J.G. Ballard: Kingdom Come
2.
I thought it was time to pay him a visit and see if he could freak me out like he used to.
To be frank, it felt a little colour by numbers. I think this is the problem with commercial publishing, and producing books to sell requires an author gives their reader want they want. More and more, this is matched against receiving what they expect.
And I get it; achieving the status of published author is the poorest I’ve ever been in my life, and it’s been the first time since I left high school that I’ve had to borrow money to pay a bill. If you are going to be a writer, you’ve gotta get paid, and to Ballard’s credit, he was writing within his own genre.
Kingdom Come is set up as a murder mystery. The protagonist, Richard Pearson’s father is shot dead by a gunman in the local shopping centre, known as the Metro Centre. Pearson goes to investigate what’s rotten in Denmark and in the process, becomes aware of how much he is to blame, given his previous job as an advertising executive.
Pearson discovers that his father was part of a fascist conspiracy where the will to power is sublimated into the desire to consume, and the Metro Centre is the temple at the centre of a society where the fascist impulse to violence is ventilated through sports.
Someone once described me as a fascist, and I’d never been so acutely aware of it as I was when reading Kingdom Come. I love contact sports and generally speaking, the more naked the violence, the better. I also believe I have the right to indulge in watching them too, given that I have played them myself.
The novel proceeds through a smooth set of transitions; Pearson is the nosy outsider who is then initiated into the fascist organisation – god knows, if it’s about buying stuff, then an ad man is always going to be useful – and eventually, solves the mystery and brings the conspiracy down.
But really, who cares? I only found Kingdom Come to be slightly alarming, given it brought me into an awareness of my own potential for fascism. The rest of it proceeded as a relatively uninteresting mystery that I didn’t much care about.
What I did enjoy, a bit like dancing with an old lover, was his magnificent gift with language, and the way that voice soared above the conventional nature of the structure and delivery of the book.
For example:
‘The Wave machine had been turned to its lowest setting and a vaguely gastric swell, like a suppressed vomit reflex, flowed across the colourised water.’
‘…She had loosened her hair, a thick black cloud like the smokescreen of a nervous destroyer.’
‘Drunks, car crashes, brawling, fist fights. There’s a huge amount of street violence. 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.’
‘People here want to share and celebrate, they want to come together. When we go shopping we take part in a collective ritual of affirmation.’
‘So being modern today means being passive?’
Sangster slapped is desk, knocking over his pen stand. He leaned towards me, huge overcoat bulking around him.
‘Forget being modern. Accept it, Richard, the whole modernist enterprise was intensely divisive. Modernism taught us to dislike and distrust ourselves. All that individual conscience, the solitary ache. Modernism was driven by neurosis and alienation. Look at its art and architecture. There’s something deeply cold about them.’
‘And consumerism?’
‘It celebrates coming together… it’s very theatrical, but we like that. It’s driven by emotion, but its promises are attainable, not just windy rhetoric. A new car, a power tool, a new CD player.’
**
Rest in peace, J.G. Ballard. I’ll never forget what you did to me when I was a callow teenager. I’ll never forget how deeply you touched me, and the shame and embarrassment you made me feel about the dark and shocking things capering within your fiction. I grew up to realise these were things I secretly loved. You taught me to admit those secrets to myself.
Theme Park at its Darkest 
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