ZapTown

Sometimes you read a book and fall in love with it—keep it on your shelf, recommend it to people you know, and keep coming back to it, over the years. Sometimes you don’t enjoy a book so much as admire it—you spend a lot of time after you read it thinking about it, and it changes the way you see the world, or gives you ideas you might not have had otherwise. It’s not necessarily a fun book, but it is one that you appreciate. And sometimes, you can see what a book is trying to do, and appreciate it, but for whatever reason, it might not connect for you emotionally—the chemistry between a book and the person who’s reading it is a strange thing, and sometimes it sparks (or misfires) in strange ways. It may not happen right away. Sometimes it takes weeks, months, even years to kick in.

Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard is one such book. When I first read it, about a year ago, I found myself putting it down and thinking it was interesting, but I didn’t find myself connecting to the protagonist. As the novel is written in the first person, this was a bit of a problem. On the surface, the plot of the novel is straightforwardly Ballardian enough. (Is Ballardian a real word? I hope so. If not, I just made it up) but could also be plucked from any number of thrillers—our narrator, an unemployed ad executive (He gets people to buy things—foreshadowing!) moves out to the heart of commercial surburbia, to the community where his father lived, to investigate the death of his father, shot for no apparent reason at the new super-mall by a man who’s later released by sympathetic doctors. The narrator, Richard starts to dig below the angry surface of the community, playing amateur detective, and soon finds connections between a group of people who could possibly be described as a secret society manipulating the mall, and the area surrounding it, for their own ends. And these people see Richard as a potential leader…

The plot itself is interesting, and Ballard’s prose is as casually precise and polished as ever, but where the novel becomes especially interesting—I think what turned me off when I first read it, but what I’ve come back to thinking about since, and what makes me think of it as an especially timely book, is the connection between consumerism and facism that Ballard’s exploring. The suburbs that surround the mall of the novel are a deeply nationalistic place, with other attacks (that appear to be unofficially sanctioned by the police) on immigrants, sport-obsessed marchers who turn to vandalism at the drop of a hat, and…well, see for yourself. From Ballard’s novel:

‘Consumerism leads to social pathology? Hard to believe.’
‘It paves the way. Half the goods we buy these days are not much more than adult toys. The danger is that consumerism will need something close to fascism in order to keep growing. Take the Metro-Centre and its flat sales. Close your eyes a little and it already looks like a Nuremberg rally. The ranks of sales counters, the long straight aisles, the signs and banners, the whole theatrical aspect.’
‘No jackboots, though,’ I pointed out. ‘No ranting fuhrers.’
”’Not yet. Anyway, they belong to the politics of the street. Our “streets” are the cable TV consumer channels. Our party insignia are the gold and platinum loyalty cards. Faintly risible? Yes, but people thought the Nazis were a bit of a joke. The consumer society is a kind of soft police state. We hink we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens…”

It’s not a new idea, the actual lack of freedom that the middle-class lifestyle of the early 21st century carried with it (How many people feel trapped by their mortages, after all?) but it’s a theme that Ballard pursues with a bright, clinical eye, and follows to a seemingly logical, brutal conclusion in this book. And in 2009, with the wheels wobbling, and people concerned about ‘social upheaval’ because of lost investments, lost wages, and consumers who no longer feel willing or able to consume, it feels like a cautionary tale that’s timelier than ever.