Customer Reviews

Millennium People

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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.

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.

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.

I won this book in goodreads.com First Reads giveaways. This was a very interesting book to me. It accurately depicts what COULD happen in any culture if you push people far enough. All it takes is one person that doesn't like a change that is happening and a bunch of people that are willing to follow that person in retaliation. Some of the acts that were carried out were a bit disturbing on some levels, but overall the author gave some pretty "fitting" scenes. Unfortunately this book took me longer than I wanted to read. The author is British and there were several terms that I wasn't familiar with, and me being the curious soul that I am, I had to look up what each one meant before moving further in the book. Other readers may not have this problem though, I am just a curious person and try not to "assume" anything when reading. Overall this was an excellent book. I would recommend it to other readers that enjoy reading about fictional revolutions.

It's about revolution of the Chardonnay and Starbucks set. Will you participate? Having read quite a bit of J. G. Ballard's earlier science fiction books, this is quite a change. I felt this work was close to Crash in underlying needs of the protagonists, but without the cars. Every sentence drips with reference and detail to some other work, giving the book more meaning that just a puff piece. I think William Gibson's Spook Country comes close to the same style, but whereas Gibson's work seemed a bit contrived, Ballard's prose is more fluid. Where Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club is about a quarter life crisis, Millennium People is Edward Norton having a mid-life crisis. It would be nice to have the middle class collectively decide not to participate any more in society (what would I do?) and this book is an interesting analogy of how it might happen.

But there's a darker side to the story with the death of the main character's wife Laura at Heathrow at the beginning of the book. I was never quite sure of David Markham's reasons for continuing the new proletariat struggle, maybe it was a sense of loss, not of his wife but of his meaning within the framework of his society. His new wife's on again and off again disability is an interesting reflection of the needs people have, and how we respond to those needs. But I felt Markham's character for a professional psychologist was a little too detached. When he does get angry, I just can't feel find any depth that he really is angry.

Overall, it was a good book. I got through it quite quickly. it draws you along because you want to know more about the Heathrow bombing, and the apparent randomness of it. Because why have a planned revolution?

This is a disturbing book, narrating the emergence of high middle class pointless terrorism, as a way to fulfill the emptiness and lack of meaning in contemporary consumerism. The story is a cynic late-capitalism Heart of Darkness, with the protagonist entering a high middle class suburb and being corrupted by its most deranged inhabitants, in a failed attempt break with the vacuous social determination of consumerism. Complex characters and full of great lines, this is the type of book that will haunt you, in other words, a great Ballard! :D

i'm sure i'm going to get some crap for this, but i've only read 52% of it, and i give up. i may end up finishing it out of sheer boredom; it is on my kindle, and frankly, it seems mindless enough that i may chip away at it late at night when i just want something to stare at, but i've officially relinquished myself from any obligation to read to the end.

i'm very disappointed. my only previous experience with ballard is his novel _empire of the sun_ and the movie based on it, and the movie version of _crash_. (yes, i'm aware that watching a movie is not the same as reading a book, but i do think i at least have a sense of the themes of the novel _crash_, and an idea of why ballard is considered a subversive writer.) i really expected to be challenged, and the topic is interesting enough, but i don't think this book works (so far) either in terms of story or ideas.

i fail to understand the motivation of the characters in any real way. apparently, psychologist markham wants to find the terrorist group that planted the bomb that killed his ex-wife, not because he mourns her in any particular way, but because his slightly loony current wife thinks it is important. in the process of searching for answers, he becomes a member of a terrorist group himself. again, i'm not sure why. we are told these things, but for me, the motivations never seemed real. i understand that he is trying to find himself and create meaning, but i'm not buying it.

i have read another reviewer's comment to the effect that the work is undermined by ballard's own ambiguous feelings about terrorism. perhaps that is so, as i'm really not sure what ballard's point here is. he makes quotable statements throughout the book (a few are rather poetic), but none are profound, and some seem to contradict themselves. for example: "The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 was a brave attempt to free America from the 20th century. The deaths were tragic, but otherwise it was a meaningless act. And that was it's point."

so... what was it's point? meaningless terrorism, or an attempt to free America from the 20th century? this book is full of these sorts of statements and contradictions, which might amount to something if i got the impression that they were intentional, intended to stretch our viewpoints. instead, i get that ballard and his characters are not clear about much of anything.

markham, for example, will one moment seem to challenge the terrorists he is coming to know, questioning their use of violence. (frankly, that violence is a bit ridiculous. what point does one really intend to make about the suffering of the middle class "proletariat" by bombing a video store?) only a page or two later, he tells his current wife something like, "they're not so bad."

his current wife is equally wishy-washy. she threatens to report her husband's involvement to the police, and only a couple pages later, tells him that pursuing violence with his new buddies may be something he needs to do to find himself.

to sum up, i'm finding this book dull and poorly conceived. i also wonder if a lot may be lost on me as an american. perhaps i would find more meaning in the references to various places, for example, if i were familiar with them and their stereotypes. is twickenham something akin to boston? is chelsea sort of like san francisco? i don't know.

Watching the Devil kick the Millennium
Over the Golden Mountain." Edgar Lee Masters

"Millennium People" has an interesting story line. Set in the UK shortly after the Millennium, psychologist David Markham is mourning the murder of his ex-wife. She was the victim of a terrorist bombing at Heathrow Airport. Determined to get to the bottom of the matter he begins his own personal investigation. He quickly finds himself thrown into a strange world: a world filled not with foreign interlopers from abroad or proletarian rebels but, rather, one filled with disaffected tea-sipping, Volvo-driving, over-extended mortgage holding members of the British middle classes. For reasons explained in the book they are just fed up, prisoners of their own success apparently. And, contrary to what one would expect of a stereotypical British member of the bourgeoisie, they seem easily led to increasingly violent acts. Finally, Markham meets the `hidden hand' behind the angst and from there the story comes to a rather dramatic conclusion.

By the time I was one-third of the way through J.G. Ballard's "Millennium People" I was reminded of Lindsay Anderson's 1968 movie If... (The Criterion Collection) in which a young Malcolm MacDowell play a privileged teen who, chafing at the oppression of an old, elite English boarding school, leads a group of children of the middle and upper classes on a violent revolt. Millennium People struck me a story of what those teens might get up to if they had decided to rebel against their stolid, middle class, middle-age surroundings. I soon became convinced that the book reminded me of Paddy Chayefsky's Network, where people, once again mostly middle class start chanting "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." By the time I was finished, when the Millennium People took its last twist and turn, or descent if you will into a study of madness, I was sure that it shared some literary DNA with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

These shifting comparisons represent for me both the enjoyment and disappointment I had with Millennium People. Weaving three themes through a book is not all that unusual and when it works it can be brilliant. But, when they don't connect, when the individual themes don't seem well-integrated than I think that leaves room for a bit of disappointment. That was the difficulty I had with Millennium People. At the end of the day I think of a book in which the individual parts were greater than the whole. While the book was a pleasure to read, as Ballard's books typically are, I felt a bit unsatisfied. Now this dissatisfaction is not the sort I feel when I read a `bad' book. Rather, it is the slight disappointment I feel when I read a book that is filled with terrific passages, with good writing and thoughtful insights into the human condition but which does not quite live up to the expectations that those passages and insights provide.

As noted, I admire Ballard's work. Although perhaps best known for Crash and Empire of the Sun I think his best work can be found in his short stories. His The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard show Ballard at his finest. I think coming to Millennium People after his short stories may be responsible for my slight disappointment. His short stories are masterful, compact, and powerful. All in all, I would recommend Millennium People to any reader. Despite my disappointment I was far from sorry that I read the book. It kept me engaged throughout. It just didn't quite live up to the promise of its individual themes.

L. Fleisig

the late J.G. Ballard is a sort of Don Delillo of Britain. A cultural anthropologist he expertly connects up the loose wires that lie beneath our troubled modern psyches.

The premise of this novel is that a previously docile group of educated middle class professionals living in Chelsea Marina (loosely based on Fulham), rise up against their bonds of civic duties and parking restrictions and launch into a violent protest - ripping up their parking tickets, targeting totems of cultured England such as the National Film Theatre and the National Gallery, burning their Volvos and seeking self imposed exile in their Cotswold dachas.

Sub plots intersect wildly in this book - a terrorist bomb threat at Heathrow Airport, the murder of an innocent TV presenter (based on the Jill Dando case) and a curious psychiatrist living in smug bourgeoise St John's Wood. But the plot is not the most interesting thing about this novel - it is Ballard's always fascinating reaction to modern life. From his childhood in the violence and anarchy of wartime Shanghai, Ballard has never accepted the mundane as normal. He comicly and plausibly portrays a picture of the last sober bastions of modern society ripping free from the moorings that hold them down.

Cheered on all the way by his great champion and friend Will Self who plasters plaudits all over my paperback editition, Ballard makes merry fun at the expense of middle class foibles. It is not fiction which offers any solutions to the modern malaise of boredom interspersed with random acts of violence, but it is an excellent diagnosis of our bizzare, bland times, and a novel which makes you think. Can't ask for much more than that.

I want to make a short review: This is one the greatest novels ever! There is an action, there is a vision, and there is a wisdom within those beautiful sentences that I want to memorize, like: "The world had provoked her, and irrational acts were the only way to defuse its threat," or: "We think we believe in God but we're terrified by the mysteries of life and death," or: "You don't realize it, David, but you're the apostle of a new kind of alienation," etc. This novel is like a good and strong sex: tasty, pleasurable, dangerous, fulfilling. Great study of revolution and violence in society. Read it, read it, read it!!!