KINGDOM COME

Over the last ten years Ballard has been moving closer to your home. In COCAINE NIGHTS and SUPER-CANNES he investigated the origins of gratuitous killings in the ennui of the life of bourgeois scientists and ex-pats. In MILLENNIUM PEOPLE he came back to Britain to look at those who are not super-rich but might be moving into their gated communities down by the river. Now, in KINGDOM COME, he portrays those of us living lives of quiet desperation in the suburbs: Brooklands is a new town, just inside the M25, north-west of London, dominated by a huge shopping mall, the Metro-Centre. Richard Pearson, Ballard's narrator, an advertising executive with no reason to stay in town, is brought to visit after his father has been killed in an apparent spree killing in the mall. Pearson's one sense of satisfaction - that the killer was quickly caught - soon turns to ashes, as a series of respectable witnesses give the semi-lunatic suspect an alibi. Dubious about the relationships between the witnesses Pearson determines to stay and investigate. 

Pearson discovers that Brooklands is not what it seems, and that the mall and its associated television channels, sporting events, and general atmosphere go much further than affinity programs and loyalty points ever could. The Metro-Centre management are doing everything they can to turn their customers into near-robots. In fact, as Pearson starts to go about in the evening he finds that the customers are forming para-military forces, Flag of Saint George shirts, the colours of the Metro-Centre teams, having become their uniforms. In a frightening parody of a Monsieur Hulot or Charlie Chaplin moment Pearson finds that he is, totally fortuitously, leading a march of these thugs, who only break off to attack foreigners' shops. Worse, Pearson finds that government both locally and in Whitehall is uninterested in what is developing. And worse still, he finds that his father had been an early participant. This may explain the bombing of his own car - Pearson is getting too near the truth. 

Despite his fears Pearson, contrarily, takes a job with the mall management, using his advertising skills to work up the customer loyalty even further; something that is proved to work when the authorities do finally try to reclaim the mall, and a siege and battle ensue because the shoppers and their stewards will not give it up. In a final moment Pearson surveys the wreckage of the dome, the shoppers seem to have been freed of the evil spell, but Pearson knows that the threat to fill their empty lives means that another volcano-like mall will erupt again. 

If "the suburbs dream of violence" as Pearson says - and our government seems intent on building more of them, containing less and less of value - then KINGDOM COME is another of Ballard's apocalyptic warnings. There have not been many comparable works about social problems, certainly not about mass movements, for years: you may have to go back to the end of Harold Wilson's white heat period to recall Arthur Wise's last two novels: THE DAY THE QUEEN FLEW TO SCOTLAND FOR THE GROUSE SHOOTING (1968) and WHO KILLED ENOCH POWELL? (1970). Both novels deal with the threat of mass movements and politics (so much so that THE GROUSE SHOOTING, like Peter Wright's SPYCATCHER, was first published abroad) and both Ballard and Wise end apocalyptically, passing through sport on the way. Just as the games at the Metro-Centre stadium spark the violence in KINGDOM COME, so the now long-abandoned England-Scotland international provokes civil war in THE GROUSE SHOOTING. 

Or is that what happens in KINGDOM COME? Events such as riots outside a new Ikea in north London seem to have supplied some of the inspiration for the story; as perhaps did the late Robert Maxwell's attempts to merge Oxford, Reading and Swindon into a new football super-club to be called The Thames Valley Royals. One of the features of the Metro-Centre is its decoration - giant Teddy Bears in its central atrium; they are real, too, in the Bentall's shopping centre in Kingston-on-Thames. Most extraordinary of all these interventions of the real, though, are the names of the two mall managers - David Cruise and Tom Carradine - who seem to have the transposed names of two well-known actors. Seem, except that soon after Pearson meets Carradine he interposes a page repeatedly calling him "David Carradine" as if the real has torn a hernia in the body of fiction, or vice versa. 

What does Richard Pearson find when he nears Brooklands? He travels down "green culverts" and arrives in a "bosky English suburb" - in other words, he sees what an advertising man of the 1950s or '60s would expect you to see, using his "Wardour Street English", the sort of language that John Betjeman parodied when he wrote: "Thus spake the brewer's P.R.O., A man who really ought to know, For he is paid for saying so". Pearson may be doing to us what he does for the Metro-Centre when he works for David Cruise.