"Kingdom Come" by JG Ballard

 

I first came across JG Ballard through the TV show "Doctor Who".  It was a review in "Doctor Who Magazine" about the video release of a 1987 story called "Paradise Towers", where the Doctor visits a dilapidated high-rise apartment block and reconciles the feuding inhabitants to unite against the return of it's murderous architect.  The review had an interesting picture of Bonnie Langford, as the Doctor's companion, being menaced by two old ladies who were planning to eat her.  The story was based on a Ballard novel called "High Rise".  Intrigued by the ideas in "Paradise Towers", I read up on it's source material and was very impressed.

 

I arrived at "Kingdom Come", Ballard's last novel (but not his last book) before his death from prostate cancer in April this year.  The novel is a murder mystery where Richard Pearson, an advertising executive arrives at the suburban town of Brooklands to the funeral of his father, murdered in a shooting at the local shopping complex called the Metro-Centre.  Soon after, he starts to investigates his father's shooting, getting caught up in the darkness at the heart of the Metro-Centre.

 

Many of Ballard's novels including this one and the aforementioned "High Rise" demonstrate that technology and it's advances do not remove us from our basic primal urges as animals and in many cases create an environment in which these urges can thrive.  It is exactly what happens here and the focal point for this impulsive madness is the Metro-Centre.  Consumerism, it is iterated constantly, has become the new religion.  People need something to believe in to give their lives meaning, and out in the suburbs away from London, this something is the Metro-Centre.  When anything threatens it, murder and savagery are the response.

 

Ballard's hero is an amoral man, who sleeps with the policewoman who knew his father and with the help of a bland TV host, turns the Metro-Centre's advertising creed inside out in an attempt to discover the truth.  The finale is typically surreal, with the Metro-Centre cut off from the real world and transformed into a kind of church, washing machines and consumer goods becoming shrines the followers drop to their knees to worship.

 

It is brilliant, highly readable stuff but really heavy-going in places.  Ballard's terror and cynicism about the state of modern life really comes across in his prose and with a grain of truth that can be difficult to swallow.

 

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

 

In the paperback version of "Kingdom Come" that I read, one of Ballards top ten reads was "The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler, a highly popular writer of noir and pulp fiction.  Chandler's books are set in California in the 1940s/50s and feature the exploits of private detective Philip Marlowe.  His books have adapted into films several times, with "The Big Sleep" adapted into a famous movie with Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe.

 

This first book sees Marlowe summoned the estate of General Sternwood and asked to investigate a man who has been blackmailing him.  Marlowe agrees, but has difficulty locating the blackmailer and later finds himself investigating the related disappearance of an old friend of Sternwood's.   His endeavours are not helped by the presence of Sternwood's two wild daughters, who are hiding some dark secrets of their own...

 

Chandler has a highly readable prose style and the numerous wisecracks that pepper the narrative, even when they don't work, add a level of humour that leavens the grittier aspects of the world Marlowe inhabits.  And it is a very sleazy, seedy world with everyone (except the dying old General) stained by greed and desire.  Chandler captures this world very well with a lot of solid, well-thought description and though his protagonist is no saint himself he is given enough depth to let the reader sympathize with him.

 

You have to read Chandler carefully for he can easily catch you off-guard.  A seemingly throwaway scene late in the book is given powerful significance in the final revelation where Marlowe reveals he's worked out what's been really going on.

 

What Ballard and Chandler have in common, expressed in different ways, is an ability to see below the surface of money and privilege to the carnality and savagery lurking below.  Marlowe's world in particular still resonates as the California in which he works seems like much the same place today - a place dominated by riches and power, and inhabited by struggling individuals who harbour disappointments and broken dreams in their efforts to get by.

 

These gifted writers used their instinct for the follies of human nature as well their natural writing skills to create highly readable stories that entertain the reader while saying something honest about the society we are living in.