Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
not so sleepy surrey, 16 Jul 2007
veteran british novelist jg ballard brings us his latest work. A master at creating dystopias and looking at the realities of modern life settings and the meaning of middle class existence, his latest work involves an advertising executive looking into the murder of his father in a shooting incident at a shopping centre in a sleepy surrey town. A place full of disaffected people looking for excitement in their lives and taking out their frustrations on asian and eastern europeans, it's a very convincing picture of modern britain.
People in the town are trying their own way to bring meaning to modern existence, and the main character gets caught up this. But how far can things go before too many people get hurt?
This is the same plot as his last three novels - a fact acknowledged in the features and interviews at the back, which are worth reading - but it succeeds due to the quality of the very readable prose and the well drawn supporting characters. The plot goes off in a few directions that I didn't expect, and which other reviewers don't appear to have been too keen on, but I found them quite interesting and thought provoking. And at a mere 280 pages of very good prose, this is a short and good read.
It's possibly not the best of his books to start with if you've never read one before, and if that's the case I'd recommend reading them all in order. But for a veteran ballard reader, this is a decent piece of work
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Ideal Atrocity Exhibition, 24 May 2007
J.G Ballard's new novel Kingdom Come is set in an ultra-modern shopping centre where the consumerist dream of ideal homes and endless sporting events has reached their inevitable apotheosis as a new form of fascism. The shopping centre in question is the fictional Metro-Centre located off the M25, but Kingdom Come could so easily read as an admonitory tale implying a retail dystopia which is very real and somewhat closer to home.
J.G Ballard is the writer of Crash and Empire of the Sun, both of which have been filmed by the `Bergs' (that's Speil and Cronen) and has been described as the `Seer of Sheperton', an `autobahn prophet' and our `greatest living author'. In his 1968 novel The Atrocity Exhibition he predicted that Ronald Reagan would become president of America a good thirteen years before said governor of California achieved assassination status. Certainly no other writer seems to have his finger as firmly on the pulse of the 20/21st century's psycho-sociological state of play.
But with Kingdom Come Ballard appears to be writing the same book as if caught in a time glitch from one of his short stories of the 1950's. His last four novels have all been set within high-concept living environments where the attainment of a perfect life loses out to an inherent will to violence. In the fourth of what I'd call the `modern life is rubbish' "quadrilogy" (Thank you 20th Century Fox) Cocaine Nights, Super Cannes, Millennium People and now Kingdom Come all begin with a seemingly meaningless murder in a perfect enclosed society with an outsider arriving to solve the mystery which turns out to be no real mystery at all because it's always a barely concealed conspiracy involving all the residents; and it's not Ballard's first exploration of ideal living environments which, in `Ballard world', inevitably degenerate into chaos; High Rise was written during his `golden period' in the early 70's, as a reaction to the explosion of tower blocks which threatened to be the de rigor living experience of the future.
This said, even when Ballard doesn't appear to be trying he still urinates from a great height on the likes of your Iain Banks' and Alex Garland's. Which I suppose goes some way to illustrating that the great are only great when they have to be. But Kingdom Come is recommended reading for residents of `designer towns' like Milton Keynes (U.K) and Celebration (U.S) who yearn for meaning in increasingly meaningless times.
Adrian Stranik
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57 of 74 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ballard at his best, 28 Aug 2006
Kingdom Come
By J.G. Ballard
4th Estate/Harper Collins
In his astonishing new novel J.G. Ballard has discovered the apocalypse in the form of washing machines, stereo units and every other form of what his characters have dubbed, with both political and religious fervour, Consumerism.
Ballard's novels have often touched a nerve, from his erotic-schizoid Crash to his semi-autobiographical The Empire of the Sun. Much of his earlier work was decidedly fantastical and often generically dubbed science fiction. But in his recent novels Ballard has been investigating the present. Often dubbed a Futurist, his conclusions are unnerving indeed.
In some ways Kingdom Come is a return to form for Ballard. His three previous novels - Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People - seemed somewhat anchored by his attempts to grapple the strangeness of contemporary suburban life. But in Kingdom Come Ballard is both terrifyingly insightful and at his most phantasmagorical best.
Kingdom Come in its 280 pages seems to achieve a strangely heroic, epic scale. In essence it is the story of a rather ineffectual, unemployed advertising executive, Richard Pearson. But when Pearson's father is murdered in a labyrinthine shopping mall in suburban Brooklands near the Heathrow Airport he sets out to investigate why the initially accused shooter has been set free. Thus begins a surreal journey into the heartlands of English suburbia, thuggish sports riots, racism, terrorism, hostage-taking, contemporary politics, consumer greed, religious extremism, family relations and far more.
Where Kingdom Come succeeds is in its fine high-wire act of balancing pure farce, surreal imagery and real world events. One suspects that Ballard, who lives in suburban Shepparton outside of London, may have personally witnessed some of the racist attacks that have become commonplace during soccer riots; he depicts the senseless vandalism and violence with solemn clarity.
He is equally acute in describing the culturally void environs in which such violence occurs. His satellite suburbs are essentially devoid of, libraries, art galleries or traditional places of worship. His Brookland is dominated by a central grand edifice, a vast shopping mall dubbed the Metro-Centre, the site of what he comes to believe is his father's deliberate assassination.
Brooklands has become dominated by the semi-martial football gangs. The populace wear clothing adorned with the cross of Saint George, without which one is invariably a target of the hooligans.
Ballard's tale builds powerfully as Pearson's paranoia grows apace, leading to a hostage situation replete with a virulent form of Stockholm Syndrome. On the wild ride we encounter many of Ballard's favourite tropes and his increasing tendency towards self-referentiality. Pearson's father was an airline pilot, leading to riffs reflecting Ballard's fascination with flight - "a reverie of wings that overflew deserts and tropical estuaries" - references to his earlier books, The Drought and The Day of Creation respectively. The near-by racetrack features a monument to the 1930s; "the heroic age of speed, the era of the Schnieder Trophy seaplane race and record-breaking flights."
Ballard's nostalgia for the '30s and the notion of flight and freedom are personal touchstones for the author. He was born in 1930 in Shanghai and shortly afterwards his family were interred in a civilian prison camp. Like the author himself, it doesn't take long for Pearson to be similarly entrapped, as much psychologically as physically, when he visits the Metro-Centre.
The mall has become the town centre. "No one attends church. Why bother?" a character muses early in the piece. "They find spiritual fulfillment at the New Age centre, first left after the burger bar."
Pearson's initial attempts to leave Brooklands and return to London are thwarted early on as all roads seem to lead back to the Metro-Centre and its immediate environs. Initially panicked, Pearson soon concludes that the Centre "smothered unease, defused its own threat and offered balm to the weary."
But the muzak played in the mall has a distinctly martial edge to it, which is more stringently replicated when the football hooligans begin marching in step and wearing uniforms emblazoned with the cross of St. George.
As always Ballard rewrites the rules. Rather than Modernism being followed by Postmodernism, in Kingdom Come Modernism is followed by Consumerism which at its extreme is compared to Nazi Germany and fundamentalist Islam and Christianity. All, his central character posits, are "states of willed madness."
As a new regime emerges from the chaos of football violence we are led through a thinly veiled analysis of disinformation that is easily read as a metaphor for Tony Blair's government.
The new regime take over the Metro-Centre, holding the mass of consumers hostage, many of them joining the insane campaign to establish a new Consumerism. The Centre becomes a tropical sauna, an enclosed environment where cargo-cult style shrines appear in the mist. This is Ballard's most evocative writing for many years, a descent into madness that sees the ultimate shopping mall meet Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
crawdada1@yahoo.com
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