to keep ratcheting up how it gets his kicks, he deals with senseless terrorism. Prescient, especially in light of the March 2004 attack on a hotel in Baghdad, which set a new low in terrorism in that it didn't seem to have any victims targeted. That is, Iraqis and Arabs were killed. Its aim seemed simply to create chaos like in Millennium People. While the plot is not Ballard's best, he still imbues his characters with these drop-dead little quirks that illuminates them in one line of text.

Millennium People does little to discredit him in this reviewer's eyes as the leading serious novelist in the English language. A must read for followers, and not a bad start for those new to Ballard.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Ever since Henry David Thoreau wrote Civil Disobedience, August 14, 2011

By 

ricko - See all my reviews

This review is from: Millennium People (Hardcover)

Ever since Henry David Thoreau wrote Civil Disobedience in 1849, authors around the world have penned books about social and political change. Did Thoreau want a better government, or individuals doing what they thought was right? J.G. Ballard has confused me in this novel, because I don't fully understand what he wants. He writes a tale of middle class rebellion, but doesn't offer a solution to the problem. Instead he just gives up! I think the book would have been more enjoyable, if there was a resolution to ease the burden of the middle class in today's society.

Psychologist David Markham finds out that his ex-wife, Laura, is killed by a bomb in Heathrow Airport. It is also discovered that it's not done by a terrorist group, but by a possible Bourgeois cell living in London. Who are these people, and what do they want? Markham tracks down clues that leads him to a group of people living in a complex called The Estate of Chelsea Marina. He infiltrates the group and meets a cell leader, a female bomber, a priest and his girlfriend. These people are tired of being the backbone of society. They revolt by giving up their Volvos, smoke bomb travel agencies and museums, refuse to pay the mortgage, and leave their responsible jobs.

Eventually, Markham meets the leader of the revolt, Dr. Richard Gould, who persuades David Markham to join the group. This part I found hard to believe, since the change from protagonist to antagonist is accomplished in a matter of a few pages. Here is a man looking for his ex-wife's killer, now willing to participate in wanton mayhem! The ensuing disturbances are sometimes light weight, other times jumbled. The conclusion of this book is somewhat muddled and leaves a taste of incongruity in your mouth.

I know that J.G. Ballard is a well respected author, but I don't think this was one of his better efforts. While I enjoyed reading this novel, it is not the brilliant political satire some reviewers are calling it. Is it worth reading? Of course it is, any Ballard book is mandatory reading.