Kingdom Come - J G Ballard

Kingdom Come, from 2006, was Ballard's last novel. It ploughs his usual field - suburban dystopia, As usual, his principal characters are mundane men and women offered just a glimpse of something higher. In High Rise the driving force was class division, the castes rigorously separated by floor, In Kingdom Come everyone is the same class - the amorphous middle class that inhabits the soulless, faceless dormitory towns around the M25. The totem to which they aspire is the shopping mall, the giant Metro Centro which dominates the fictional township of Brooklands. Even as our outsider, Richard Pearson (a typically anonymous name) pitches up, the dream is beginning to sour. Some lunatic opened fire on the mall shoppers thronging the atrium, Richard's estranged father, a retired airline pilot, is among the dead.

Richard has nothing better to do - he has just lost his job in adverstising alongside his marriage - so he stays on in Brooklands. He stays to settle his father's affairs there but ends up moving into the old man's flat. He gradually gets drawn in to suburban life. He meets various locals - solicitor, doctor, policewoman, He meets David Cruise, the minor celebrity who helms the Metro Centre's cable TV channel. He worked with Cruise in the old days. Richard has ideas for making Cruise's onscreen persona more compelling...

Ballard's problem is that his vision of the near future is already out of date. He thought that consumerism was rotting the public psyche whereas it was always unrestricted credit that made us sick. The banks were allowed to count debt as profit on the fatuous premise that it would someday be repaid. Only two years after Ballard published - a year or less before he died - the truth was revealed to the world. Malls like the Metro Centre were built on foundations of sand and how the economists and entrepreneurs wish we could be seduced back through the doors.

The other problem is that Richard Pearson is not really an outsider. He is a member of the glitzy London elite with his fancy flat in Chelsea and his classic Jensen car. Brooklands is the creation of people like him, the place where they decant the people they don't want to live next door. For people like Pearson the M25 isn't how the poor folk get into inner London, it's how the residents of inner London bypass the suburbs. Pearson virtually drips contempt and we can't avoid the conclusion that it's a contempt entirely reflecting that of his creator. Take the opening para:

The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world...

The plot, such as it is, is predictable, the twists predictable. Ballard is concerned not with his story but with his thesis and as such both suffer. The odd thing is, you can't stop reading, a measure of Ballard's deceptively prosaic style. In that sense Kingdom Come is a fitting coda to a fifty-year career, however it brings nothing new to the table.

 

High-Rise - J G Ballard

Reading J G Ballard’s High-Rise (1975) quickly put me in mind of Golding’s Lord of the Flies from 1954.  The resemblance goes beyond mere dystopia.  Both are about civilised man’s predilection to run wild when deprived of his creature comforts.  For both Ballard and Golding, the veneer of social cooperation is tissue-thin.

I don’t want to labour the point because there are obvious differences between the books.  Golding wafts his schoolboys off to a tropical island whereas Ballard maroons his adult male protagonists in a suburban London tower block.  To begin with at least, both locations smack of the paradisiacal.  But, just as Eden had its serpent, so Ballard’s suburbia houses an underlying menace: 

The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape.  Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence....  The cluster of auditorium roofs, curving roadway embankments and rectilinear curtain walling formed an intriguing medley of geometrics - less a habitable architecture, he reflected, than the unconscious diagram of a mysterious psychic event. [Ballard 1975: 34-5]^[1]

For me, massive high-rise developments bring to mind the disastrous social experiments of the 1960s in northern cities like Sheffield and Manchester.  Streets of slums wiped away in favour of jerry-built slums in the sky.  Ballard’s London high-rise is very different.  This new-built development of a thousand apartments is for affluent buyers only; professionals at the very least (Laing, for example, is a lecturer at a medical school), preferably stockbrokers and above.  It remains a social experiment, though.  The size of the apartments, and naturally their cost, increases the higher up you go.  The architect himself, Anthony Royal, occupies the penthouse.  The utopian idea was for the residents at all level to come together in the communal areas like the shopping mall, the swimming pool, and the Royal’s rooftop sculpture garden.  In practice, even as the last of the residents moves in, the middleclass has subdivided itself into three - lower, middle, and upper - and never shall the twentieth floor, let alone the ground floor, aspire to the fortieth.  What was meant to be a single community has become an amalgam of a thousand islands.

These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth century life.  They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed. [Ballard 1975: 46]

Royal has built himself a vertical kingdom, with courtiers and even courtesans.  To be able to be the top of the pile means that someone must be at the bottom, and the lower orders always have the potential to become unruly.

In many ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly ‘free’ psychopathology. [Ballard 1975: 47]

It begins with a fifteen-minute blackout on just three floors.  Residents isolated on the tenth floor concourse stampede.  Some are briefly marooned in the lift between floors.  Somebody, for reasons unknown, drowns a dog in the communal swimming pool.  From that point the veneer cracks, faultlines spreading from the centre like a spider’s web.  Inhibitions slip, the garbage disposal shutes become clogged, people smear dog shit, parties run on for days, a man dies.

Class turns against class, floor against floor.  People defend their territory to the death.  No one leaves the high rise.  No one calls the police.  Their world turns in on itself, becomes self-contained.

The true light of the high-rise was the metallic flash of the polaroid camera, that intermittent radiation which recorded a moment of hoped-for violence for some later voyeuristic pleasure. [Ballard 1975: 133]