Kingdom Come

Published on February 18, 2008

 A huge, shiny shopping mall rises from a faceless urban sprawl of motorways, security cameras and executive estates, holding the surrounding population mesmerised with its gleaming treasures. No, it's not Siam Paragon - this is the Metro-Centre, the central setting of British writer JG Ballard's latest test-drilling for collective psychosis beneath the shiny surface of modern materialism. It comes up with some interesting - if rather preposterous - results.

Our hero Richard Pearson is an advertising executive who after news of his estranged father's murder by a gunman makes a reluctant journey from his home in genteel inner London to the Metro-Centre in the suburbs, the site of the shooting. Though proud of having cooked up the dreams that make the malls the only meaningful focus of community for these barren motorway towns, he routinely shudders at the thought of visiting the soulless reality.

In his father's flat he finds a cache of books on fascist leaders as well as other disturbing evidence of an obsession with right-wing violence. Then, in town he witnesses a riot and assaults on an Asian shopkeeper and Kosovan asylum seekers, perpetrated by gangs of white sports supporters in St George's shirts who drive around in SUVs. He finds out that the teams the gangs follow are run by the Metro-Centre as a promotional tool.

All this, we're told, squares with a theory Pearson has held for a long time, and has even utilised for his advertising campaigns: that the limitless excess of consumerism leads to an enormous boredom and a thirst for sensation that can only be satisfied by darker forces. He remembers an old campaign slogan he came up with: "Mad is Bad. Bad is Good."

Though he's desperate to escape the madness creeping through the town, he's stopped in his tracks when the main suspect in the murder is released thanks to the testimony of three pillars of the community. He meets one, the female casualty doctor who was the last person to see his father alive. She's had to deal with consequences of the increasing violence, and points angrily to the mall as the source of the decay.

It's an anger shared by three other characters that Pearson comes across: his late father's solicitor, the town's chief psychiatrist and the headmaster of the local school. But Pearson realises there's a conspiracy at work when he gets caught up in a riot and stumbles on an SUV whose occupants seem to be directing the violence. He recognises the doctor - and she's sitting next to the solicitor ... and who are those other two shady characters in the back? So begins Pearson's quest to get to the bottom of the mystery of his father's murder and find out whose side the plotters are on.

Like most other sci-fi writers, Ballard isn't much interested in the business of building detailed character portraits. All those psychological insights and telling observations would only slow down the juggernaut of a plot and the big vision of the end of the world that's driving it. Both sides of the tale - the ideas and the characters - suffer as a consequence, the former descending into a set of manifestos, the latter into their mouthpieces.

Here, for instance, is the psychiatrist banging home to Pearson a message that's repeated over and over: "The danger is that consumerism will need something close to fascism in order to keep growing... Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for madness."

Uh huh, uh huh ... now let's hear that idea come to life in a really good story, you think. But, no, what's rolled out instead is a daft plot glued together with more of the same portentous pronouncements.

Yes, the world might well be going to hell in a shopping cart, but this reader wants a better description of the points down the road than this.