“People don’t riot in Surrey,” remarks a police officer in Kingdom Come. “They’re far more polite, and far more dangerous.” The Surrey of JG Ballard’s new novel is not the affluent commuter belt of Epsom and Esher, but the “suburban hinterland” that fringes the western rim of the M25: “a terrain of inter-urban sprawl, a zone of dual carriageways and petrol stations where there were no cinemas, churches or civic centres, and the endless billboards advertising a glossy consumerism sustained the only cultural life”. If this isn’t quite your experience of Surrey, well, Ballard has always seen England through a black squint, and it is his ability to summon a deteriorated but recognisable modern world into being that makes him among the finest dystopians at work.
The narrator of Kingdom Come is Richard Pearson, a former advertising executive whose father has been killed in “a bizarre shooting incident in a suburban shopping mall” in Brooklands, part of this “inter-urban sprawl”. Pearson travels to Brooklands to wrap up his father’s affairs, only to become embroiled in the town’s dark happenings. He discovers that its white British inhabitants have begun organising themselves into so-called “sports teams”, whose members are set on purging the area of its immigrant community by violence. “A new kind of hate had emerged,” reflects Pearson, “silent and disciplined”, which to him resembles a dogmatic and vengeful religion.
The cathedral of this religion is “The Metro-Centre”, the vast mall in which Pearson’s father was killed. The experience of shopping there, Pearson observes, is eschatological: it is a realm that has “abolished time and the seasons, past and future”, and where the shopper exists only in “an intense transactional present”, brought to a rapture of purchase.
Over the novel’s course, the violence in Brooklands escalates and its stylisation increases. The Metro-Centre shoppers uniform themselves in the St George Cross, and the sports teams swell. The vigilantes also begin to film their attacks on mobile phones. A figure emerges, and Pearson (for reasons that are never clear) also joins the movement, becoming its Goebbels. His desire is to “wake the suburbs into a more passionate world” and to bring about the “ relaunch of the kingdom of Surrey”: to this end he orchestrates an advertising campaign designed to rouse the Brooklands consumers to violent action. He succeeds in a dramatic fashion: a small army of shoppers seizes hostages and then, pursued by the police, falls back to the Metro Centre. There, well victualled and well armed, they settle in for a siege. The novel ends in a suitably Pentecostal fashion.
Kingdom Come must be seen as the completion or the continuation of a visionary fictional project begun by Ballard three books ago, with Cocaine Nights (1996). That novel, like Super-Cannes (2000) and Millennium People (2003), explored two ideas that receive their restatement in Kingdom Come: that “consumerism creates an appetite which can only be satisfied by fascism”, and that “humans are a primate species with an unbelievable need for violence”.
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The tone of these four late novels is curious, veering between an apocalypse-now denunciation of the contemporary, and a grand guignol comedy of manners. The two modes are not essentially incompatible, but at times one would wish the novels’ registers were a little more integrated and their content a little less samey. For Ballard has become unignorably repetitive. Everyone speaks with the same voice (cultural-studies seminar contribution), the same phrases recur with only slight variations, and each novel features a near-identical array of character-types (the visionary psychologist with Führer aspirations, the investigative incomer, the “steely but invulnerable” female professional, and her sexually attractive but slightly weaker counterpart).
Perhaps, though, Ballard is repeating himself because he thinks we’re not listening to him. Kingdom Come might seem like a winsome exercise in black fantasia, until one recalls the violent riot that occurred at the opening of the Ikea store in Edmonton last year and left five people hospitalised, or the four teenagers who rampaged along the South Bank in 2004, killing one man, injuring six others and filming their attacks on their mobile phones. Remembering such incidents, it becomes harder to disagree with Ballard’s remark that “a new type of delirious consumerism is breeding a new type of human being”.
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