An oddity about J.G. Ballard is that his unquestionable truths about English society are often encased within deliberately, and stupendously, implausible plots; his trick is to conjure reality from the deeply unrealistic. Kingdom Come, his latest novel, demonstrates that he is still, in his eighth decade, as outré as ever, and still as keen to understand the national psyche.
It begins, conventionally enough, with its narrator, Richard Pearson, describing outer London suburbia, a place where
every resident… was constantly trading the contents of house and home, replacing the same cars and cameras, the same ceramic hobs and fitted bathrooms. Nothing was being swapped for nothing. Behind this frantic turnover, a gigantic boredom prevails.
So far, all is normal; most readers will recognise this type of area. But Ballard’s suburbia quickly becomes more sinister. Pearson, an out-of-work advertising executive, arrives in Brooklands, near Weybridge, following his father’s murder in the Metro-Centre, the town’s vast retail complex. When a mentally ill man with a known grudge against the Metro-Centre is arrested, the case seems to be closed, but the man is given a curiously watertight alibi by his doctor, his psychiatrist and his former head teacher — all trustworthy people who just happened to be in the right place to confirm his innocence.
Pearson realises that something is wrong in Brooklands. The population, half-mad with ennui, has begun to revolt. Race riots occur nightly, with Asian and eastern European families being savagely beaten by middle-class thugs while the police avert their eyes. The Metro-Centre appears to be the touchstone for all this. The local people congregate around it, watch its satellite TV channel and support its official sports teams, and then, in a frenzy of jingoistic emptiness, descend on to the streets in St George shirts, looking for trouble.
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