G. Ballard, Kingdom Come
J. G. BALLARD, our greatest literary futurist, changed the coordinates of reality in British fiction and took his faithful readers on a wild, intellectual ride. He never restored moral order to the proceedings in his fiction because he did not believe we really wanted it. Whatever it was that Ballard next imagined for us, however unfamiliar, we knew we were in safe hands because he understood ‘the need to construct a dramatically coherent narrative space’.
When I was a young writer in the 1980s, Ballard first came to my attention after I read his luminous, erotic story collection, The Day of Forever. It was so formally inventive that I would not have guessed it had been published in 1967. Nor did I know that the baffled conservative literary establishment of his generation had tried to see off his early work as science fiction. Ballard always insisted he was more interested in inner space than outer space.
When it came to anything by Ballard, genre really did not matter to me; his fiction could have been filed under Tales of Alien Abduction or Marsh Plants and I would have hunted it down. Despite our difference in generation, gender and literary purpose, it was clear to me that he and I were both working with some of the same aesthetic influences: film, Surrealist art and poetry, Freud’s avant-garde theories of the unconscious. I was just starting to write but Ballard made me feel less lonely. Perhaps more significantly we shared the dislocation of not being born in Britain. Home was the imagination. I too was attracted to the paintings of de Chirico and Delvaux, with their dreamplaces – empty, melancholy cities, abandoned temples, broken statues, shadows, exaggerated perspectives. Ballard was going to make worlds we had not seen before in British fiction. When asked, after the success of Empire of the Sun, why it took him so long to write in a less disguised way about his childhood experience at the internment camp in Lunghau, his beautiful answer was that is took him ‘twenty years to forget and twenty years to remember’. Of course, images from Shanghai and the war were laid forever inside him. I have always thought that his books, with the exception of Crash, which seems to me an abstract attempt to grieve for his dead wife, were already written in that one room he shared with his parents between 1943 and 1945. The reach of his imagination was never going to fit with the realist literary mainstream but I was always encouraged by his insistence that he was an imaginative writer.
I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.
Good on you Jim.
There is a great deal of rather strained legend-making when it comes to Ballard, but it is the witty, deadpan, open-minded American journalist and pianist, V. Vale, founder of the tremendous RE/Search Publications and champion of Ballard since 1973, who in my view tracked his thought drifts most sensitively in various interviews. I have never regarded Ballard as a kind of psychogeographer of postmodernity; his most enjoyable fiction is more Dada than Debord.
I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humour of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.
His highly imagined landscapes and abandoned aircraft and stopped clocks and desert sand were located in his head – and anyway he preferred driving fast cars to walking. He once sent me a photograph of the Heathrow Hilton and told me it was his spiritual home.
What was it that Ballard offered to me as a young female writer? It is more to do with what he did not offer. He preferred social theory to social realism. I was not going to run to Ballard’s books to learn how to write a ‘well rounded’ character, for God’s sake. His characters are more like tannoys to broadcast his arguments and ideas. But I did love his gloomy, unbelievable male psychiatrists, cinematically lit, groomed, suave and perverse, sipping a stiff gin and tonic in towelling robes while they observe (and possibly medicate) everyone else freaking out around them. The well-mannered narrators in the later novels (Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People, Kingdom Come) are mostly mild, middle-class, manly men. Their destiny is to become inflamed Nietzschean men, excited to finally understand that they too would like to punch their fists through the boredom of the empty, greedy, good life with its fragile veneer of civilisation. Yet I have always regarded Ballard as quite a humane writer, a paternal writer, steering us through the ruins of his dystopias via the mindset of his apparently rational avatars – always endearingly baffled to discover their own suppressed urges.
I enjoyed his noirish female characters too (many of them doctors), enigmatic instead of domestic, emotionally unavailable, sexually experimental, sometimes tanned and thuggish, as in Cocaine Nights, or vulnerable but corruptible as in Kingdom Come – but the great thing is that they do not want the male lead to marry them and are never about to roast a chicken.
I believe in the beauty of all women, in the treachery of their imaginations, so close to my heart.
All these years later, I still marvel at the eerie poetry of Ballard’s prose. It lingers like a strange perfume over his concise, matter-of-fact sentences, more heightened in the earlier novels and short stories, but the bottom notes (petrol, anguish, desire, nightmares) are still present in the first three lines of his final and most didactic novel, Kingdom Come.
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 …
Kingdom Come is an exuberant, crazed, maverick, twenty-first-century re-staging of Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents. We have our usual Ballardian narrator, a decent chap, former advertising executive Richard Pearson, who, while driving down the slow lane of the M25, is surprised to find the indicator ticking as if it has a mind of its own. Pearson obeys his car’s invitation to turn down a slip road, which ‘I had somehow known was waiting for me’. Ballard believed our unconscious plans a number of assignments for us. The slip road leads to the small motorway town of Brookfields, near Heathrow. Pearson’s father, a retired air pilot, has been killed by a deranged mental patient who opened fire, apparently at random, on the crowds shopping at the Metro-Centre, a massive mall in the centre of this town. Pearson suspects there is more to find out about his father’s death and begins his investigations – with the oedipal help of the attractive female doctor who attended to his dying father, and who for some reason has sex with his son.
There are no space ships hovering above the Metro-Centre, with its ‘humid, microwave air’, but the minds of the citizens who shop there have definitely been abducted by hyper-consumerism.
At the sales counter, the human race’s greatest confrontation with existence, there were no yesterdays, no history to be relived, only an intense transactional present.
The former advertising executive starts to uncover the drives of the savage consumers of Middle England who lug home refrigerators, toasters, televisions, beat up Asian shop keepers and lavish affection on the three giant teddy bears sitting in the atrium of the Metro-Centre. Naturally, these Disneyesque toys are pierced with bullet holes.
Kingdom Come is a sort of fairy tale in which ‘a more primitive world’ is ‘biding its time’. The blades of knives on display in the mall’s hardware store menacingly form, ‘a silver forest in the darkness’. Ballard explores the pre-rational nationalism that replaces politics, the mass spectacle of St George’s flags waved at the endless parades and sports matches. ‘No Sieg Heils, but football anthems instead. The same hatreds, the same hunger for violence, but filtered through the chat-show studio and the hospitality suite.’
It seems that for Ballard, the labyrinthine Metro-Centre is as enthralling as de Chirico’s brooding Italian archways and piazzas. Once again
