JG Ballard: Kingdom Come

Written by:Chris Mitchell.

The reviews for Kingdom Come have been almost universally lazy hackwork (”Seer of Shepperton”, blah blah, “Shanghai internment”, blah blah, “Crash very nasty book”, blah blah - gimme a break). The drubbing Ballard’s latest received from Michael Portillo on The Newsnight Review surely signals its importance all the more. Some have said it’s badly written - because it doesn’t bother describing character’s hair colour or similar - and others have said it’s a heavy handed and absurd attack on consumerism, mainly because it mentions the word “consumerism” in the text numerous times. (I wish reviewers what they posit as a good book when they make value judgements like that, so we know where they’re coming from).

Steven Shaviro has, thankfully, written an excellent review of KC on his site. Shaviro gets the point - Kingdom Come is not simply an attack on consumerism but an attack on the absence of meaning in 21st century life. Shopping is an affect of this absence, not the cause of it.

There is nothing to do in the suburbs except root for the local sports teams, and go shopping at the Metro-Centre, a vast indoor mall whose enormous dome dominates the landscape, and whose central atrium is dominated by three enormous bears who inspire veneration from the shoppers. Everyone’s life is dominated by the twin vicarious activities of consumerism and sports fandom; and there’s a strong synergy between the two, since the Metro-Centre sponsors special sports nights, and organizes its promotions around the matches.

Ballard presents consumerism as an ever-accelerating, positive-feedback cycle. Shopping is immediately satisfying; but once you bring the products home, you feel empty and disappointed. Consumerism thus gives rise to disaffection and boredom. But the only cure for such dissatisfaction is still more shopping. And so the cycle replicates itself, on an ever-expanding scale.

Sports fandom, meanwhile, works as an intensifier. “People don’t know it, but they’re bored out of their minds. Sport is the big giveaway. Wherever sport plays a big part in people’s lives you can be sure they’re bored witless and just waiting to break up the furniture” (67). Destruction and violence are just the flip side of accumulation. Where Bataille and Baudrillard seem to imply that excess, expenditure, and violence mark a line of escape from the sterility of bourgeois accumulation, Ballard is far more pessimistic. Expenditure, or potlatch, is really just another part of the same logic.

What, then, do the white, lower-middle-class British suburbanites do, after getting pumped up by an afternoon of shopping, and an evening of rooting for their team? Why, they go out and engage in a racist mob rampage — targeting South Asians and Eastern Europeans — under the cover of that old British standby, football [i.e. soccer] hooliganism. The police basically stand by during these riots, and do nothing. For they, and the politicians who command them, know that such outbursts are, ultimately, useful to the social order. “Secretly, they [the police and the town council] want the Asians and immigrants out… Fewer corner shops, more retail parks, a higher tax yield. Money rules, more housing, more infrastructure contracts. They like the bands playing and the stamping feet — they hide the sound of the cash tills” (169)….

The book has been criticized for the fact that its plot and characters aren’t slick, catchy, and ‘well-constructed’ enough. But of course these are the wrong standards by which to judge Ballard. He writes genre fiction as social theory — and he remains, at age 76, one of the most acute social theorists that we have.

Simon Sellars has done an excellent interview with the man himself over at Ballardian.com - easily the best of the round of interviews to appear along with KC - and you might enjoy the more lighthearted post-apocalytic photo essay I put together last week called Ballardian Bangkok too. Plus of course, all the distilled JGB goodness at JGBallard.com.

Oh yes - if anyone knows how I can get signed up to UKNova.com so I can download the torrent of JGB on the South Bank Show, please drop me a line. Thanks.

Posted on September 30th, 2006.

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