Fiction: Belief incites war and its atrocities form the stuff of daily news. Yet there is a further evil, equally mindless and potentially even more destructive: the consumerist fantasies that breathe amoral discontent, writes Eileen Battersby
Leisure is the new danger - it creates boredom and, with it, an idle propensity for random violence. Greed is a tyranny; satisfaction is elusive and probably impossible. The middle class is the new enemy, depraved beyond salvation and prepared to eat itself. The great JG Ballard, author of The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965), The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973), Empire of the Sun (1984), Cocaine Nights (1996) and other equally original amoral calls to moral order, remains the relentless Cassandra of British fiction.
It is he who keeps watch, waiting for increasing horrors to fall from an already polluted sky down on a diseased earth. Dealing in images of drought, decay, desolation and nature gone to seed, Ballard is the supreme literary outlaw, a maverick whose strange imagination combines surrealist, at times pornographic, lunacy with a prophet's vision. His offbeat futurism emerged in the 1960s and has since evolved into our present.
No other contemporary British writer, and few international literary figures (with the possible exception of William Burroughs himself), has harnessed the inspired subversion of Lewis Carroll and infused it with such absurdist grotesque truths. Ballard's novels read as ironically deadpan bulletins from the grim margins that have in fact become society's centre. Long alert to the madness of existence, his most recent fiction, such as Rushing to Paradise (1994), Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes (2001) and Millennium People (2003) has focused on the consumerist nightmare.
Ballard, born in China in 1930 and raised in the Home Counties artificiality of the International Settlement in Shanghai, experienced the displacement caused by war as a child. His experiences inspired his coolly detached autobiographical classic Empire of the Sun, one of the great war novels. Ballard has never quite relinquished those early uncertainties and they have shaped his weirdly atmospheric fictions, which are as much psychological odysseys as plot-driven narratives.
Kingdom Come is a variation of Millennium People with its rampaging consumers, but this time the Volvo- and Saab-infested Chelsea Marina residential enclave has been replaced by a pulsating multi-storey shopping centre off the M25, the motorway wasteland that, along with Heathrow Airport, so intrigues Ballard. In Crash, he explored the sexuality of choreographed car crashes; in his recent books the thesis has tended to centre on excess and violence born of leisure and consumerism.
The suburbs are the lost frontier, inhabited by citizens whose existence is determined by how much shopping they can cram into each day. As ever with Ballard, it all begins as straight-faced Kafkaesque comedy and quickly turns nastily realistic. Richard Pearson, the narrator, is another of Ballard's lonely walking wounded, this time a fortysomething advertising executive who has been defeated by a colleague turned rival who became, in the process, his former wife.
"The suburbs dream of violence," thinks Pearson, who knows he is daydreaming. The dreams don't linger. "Beyond Heathrow lay the empires of consumerism, and the mystery that obsessed me until the day I walked out of my agency for the last time."
That suburban hinterland surrounding London, made up of housing estates and motorways, business parks and conference centres, is Ballard's chosen territory. In Pearson he appears to have found an ordinary man, battered by life but not overly cynical and unimpeded by any particular set of beliefs:
Like many central Londoners, I felt vaguely uneasy whenever I left the inner city and approached the suburban outlands. But in fact I had spent my advertising career in an eager courtship of the suburbs . . . The suburbs, we would all believe to our last gasp, were defined by the products we sold them, by the brands and trademarks and logos that alone defined their lives.
No new product is drawing Pearson away from his central London sanctum. "Only a few weeks earlier, these amiable suburbs had sat up and snarled, then sprung forward to kill my father." Within sentences Ballard has evoked an anonymous landscape that is terrifying and familiar:
there were few signs of permanent human settlement. I was moving through a terrain of inter-urban sprawl, a geography of sensory deprivation, a zone of dual carriageways and petrol stations, business parks and signposts to Heathrow, disused farmland filled with butane tanks . . . There were no cinemas, churches or civic centres, and the endless billboards advertising a glossy consumerism sustained the only cultural life.
Brooklands is the place to which his former pilot father had retired. Pearson has no illusions. He is alone, a failed husband and a son who never knew the father who abandoned him and his mother when the narrator was five years old.
"I needed urgently to reinvent myself," admits Pearson. "Perhaps my father would help me."
Pearson regards himself as likable, and he is. Ballard has created an Everyman figure who is as frightened and as potentially crazy as the rest of us. Aware that he never knew his father in life, he attempts to get to know him in death. First he must reconstruct the day the old man, Captain Stuart Pearson, formerly of British Airways and Middle East Airways, died, gunned down by a lunatic, "a day release patient" in the Brooklands Metro Centre. This giant shopping mall is a magnet and serves as the cultural heart of the community.
In typical Ballard style, the narrative voice is cool, detached, forensically alert to the smallest detail, and there is that unnerving lucid chaos of which Ballard is a master. Pearson recalls arriving at the mortuary to view his father's body and failing "to recognise the tiny, aged face that clung to the bony points of his skull".
Early on, Pearson meets two familiar examples of the slightly crazed, tense women that tend to populate Ballard's fiction: the first, Mary Falconer, is a near-parody of an icy woman police officer; the second, Julia Goodwin, is yet another of Ballard's ever-present team of mad doctors.
One by one, Pearson meets up with a succession of brilliantly drawn and odd major characters, each of whom is a zealot with a say in the plot which is magnificiently corny but compelling. All the while, the authorial asides come fast and sharp: "Consumerism dominated the lives of its people, who looked as if they were shopping whatever they were doing."
The mall emerges as corrupt and all-corrupting, consisting of millions of square feet of retail space, three hotels, six cinemas and 40 cafes. It is a town in itself, dominated by shops competing with each other in selling the same goods. It never sleeps and controls the lives of all who enter it. It is an inferno. In many ways Pearson is the ideal pilgrim, sinned against and sinning; he is revolted and aware of the mall's influence but is also drawn into it as it operates within the language of his former occupation. He, in the person of a failed afternoon TV presenter, even creates a hero-cum-sacrificial victim. Most importantly, the brazen excess reminds him of the poverty of his childhood, spent with a mother who could never match the glamour of the absent pilot father. Many of the verbal exchanges, even the more menacing ones, border on the comic. Predictably, Pearson is attracted to Dr Julia Goodwin, a study in ambivalence who keeps the reader, and the besotted narrator, guessing.
Like a wayward detective, Pearson in pursuit of his father eventually realises that the old man, far from being seduced by the violence around him, was attempting to counter it. Parallels with mass insanity, fascism and the rise of the neo-Nazi movement are made. This is a subversive and highly political book, Ballard exposing not only his society but his time.
Gradually Pearson, the outsider, becomes involved in the power struggles. The violence erupts into a war, complete with a full-scale siege. His descriptions of turmoil echo the upheaval of wartime Shanghai as recalled in Empire of the Sun. The effect of displacement as described in that book is brought a stage further in Kingdom Come, to total corruption.
The characterisation of Pearson is interesting in that Ballard, at 76, has created his most personable character to date. For all the deadpan tone, there is a strongly satirical element at work. Yet Ballard, more moralist than social satirist, never indulges in empty tricks - his humour is barbed and his satire carries polemical weight. Whether in a football stadium or an underground car-park, an airport concourse or, in this case, a shopping mall, Ballard understands both the festering anarchy and dangerous passivity of a crowd poised to become a mob.
The Metro Centre as battlefield under siege is presented as the logical culmination of the consumerist nightmare, fuelled by the rhetoric and false promises of advertising - itself the ultimate propaganda. As he has throughout his career, JG Ballard has written another prophetic tale of our sickly epoch, for us to ponder.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Kingdom Come By JG Ballard Fourth Estate, 280pp. £17.99