Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard

J.G. Ballard, the author of (among other stories) “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” would have enjoyed the presidential election of 2012.  This campaign so devoid of ideas and so rich with agreed upon fictions would have been a bleak backdrop for one of Ballard’s own stories.  He died in 2009 just as the forty-year delusion of debt-fueled growth eradicated the middle class utopias he so often fictionalized.

 Ballard’s world was one of abandoned swimming pools and empty hotels; a post-political suburban wasteland populated with self-servers and mobs.  His last book, Kingdom Come, pushes a recurring focus—middle-class consumerism—to a weird and undercooked conclusion. 

In it the former advertising executive Richard Pearson returns home to suburban Brooklands after his father’s death.  What ensues is part detective story and part speculative fiction.  Pearson is an astute observer of consumerism’s effects on Brooklands population.  It’s a place where “the only real things are mirages.” 

As is usual in Ballard’s late fiction, characters are shallow and are mainly responsible for transmitting and debating his novel’s rich ideas.  In one scene a character says:

We have to prepare our kids for a new kind of society.  There’s no point in telling them about parliamentary democracy, the church or the monarchy.  The old ideas of citizenship you and I were brought up with are really rather selfish…“

Later, when mankind’s precious “rights” are invoked a character says:

What’s the point of free speech if you have nothing to say?  Let’s face it, most people haven’t anything to say, and they know it.  What’s the point of privacy if it’s just a personalized prison?  Consumerism is a collective enterprise.  People here want to share and celebrate, they want to come together.  When we go shopping we take part in a collective ritual of affirmation. 

In the Ballardian world, the empty lives and lonely crowds are a product of an Enlightenment project gone horribly wrong.  He explored this territory in Cocaine Nights and Millennium People.  In the former, early retirement in a world without work—“a billion balconies facing the sun”—leaves only darker pleasures to be explored.  A sleepy community becomes the playground of pleasure-seeking nihilists. 

Kingdom Come imagines a neo-fascist vigilantism somewhere between the airport and the ‘burbs.  Ballard’s characters include cardboard demagogues, the giggling herd, and toughs who fetishize symbols and violence.  And throughout the novel’s twists and turns there is the lurking memory of Brownshirts and the ustasha—the undead specter of 20^th century nihilism. 

The novel is, in effect, a Counter-Enlightenment work.  Having explored man’s crooked nature in books like Crash, which explores the sexuality of the road accident, Ballard’s vision is of a fascism birthed from the consumer economy.  Instead of the torch-led fury and coordination of a Nuremburg rally, contemporary society has the high-pressure orderliness of the supermarket. Instead of the Freikorps roughing up rabbis, our age has suburbanites in St. George Crosses truncheon-thumping immigrants.  And glowing above it all is the dome of the Metro-Center, a shopping complex from Albert Speer’s sketchpad.  It is a modernist cathedral that is visible from everywhere in town—a comfortable bowl for the listless, insatiable goldfish mankind has become.

But like Cocaine Nights, Ballard’s last novel swings at empty air:  Consumerism is not fascism.  Yes, technology has eliminated work.  But no iron safety net has caught the supplanted workforce.  Instead of a billion balconies, the population endures austerity.  Instead of bored vigilante violence, a generation of sex workers and lettuce-pickers scrambles desperately to survive.  The shrinking middle- classes may “dream of violence” in Ballard’s novel but in reality they mostly abuse themselves through self-loathing, anti-depressants, and a delusional hope in long dead notions of “fair play.” 

Both Ballard and his friend and advocate, the political philosopher John Gray, have a critical handicap in their critique of the Enlightenment project:  Their only muse is the nightmare and their only material is the supposed “crooked timbre” of mankind.  One must remember, in 2011 millions of people disgusted by greed and the consoling fictions peddled by their betters put the lie to these authors’ dark portents.  The most satisfying illusion today is the belief that one can resign himself from the challenges of history in a retreat to the study.  The puppet characters in Ballard’s last book have much to teach about humanity’s dark purposes, but their creator still had much to learn about man’s complex and surprising nature.