Sigh.

Into this caustic, volatile (anti) social brew comes the newest novel by one of the world's most thought-provoking novelists, James Graham Ballard. 'Kingdom Come' analyses the insane riptide undercurrents of current UK life and finds quite a few maggots squirming under the smiley feelgood surface of an island run by lawyers for lawyers and big business, NOT for the advertising-Blitzed population. ‘Kingdom Come' is the fourth detective book by Ballard in a row, and I found it much more interesting, exciting, analytical, truthful and, it has to be said, depressing, than 'Cocaine Nights,' 'Super-Cannes' and 'Millennium People,' the previous three amateur gumshoe efforts preceding it. It's an occasionally humorous, satirical Book of Revolutions from an atheist hostage in an insane shopping maul, a warning and a mapping out of potential fascistic trajectories that the current UK (the US being another horrifying can of worms altogether) situation could potentially lead to.

42-year-old Richard Pearson, the novel's main protagonist, is a failed advertising executive (Ballard himself wrote ad copy many moons ago) whose elderly ex-pilot father is killed when a madman goes on a rampage in the Metro-Centre shopping mall in Surrey with a stolen police machine gun. Pearson goes to Surrey from London to try and find out what happened and who killed his father, and soon finds himself deeply drawn into an unfolding societal scenario that bears more than a passing resemblance to today's England. The people of the suburbs are bored ('The suburbs dream of violence' being the slogan on the back of the book, perfectly encompassing the mood of the population within its pages) and are keeping themselves amused by abusing non-English immigrant elements (burning Pakistani shops, beating up East European immigrants, etc), watching football matches and worshiping at the Metro-Centre, which has become their chosen temple with their purchases there votive offerings to the consumer gods who now hold their lives in thrall.

Upon entering into this empty, vapid, diseased new culture and commodity community, Pearson decides to try a societal psychological experiment; after all, you can take the man out of advertising, but not advertising out of the man. He is an archetypal Ballard protagonist, half-hating and half-seduced by the new social (dis)order unfolding before his eyes and as an ex-ad exec he can't help but want to mess with the heads of the locals. He enlists the help of David Cruise, a local low-rent cable 'celebrity' whose name evokes another mad movie star and whose demeanour evokes the current head of the UK government, slick, sick, all spun out, nothing to say (‘The message is: there is no message’ as the text puts it, in a slightly different context about man's freedom, but which could also serve as a slogan-template for Cruise's hollow pointless societal pronouncements) and no real reason to be on the air.

Pearson points out to this meaningless televisual cipher that consumerism is the new politics and religion, Cruise should be a new kind of politician (and if you think this is so far-fetched, halfway through reading this book I heard that there is a website campaigning to get Oprah Winfrey, a disturbing, worshipped Messiah-figure in America, to run for president. I heard that, smiled, and tipped my hat to Ballard yet again) acting as a rallying point for the local community, praising the audience one minute and attacking it the next to get it to identify with him as a well-meaning but strict and slightly damaged and vulnerable parent, and the ratings will shoot through the roof, along with flagging sales in the Metro-Centre. And they do. Soon Cruise is the focal point for the area and his word is fake consumerist Sharia law, and when the Metro-Centre comes under attack and Cruise is shot the locals invade the place to protect it (it has, after all, become the glittering electronic palace-place that gives their empty lives any meaning) and soon some of the populace, Pearson included, are being held hostage in the shopping mall as things grow ugly and the new religion demands total psychological subservience and blood sacrifice.

'Kingdom Come' (whose title refers to the religious-consumerist 'paradise' we all now inhabit) is a fascinating book. Pearson is an ambiguous (anti) hero, whose motives are dubious at best. He finds himself half-identifying with the St George's Cross-shirt-wearing locals, whilst at the same time wanting to manipulate them for his own ends, and becomes a kind of Goebbels figure for Cruise's velvet-glove fascism dreams of hopeless glory. If Pearson can get the locals to perform as he believes they will he will validate and vindicate his own ejection from his ad agency; here Ballard reminds us that every would-be public figure has their own agenda and baggage, and we should never take as read, or even sane, the people in government or the media because, well, they exist merely to empty our heads and pockets for their own brain-drain-gain.

Ballard clearly finds the national English (though the rest of the UK has the same problems, to a greater or lesser degree; however, it's only England that Ballard really addresses in this prophetic, analytic, diagnostic book) mood to be deeply disturbing, and constant analogies with Nazi Germany (attacking gypsies, ethnic cleansing, the BMW 'Heinrich' driven by Cruise, etc; the book cover's gothic, Germanic lettering reflects this aspect of the story too) are made in the text. And in this I think, unfortunately, he's spot on. It's deeply ironic that a country that did so much to combat fascism during the Second World War is now manifesting uneasy symptoms and tics associated with the Third Reich. But I put it all down to national insecurity and xenophobia.

The UK once had an empire, but it now doesn't and, indeed, the empire is striking back, what with the arrival of countless numbers of Pakistanis and Indians, and British call centre 'jobs' (if you can call them that) being farmed out to India, replete with sneering offers of two-grand-a-year-pay relocation to that country for Brits. The UK doesn't know who the hell is amongst it now, knows that some of the people it has raised actively despise it and will blow them up on buses or trains because they hate the indigenous British populace (of whom they ostensibly were part physically, if obviously not mentally) and its indigenous religions, or lack thereof. And the UK is angry as hell, and is banding together to counter the (what it sees as) insidious foreign elements in its midst, and is waving its flags high in England at least. People don't want to live alongside the 'darkies' they once ruled and it's an ugly thing altogether.

Ballard's musings on people's need for religion (which he views as a psychopathology and, as a resident in the US deeply frightened by the ever-more-fascistic overtures and overtones of an American government run by born-again psychopaths, I am inclined to agree wholeheartedly) are mind-boggling and thought-provoking. He has clearly put a lot of thought into what drives the mental consumer mentality, and drawn a few clear-cut, logical-sounding conclusions of his own, backing his assertions with historical analogies. He reckons that consumer life infantilises people, and that people secretly will the destruction of the society they are bored with because, at deep-dish bottom, we are all just apes (not for nothing do we share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees) and we like smashing things up like bored children. From a conversation on P104 between Pearson and Dr Maxted, a crazed psychiatrist (aren't they all?) he meets in Surrey (Maxted starts):

”Elective insanity is waiting inside us, waiting inside us to come out when we need it. We're talking primate behaviour at its most extreme. Witch-hunts, auto-da-fes, heretic burnings, the hot poker shoved up the enemy's rear, gibbets along the skyline. Willed madness can infect a housing estate or a whole nation.'

'Thirties Germany?'

' Good example. People still think the Nazi leaders led the German people into the horrors of race war. Not true. The Germans were desperate to break out of their prison. Defeat, inflation, grotesque war reparations, the threat of barbarians advancing from the east. Going mad would set them free, and the chose Hitler to lead the hunting party. That's why they stayed together to the end. They needed a psychopathic god to worship, so they recruited a nobody and stood him on the high altar. The great religions have been at it for millennia.'

'States of willed madness? Christianity? Islam?'

'Vast systems of psychopathic delusion that murdered millions, launched crusades and founded empires. A great religion spells danger. Today people are desperate to believe, but they can only reach God through psychopathology. Look at the most religious areas of the world at present - the Middle East and the United States. These are sick societies, and they're going to get sicker. People are never more dangerous than when they have nothing left to believe except in God.'

'But what else is there to believe in?' I waited for Maxted to reply, but the psychiatrist was staring through the picture window at the dome of the Metro-Centre, fists gripping the air as if trying to steady the world around him. 'Dr Maxted?'

'Nothing. Except madness.' Maxted rallied himself and turned back to me. 'People feel they can rely on the irrational. It offers the only guarantee of freedom from all the cant and bullshit and sales commercials fed to us by politicians, bishops and academics. People are deliberately re-primitivizing themselves. They yearn for magic and unreason, which served them well in the past, and might help them again. They're keen to enter a new Dark Age. The lights are on, but they're retreating into the inner darkness, into superstition and unreason. The future is going to be a struggle between vast systems of competing psychopathies, all of them willed and deliberate, part of a desperate attempt to escape from a rational world and the boredom of consumerism.'

'Consumerism leads to social pathology? Hard to believe.'

'It paves the way. Half the goods we buy these days are not much more than adult toys. The danger is that consumerism will need something close to fascism to keep it growing. Take the Metro-Centre and its flat sales. Close your eyes a little and it already looks like a Nuremberg rally. The ranks of sales counters, the long straight aisles, the signs and banners, the whole theatrical aspect.'

'No jackboots, though,' I pointed out. 'No ranting fuhrers.'

'Not yet. Anyway, they belong to the politics of the street. Our streets are the cable TV consumer channels. Our party insignia are the gold and platinum loyalty cards. Faintly risible? Yes, but people thought the Nazis were a bit of a joke. The consumer society is a kind of soft police state. We think we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens. Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness. You can see it here already.'

'In bosky Surrey? I don't think so.'

'It's coming Richard.' Maxted pursed his lips, as it to shut out all possibility of a smile. ‘Here and in the towns around Heathrow. You can feel it in the air.'

There are also some nice in-jokes in the text. One character describes Pearson as being “beyond psychiatric help”, which is what the wife of a psychiatrist supposedly said about Ballard upon reading the 'Crash' manuscript. Another from P72 describes seatbelts as “sexual restraints” which, in light of the theme of 'Crash,' about gaining sexual gratification through car crashes, is pretty damned funny. Have to say, though, for me the most affecting, effective, humorous-but-deeply-disturbing image in this book comes from some people praying to three bear statues in the Metro-Centre, the building's iconic mascots, infantilized back to childhood and singing 'The Teddy Bear's Picnic Song' to them as a hymn, having passed by traditional religion and now worship any post-Christian effigy that takes their animistic fancy.

Ballard clearly has his finger on the pulse of contemporary England with this excellent novel, and is frightened and disgusted and angered and saddened by the state of the country. And I personally think, in many respects, he's dead on about the flat affectless entropic realm that much of the human race, at least in the west, now inhabits. Atheism and neurotheology (the study of religion in the brain) sit uneasily cheek-and-jowl alongside fundamentalist religions thousands of years old, and it's a deeply depressing state of affairs. The world is run by deluded madmen and there's nothing truly left to believe in, not even madness, as stated above. Anybody without religious belief, and with a brain in their head, cannot help but be extremely depressed and appalled by the state of the world today.

We're meant to buy buy buy buy buy buy buy worthless products and pay lip service to the worthless antediluvian religious beliefs of deranged fools who would foist their dangerous and dangerously stupid outdated views onto you and tell you that, as a free thinker and person who tries to analyse the world and its goings on, are wrong; thought is discouraged as elitist and seditious, and increasingly feels masochistic and like self-inflicted sadism because of the enormous amount of stupidity any intelligent, rational human being has to try and ingest in one day and remain relatively sane and want to keep getting out of bed in the morning. Electronic tsunamis of pop culture and insanity and cruelty information overload overwhelm us and we're meant to just smile and take it, as life and sentience, the only things we have, are turned into a life(less) sentence and ruined for us by the morons running the planet and the morons who grinningly unthinkingly accept the blows rained on our brains and rights as human beings just so long as they can continue to play the X-box or seal themselves in their I-pod or watch the sugary intolerable moneymaker shit that passes for television or cinema these dazed days. Personally, I feel incredibly alienated from most people and most of what constitutes human 'experience' these days, and constantly find myself shaking my head at what other people laugh at or frown at. I just don't understand the human race anymore, if I ever did, and I don't think I ever will.

Ultimately we're left with the lunatics in control of the asylum trashing the world for their own gain or sadistic (t)reasons. And where can we go to get away from them? Nowhere: they are us, they are all around us, and readers are barely a blip on the world's consumerist radar nowadays. Writing are theorized to have appeared to record commercial transactions thousands of years ago as images which then evolved into words; they have now devolved back into moving images used to record and accelerate commerce; things have come fool circle. And don't even get me started about fun-damn-mentalist America with its religious garbage cheek-and-jowl alongside the most (un)advanced consumerist society the world has ever seen, with far more ads even than the UK; that conversation would just get even more depressing. So words aren't going to save us, and the admonition at the end of this profound, profoundly disturbing, depressing and truthful book about sane people waking and rallying probably won't be heard by many. But at least JG Ballard tried to warn us with this deeply concerned, moralistic, important work. And Pastor Martin Niemoller, whose famous warning resonates through the pages of this book, would have been proud.

I leave you with a final image taken from the October 2006 issue of the American magazine Good Housekeeping. Edvard Munch's classic 19th century painting 'The Scream' is reproduced on a full page in colour. On the bridge behind the screaming man is a smiley-face round sweet playing hopscotch and clearly having a great time. 'Dark Just Got Fun' reads the buyline at the bottom of the page, an advert for M&M's new dark chocolate. Alleviate existential angst with confectionery. And vandalise great art while you're at it. I think that pretty much sums it all up. I'm off now to find some fake bears to pray to in some shopping mall somewhere - after all, if you can't beat them…

Graham Rae is a Scottish scribbler from the cheery charming picture-postcard-perfect post-industrial up-and-coming internationally renowned tourist destination of Falkirk, now resident in the US. He has been writing for as long as he can remember (started at any early age, carving graffiti into womb walls) and am halfway through my first novel (well, third, but the other mishmash misfires don’t count),’ Weekend Warriors.’ He has been writing about film for various electronic and print publications for 18 years now, and you can see a sporadically entertaining eclectic selection of his ramble/rantings at www.filmthreat.com

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.