- Paperback: 416 pages
- Publisher: Harper Perennial; Adobe eBook Reader edition edition (28 Aug 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0007132700
- ISBN-13: 978-0007132706
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.4 x 3.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 949,710 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
JG Ballard covers familiar territory in Super-Cannes: new social structures under pressure, new psychopathologies to be explored. As he did in his previous novel Cocaine Nights, he has avoided the more abstract imagery and plot of Rushing to Paradise or The Day of Creation to create, on the surface, a more mainstream novel, clearly concerned with modern issues of racism, random violence and sexuality. But familiar territory is always the most deeply subversive place in a Ballard novel.
Eden-Olympia is more than a mere business park. It is an expensive and intense hive, the modern "Dream Palace" of "a new elite of administrators, enarques and scientific entrepreneurs"; its aim, "to turn Provence into Europe's silicon valley". Paul Sinclair finds himself with time on his hands in this radical environment when his young wife takes a job at Eden-Olympia. She replaces a doctor who killed 10 executives with a rifle before shooting himself. He left no note and no explanation. Sinclair finds himself living in the same house and learning some of the same lessons as the killer.
There are the (un)usual Ballardian motifs; the injured airman, the swimming pools, the cars, the voyeuristic sex and violence, the perverse personal iconography of the central characters (the hothouse social environment even harks back to High-Rise from 1975), but in this new context they are even more profoundly unsettling than before. The apparently slick, professional characters are flawed and ambiguous, while strange events, as in the outstanding novella Running Wild from 1988, lead to extreme conclusions. Ballard is an expert in explaining how what at first appears perverse, amoral or simply wrong, is actually obvious, sensible and sane, and then going even further. From the beginning, the clues are all there. Eventually, both Sinclair and the reader are clear on what must be done. --John Shire --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
‘Sublime… an elegant, elaborate trap of a novel, which reads as a companion piece to Cocaine Nights but takes ideas from that novel and runs further. The first essential novel of the 21st century.’ Independent
‘Possibly his greatest book. Super-Cannes is both a novel of ideas and a compelling thriller that will keep you turning the pages to the shocking denouement. Only Ballard could have produced it.’ Sunday Express
‘In this tautly paced thriller he brilliantly details how man’s darker side derails a vast experiment in living, and shows the dangers of a near-future in which going mad is the only way of staying sane.’ Daily Mail
‘Vintage Ballard, a gripping blend of stylised thriller and fantastic imaginings.’ Guardian
‘Truly superb… the best book he has written.’ Daily Express
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Whenever Ballard gets near paradise, something goes wrong. Here he takes us to the South of France, and a multi-national science park with top executives, sunshine, and security. His characters live in a kind of compound where everything is organised to make them happy and efficient. But where some would want to make a social or political critique, Ballard goes straight to the core of human frailty and shows us desensitisation; perversion, and murder. This book is a dark vision. How far his readers will follow him is an open question, but this remains a fine piece of work.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Twenty years or so ago Ballard would have done this entire book in a couple of paragraphs. Now he fleshes his ideas out with a scenery that seems to be borrowed from touring companies of Noel Coward and second-rate thrillers. It's as if he's been dipping into his original store that was The Atrocity Exhibition and systematically expanding them all into longer forms. This was the man who produced the condensed the novel. Now he's produced the diluted novel. He can never be anything but interesting and his work shines out of the dross, but if you've been following Ballard's and Moorcock's careers as long as I have you'll see that this whole idea would have been an aside in a Jerry Cornelius story. And Moorcock's Cornelius stories are still as tight and packed with ideas as ever. Ballard is the kind of writer who hones a few ideas into wonderful, precious instruments, while Moorcock gives us the whole cauldron of raw white hot steel and flings it into the world, to see what new shapes he can make. These are my two favourite writers. They have been since I started reading them in New Worlds in the late 1960s. It seems to me that Ballard was always at his best when associated with Moorcock and New Worlds and maybe the same goes for Moorcock -- who was at least able to pay Ballard for his work by writing those hack S&S stories which seem to outsell all the good stuff! Could be I'm nostalgic for the New Wave Golden Age, but I would dearly like to see Ballard tackle a real, rather than a notional, subject again. Gordon Oliver.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Super-cannes is a nightmarish vision of a corporate future where highly-paid and overworked executives take regular outings into violence and madness in order to... keep their sanity. Encouraged by the business park's head psychologist, the executives of Eden Olympia descend on groups of immigrants, prostitutes and foreigners to rape, pillage and occasionally murder. These therapeutic excursions into every-greater and more depraved violence improve the health and wellbeing of the executives, and increase the profitability of the resident companies. The police turn a blind eye, victims are too afraid to talk and critics tend to meet violent ends. Ballard successfully explores a society where accountability and community have started to disintegrate, and morality is seen as little more than an old-fashioned religious dogma to be discarded.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Retro dystopia
Written in the usual elegant Ballard style but I had to keep on reminding myself that this was set round the millennium rather than in the 60's or early 70's like his other... Read more
Published 4 months ago by A. Mackintosh
Disappointing
This book started so well, painting a great picture of a realistic brave new world on the French Riviera, and setting up an intrigue that promised to blossonm into an exciting... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Thomas Hunter
dystopic dreams
Ballards dystopian novel, seemingly aimed at the future is based upon what is occuring within the present. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Dr. Delvis Memphistopheles
Pathology the essential ingredient of contemporary life
Although Ballard has been described, and highly esteemed, as a science fiction writer, this book may technically be so described but is temporally and in terms of subject matter so... Read more
Published on 11 Jan 2010 by Martin White
Well written, but too similar to Cocaine Nights
My edition of this novel contains gushing praise from critics, and if you have never read other Ballard novels, this indeed comes across as an original and exciting thriller. Read more
Published on 1 Feb 2009 by John Hopper
Brilliant
This is a book that can stand to be re-read, it's intelligent but also very entertaining (in a dark sort of way. Read more
Published on 12 Jan 2009 by Herman Melville
Pretentious Moi?
The sterile paranoia of Stepford Wives merges with LA Confidential to give us Supercannes. Ballard is unquestionably a brilliant writer with vivid imagery that is incredibly unique... Read more
Published on 22 July 2008 by J. S. Meins
More Ludlum than Orwell
This was a disappointment. Ballard had the basis for a very interesting book, but has sailed off into light entertainment; unfortunately he is not a great thriller writer. Read more
Published on 24 Jan 2005 by Stephen McCaffery
Super-Cannes & Cocaine Nights . A New Novel?
J.G. Ballard is back with his usual brilliance, passion, extremes and cynicism in his 2000 novel "Super-Cannes" which the sceptics could call a re-write of his masterly written... Read more
Published on 12 Dec 2004 by Faik Genc
Super-Can't
For frustratingly brief moments Super-Cannes delivers the reader into the familiar yet unsettling universe for which Ballard is best known; an arena of stultifying heat and empty... Read more
Published on 20 Mar 2004 by WaxWorks
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
