Bookplanet: latest from J.G. Ballard (perhaps the weirdest visionary novelist of our time, a bent Orwell)

Narratives of the mall
Review of J. G. Ballard’s KINGDOM COME
M. John Harrison

J. G. Ballard’s early landscapes flickered up off the page, their drowned or desert conditions hinting at the landscapes of global warming to come. His early narcissistic psychiatrists and deranged movie stars glowed against this background – less human beings than messages etched into the brutalist semiotics of arts centre, Hilton hotel and motorway flyover. Whatever else he has been, Ballard began as an imagist. His ideas were welcome because they seemed to be inseparable from his inventiveness, the tone of his voice, the archi-tectonics of Ballardian space. The symptoms of his literary pathology were presented with all the enchantment of a page of Vogue or Architectural Review, while deconstructing both. His eye was cinematic, fractured, relentlessly selective, intermittent as a broken video camera operated by one of Rebecca Horne’s disordered mechanical structures, prefiguring a kind of art accident not yet technologically possible. Now, years later, in Kingdom Come, we encounter the same frozen restlessness, the same obsessive but broken regard, no longer inventing the future, only misappropriating the present. It is difficult to overstate how far ahead of his time Ballard seemed to readers in 1956. But now that history has caught up and passed the old motorist, his late vision – of consumption as Fascism out of uniform, or at least as a precondition for the full-blown, full-dress kind – seems simultaneously unassuming and cranky. If you accept the vision, Kingdom Come makes the usual kind of Ballardian sense.

Richard Pearson – a failed advertising executive in his early forties – drives a classic Jensen sports car, lives in the “millionaire’s toytown” of Chelsea Harbour, and finds himself bored by dinner parties in Holland Park. His wife has left him. Unsure how to reinvent himself, he allows the death of his estranged airline-pilot father to draw him southwards into the suburban aureole of Heathrow airport. It is a psychic journey, during which the opposite of what others think will become true. Of the old pilot, Pearson finds nothing but enigma. Why did his father keep a library of Fascist texts, books about Perón, Goering and Mussolini, a history of Oswald Mosley and British Fascism? Why did he join so many sporting clubs, their teams “as smart and disciplined as military units”? What is the meaning of the St George T-shirt? Of the ice hockey? The investigation of his father’s murder leads him to the Metro-Centre, a vast shopping mall, which is the battleground for a vicious undercover turf war, fought out between Fascisms old and new.Going native at the mall, Pearson begins to see himself in a fresh light; and it is there, too, as scriptwriter and meta-political adviser to a cable-television sportscaster called David Cruise, that he experiences the inevitable encounter with his own inner Goebbels, and, like the suburbs themselves, finds at last the nightmare that liberates.

All this takes place in a space of retail parks, science parks and sports parks, where the “perimeter towns” doze “against the protective shoulder of the M25”, a now customary landscape, paradoxically “coded for danger”, which grows vaguer and less delineated as the years pass, fading to a generalized list of consumer products. All signs point inwards, directing the traveller back to his starting point. We feel less and less placed, because Ballard doesn’t describe things, he has opinions about them. The defining image of a suburban housing estate, for example, is not its “untended front gardens” but how the lights of the local stadium “interrogate” it over its “failure to join the consumer society”. Brooklands, by the same token, is not a town as we recognize one: its streets and buildings distinguish themselves less by having architectural or commercial characteristics than by being “home to a population that only felt fully at ease within the catchment area of an international airport”.

Provocations like these are familiar to admirers of the ageing semiotician. In his earlier novels and short stories, they worked cunningly against the extreme compression and enticingly broken structures; or gleamed suddenly through the jungles of simile like the structural supports of the Tropical House at Kew – flashes of amused intellect, one thought then, which nowadays resemble more an inner monologue distributed between the fractions of the Ballardian psychodrama.

In Kingdom Come we meet Duncan Christie, “his sallow, unshaved face” pockmarked by acne, as out of place as a Neanderthal, “discovered in a sun-lounger beside a Costa Blanca swimming pool”; Julia Goodwin, her face “pale but surprisingly strong, marked by tremors of doubt like those of an actress unable to understand her lines”; Tony Maxted, with his boxer’s shoulders and loose talk of “a willed insanity, the sort that we higher primates thrive on”. They are all here, the ghosts of puzzled assassins, the icy yet frazzled women doctors and the sociopathic psychiatrists of the Ballardian mood, bloated with significance, crowding out the defenceless unassuming figures of Richard Pearson’s family romance – nervous mother, in-drawn father, the father’s many sexual conquests preserved as a line of photographs on a mantelpiece. When Julia Goodwin touches the mass of dark hair above her left ear, tracing a line to the back of her neck in “an almost erotic transit”, we feel an almost erotic wave of familiarity. It is comforting to find that Maxted still thinks “the future is going to be a struggle between vast systems of competing psychopathies”, even though we haven’t, specifically, met him before. The characters’ exchanges are as repetitive as ever.

Ballard’s dialogue, though interrupted by flashes of accidental realism, remains typically dissociated, at an angle to the things people actually say. In addition it has taken on a thinned, retrospective feel: through it can be heard, with much more clarity than was possible at the time, the sound of 1956. When police sergeant Mary Falconer – “a steely but oddly vulnerable woman” whose scent is “a heady mix of Caleche and oestrogen” – describes the Metro-Centre as if it is an artefact dropped into the West London suburbs as part of an alien mind-control experiment, she places us instantly in a Nigel Kneale drama. If The Drowned World spoke of a genuinely “new” future – one which, almost by definition, we didn’t dare imagine, in case it told us too much about the present – Kingdom Come seems tuned to the past, and would work well on black-and-white television.

The Metro-Centre is the real central character here. From the day it first fills Pearson’s view, “like the hull of a vast airship”, to the day he leaves it “a furnace consumed by its own fire”, it dominates the ordinary world, an engine of turbo-capitalism and Ballardian ambivalence. It has abolished time and the seasons. It has its own television station and, in David Cruise, its own figurehead. All other commerce has winced away. Race riots, loosely disguised as sports fixtures, boil around its base; while, inside, people wander “a self-contained universe of treasure and promise”, not so much the followers of a cargo cult as the inhabitants of one. The interior of the dome glows like the core of a nuclear reactor, because what happens there is nothing so simple as the sale of white goods:

“It’s a new kind of democracy, where we vote at the cash counter, not the ballot box. Consumption is the greatest device anyone has ever invented for controlling people . . . . ”

How you convert a metaphor into the arming device of a political conspiracy, or how the consumerist dream might be co-opted to produce the kinds of hard results associated with the nationalist dream of the 1920s and 30s, Ballard seems less sure. In reality, there are only a lot of people buying American sports utility vehicles, Tanzanian fish, Chinese teddy bears, French five-hob stoves; and this is quite enough to do the damage. Do unconscious dreams of mass violence need to figure?

A lot of fun is being had here. The old satirist bares and snaps his teeth as energetically as ever, and if you don’t pay attention you are likely to find them in your own leg as well as in that of his straw man. But beneath the ironic reversals and one-liners, there is a suggestion of autumn cannibalism. J. G. Ballard begins to seem like his own victim. Perhaps, after all, it is not the consumers who have fallen for the dream of the Metro-Centre; perhaps it is the alienated intellectual of the London suburbs, who, since the 1950s – coincidentally, about the time of the publication of Barthes’s Mythologies – has been entertaining himself, and often us, with a horror film about the invincible primacy of the mediated. Perhaps the hypnotically frightening notion that a mall is more than just a place to go shopping disguises, or eases, a deeper fear.

Though people make and use a lot of signs, the value of an object never lies solely in its interpretability, its possibilities as language. A refrigerator, for instance, is mostly a thing you put food in to keep it cool. For the old metaphorista, perhaps, the hidden terror of the shopping centre is that it is just somewhere people go to shop. Seduced by the glamour of significance and the significance of glamour, self-convinced of the perilous interchangeability of action and fiction, Kingdom Come is at its most entertaining when Pearson launches his ultimate advertising campaign, a series of thirty-second cable-television advertisements featuring David Cruise as the “fugitive and haunted hero of a noir film”, a “trapped creature of strange and wayward moods”, as ready to slap the housewives of his afternoon chat-show audience as to beg them for comfort. These fragmented narratives, designed to usher in a new Dark Age, will make no sense to their intended audience except at “the deepest level . . . the collective dream forever playing in the back alleys of their minds”. To us, they make no sense at all, but emerge as perfect, threatening little Ballardian vignettes, a lot more readable than the satire that frames them. For two pages we are genuinely amused, then understand with a shock that it is the author who feels bored and trapped, not the characters. Events run out of control, the novel swings between the opposing forces of humanism and rationalism, accidental sanity and elective psychopathy, in a desperation as much existential as rhetorical. The new politics isn’t a cure for anything; the nightmares seem more private than ever.