‘Madness – that’s all they have, after working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Going mad is their only way of staying sane.’ (Frank Halder to Paul Sinclair)
You can tell late-period Ballard novels by their sheer size – Super-Cannes is a whopping 392 pages long, in the shiny Flamingo paperback edition I own.
The swimming pool had calmed.
The book is on the same topic and has much the same structure as its predecessor, Cocaine Night, but is, at least to begin with, noticeably more believable and enjoyable.
I circled the artificial lakes, with their eerily calm surfaces…
The plot – 1
First the plot: As with its predecessor, we’re among an élite of the well-educated, prosperous, professional middle-classes again. And abroad again: in the Costa del Sol for Cocaine Nights, the South of France for Super-Cannes.
At Eden-Olympia the medical staff were calm and unrushed…
And Super-Cannes is, like Cocaine Nights, told by a first-person narrator, in this case Paul Sinclair (how does Ballard manage to come up with such boring names for his protagonists?).
Trying to calm her, I took the phone from her surprisingly soft hand…
Paul is a pilot of small planes and editor of a couple of aviation magazines. He was injured in a flying accident nine months earlier and his knee refuses to heal properly. As the novel opens it is still in an uncomfortable brace.
Calming myself, I stared down at the dappled floor…
His new young wife, Jane, has taken up a post at the newish Eden-Olympia complex, part of the European Silicon Valley being built north-west of Cannes (in the south of France), a self-contained luxury business park which contains the European headquarters of major European banks and car manufacturers, along with exquisitely manicured villas, a world of tennis courts and swimming pools, luxury homes where all these busy executives spend the little time left over when they’re not at their offices.
Jane sat calmly in her white coat, dwarfed by a black leather chair contoured like an astronaut’s couch…
The story opens with even more doctors than usual for a Ballard story (if I had a pound for every Ballard protagonist who is a doctor): Paul’s wife, Jane, is a doctor and is replacing the previous doctor working in the Eden-Olympia clinic, Dr Greenwood, and they’re met on arrival at the park by its head psychiatrist, Dr Wilder Penrose, who plays a pivotal role in the story.
Sitting by the open doors of the limousines, they were almost Roman in their steely-eyed calm…
The similarities to Cocaine Nights are obvious from the start: just like Estrella da Mar in that novel, Eden-Olympia looks, on the surface, to be a perfectly organised, self-contained, respectable and hard-working bourgeois paradise, located in an idyllic setting on the Mediterranean, and yet… it has a dark side! Oooh, yes, I know… who would have imagined!
Halder gave up his attempt to calm me…
The two books share the same basic structure in the sense that a 1. mass murder 2. triggers a visit from 3. an outsider who proceeds to 4. investigate deeper and deeper into this self-enclosed sub-culture’s 5. murky depths, and 6. finds himself becoming changed and depraved by it.
Calmly, I said: ‘You’ve had a bump. Cutting corners too fast?’
In Cocaine Nights it was the arson attack on one of the ex-pat community’s luxury villas in which five leading figures burned to death which led to the narrator’s brother being arrested for the crime (because of the strong evidence against him), and prompts the protagonist to fly out to the beach resort to investigate…
Her fingers moved towards a salt sachet, stopped and calmed themselves by eviscerating the stub of her cigarette…
In this book, Jane’s predecessor as doctor at the business park’s clinic, Dr Greenwood, ‘went postal’, went on the rampage with a rifle, locking three chauffeurs hostage in his garage, before going to the business district and cold-bloodedly assassinating seven managing directors and top executives, before returning to his villa and executing the three ‘hostages’ in his garage.
Or did he? [Cue spooky made-for-TV thriller music]
The first person narrator, Paul Sinclair, is disconcerted to discover that he and his wife have been allotted the very same villa Greenwood lived in, and where the hostages were kept and then shot dead – though he is assured the house has been deep-cleaned and, in the case of the garage, rebuilt.
I imagined her lying awake at night, in this electrified but nerveless world, thinking that if only she had forgone her holiday she might have reached out to Greenwood and calmed his dream of death…
Except that Paul finds some evidence overlooked by the police, three bullets in and around the swimming pool which conflict with the official version of events. And, with his wife quickly drawn into the austere work culture of this dream executive-class business park, Paul finds himself with plenty of time on his hands to hobble round the manicured woodland, and explore the office blocks, and to start to make appointments to interview people involved in ‘the tragic events’, including, for example, the three widows of the hostages supposedly shot in cold blood.
He calmed himself, trying to steady his pulse…
Thus, on one level, the book amounts to a long investigation, as Paul slowly increases elements of the chain of events which are at odds with the official story put out by the business park’s press and PR people, and is given (pretty heavy-handed) clues from various officials – from Wilder Penrose the psychologist to Frank Halder, a senior security guard, who takes a strange watchful interest in Paul’s well-being.
‘He helps me park my car, and hangs around the clinic with those calm eyes. He’s waiting for something to happen.’
Slowly pretty much the same picture emerges as in Cocaine Nights, which is that the pampered, bored, professional bourgeoisie need livening up, need excitement – and that this takes the form of random crime, drug dealing, BDSM sex and so on. The usual suspects, then. The characters don’t really hide this, it is mentioned right from the start thus killing off any sense of suspense.
‘I like to stir things up, keep the adrenalin flowing. The more they hate you, the more they stay on their toes.’ (Wilder in chapter 1)
The posh neighbours, Simone and Alain Delage, don’t mind parading round in the nude. Pretty soon they are coming over to Jane and Paul’s to smoke dope and watch porn movies. Paul sees plastic sachets of white powder in various offices and in still photos of the crime scenes and he, and we, are quick to suspect they contain cocaine or heroin.
Halder raised a hand to calm me…
On one of his forays into Cannes proper, Paul stays on into the evening and watches the streets bloom with prostitutes and their terrifying East European pimps. He’s particularly struck, attracted and appalled at the same time by the vision of an 11-year-old girl wearing inappropriate make-up and sexualised clothes and finds himself approaching her pimp and asking how much she is with a view to ‘saving’ her. At least that’s what he tells himself.
Halder pinched his nose, and calmed his fluttering nostrils…
In the event he doesn’t get far with the transaction because a squad of three Range Rovers screech onto the scene, out of which leap a bunch of men in tight black leather jackets wielding baseball bats who proceed to beat the crap out of the little crowd of pimps. The leatherjackets beat the East Europeans and Arabs to the floor, smashing their teeth and smashing in the windscreens of their cars. Paul himself receives a hefty whack over the back before he’s pulled into a doorway by a figure he realises is the park security guy, Halder, a figure who slowly develops into his guardian angel. Paul is to discover that these are regular outings by the more psychopathically-minded senior executives at the business park and are jocularly referred to as ratissages.
He opened his envelope of photographs, waiting for me to calm myself.
Thus it comes as little surprise to the savvy reader when, once the mayhem is over, some of the leather-jacketed vigilantes remove their balaclavas and are revealed as the head of security at Eden-Olympia and several of its younger chief executives. Do they do it out of morality, policing Cannes’ underworld? Paul asks Halder. ‘No,’ Halder replies. ‘For kicks.’
Later, when Paul mentions why he got caught up in the vigilante attack to Penrose, the latter quizzes him about his interest in the 11-year-old girl and then goes on to be as plain as can be about the worldview which underpins the book:
‘Sordid. What can one say? Tragic for the child, but sexual pathology is such an energizing force. People know that, and will stoop to any depravity that excites them.’
So before we’re half way through the book we are fully informed that the business park full of hard-working European professionals is also a hotbed of drugs, kinky sex and violent vigilante squads, and we know at least one of them went off the deep end and went on a killing spree.
‘Some people say she tried to calm him down.’ ‘Brave woman.’
So there’s little surprise about the story. There’s not much place for it to go if we’ve established before we’re even half way through, that the main character is at least partly attracted to the idea of child sex, that the business park’s resident psychiatrist more than half sympathises with him and finds an attitude like that perfectly natural.
He composed himself, waiting for the muscles of his face to calm themselves…
Savvy and grip
Still, what makes Super-Cannes feel significantly better than the previous three or four novels is the savviness of the narrator.
He thrust the envelope of photographs through the open window, his face fully calm for the first time that day.
Rushing to Paradise is an unsatisfactory book because, although the plot has a certain plausibility (oddball environmentalists left on a remote Pacific atoll forget their eco crusade and descend into Lord of the Flies psychosis) the central character whose eyes we see it all through, 16-year Neil Dempsey, is very slow on the uptake. Slow and dim. It takes him ages to cotton on to things the savvy reader has spotted hundreds of pages earlier, such as that the leader of the eco-warriors is a psychopath. The reader is way ahead of the characters, which makes for a frustrating read.
She spoke calmly, her face only a few inches from mine, and I could smell the sweet Turkish tobacco on her breath.
A bald summery of Cocaine Nights also makes it seem groovy (man arrives at self-contained ex-pat community on the Costa del Sol to discover its cheerful bourgeois daytime life conceals a jungle of dark-side activities such as hard drugs, wifeswapping, BDSM and, at its extreme, murder). It’s a good idea but, again, lacks suspense because the reader is way ahead of the plodding narrator.
‘Forget it.’ I tried to calm her. ‘They’ve gone.’
Grip No, if you’re going to write in the thriller genre (which Ballard seems to have decided to do in his last books) you need to demonstrate the quality that one of its founding fathers, Henry Rider Haggard, called ‘grip’.
In romance ‘grip’ is almost everything. Whatever its faults, if a book has ‘grip’, these may be forgiven. (The Days of My Life by Henry Rider Haggard, 1912)
By ‘grip’ Haggard means that the reader’s imagination is so gripped, so thrilled and excited that you can’t stop turning the pages.
The last book I read which had ‘grip’ in the way Haggard describes was Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, a few years ago. I was on a weekend break and picked it up in the hotel library. I planned to get up the next morning in time to a) go for a swim in order to b) enjoy the massive hotel breakfast before c) going to visit a nearby castle. But all my plans were wrecked because I found myself literally unable to put Mutant 59 down. I knew it was pulpy rubbish and at midnight, and 2 and 3 o’clock I tried to mark the page and turn the light off, telling myself I’d finish it tomorrow – but each time ended up picking it up again to read ‘just one more chapter’, and the next thing I knew dawn was coming up. That’s grip.
Alarmed, Frances held my wrist. ‘Calm down. You’re safe here.’
So Cocaine Nights is clever: its basic plot proposes a sociological theory about human nature and culture (humans need excitement and their society must find some way of providing that or they’ll engineer their own wayward forms).
Penrose tried to calm me…
It is carefully plotted, contains a number of vivid scenes, and is written in Ballard’s artful style which combines incisive descriptions with a careful deployment of his key terms and phrases (characters are constantly unsettled, need calming, sooner or later become ‘demented’ or ‘deranged’; have their ‘reasons’ and their ‘motives’ which the narrator always struggles to figure out; the narrator never notices, guess or intuits, he always ‘senses’: thus Ballard artfully creates a claustrophobic world by the almost incantatory repetition of the same words, same attitudes, same situations, etc).
‘Jane…’ I stepped through the clutter of unpaired shoes that she was rooting from the cupboard, placed my hands under her arms and lifted her to her feet, surprised by how much weight she had lost. ‘Calm down…’
But I found Cocaine Nights a struggle because it was so obvious what was going on, and when the ‘revelation’ came I thought, ‘oh, OK, that’s clever’ and went to sleep.
I wanted to calm her, and took away her cigarettes.
Part of the reason for this is that the narrator is depicted as implausibly naive, in order that he can then be ‘shocked’ when he discovers some of the prim bourgeois types he’s introduced to take drugs or have rough sex.
Frances had calmed herself, and waited for me to reply.
Shocked? That’s standard behaviour in a Ballard novel. That’s what we come to a Ballard novel expecting.
So part of the reason Super-Cannes is distinctly better than Cocaine Nights – even though it has a similar structure and is putting forward much the same view of human nature – is that the central character is that much more sophisticated and savvy.
As we took the lift to the basement garage she touched the dinner jacket, trying to calm a fleeting ghost.
Paul Sinclair is funny. His wife, Jane, is funny. Thus he or she can engage in banter that is genuinely funny. Super-Cannes is a better book despite the fact that the plot structure and worldview are almost identical to its predecessor, largely because the narrator is more sympathetic.
‘Frances, relax…’ I moved her edgy hand from the gear lever, trying to calm her.
Some of the exchanges with Wilder made me smile and, as I did so, I realised that’s a quality you rarely associate with Ballard – humour. Here are Paul and Jane in their car, just as they arrive at Eden-Olympia and the psychiatrist Penrose has gotten into the car and is guiding them through the quiet avenues to their villa.
We were driving along the shore of a large ornamental lake, an ellipse of glassy water that reflected the nearby mountains and reminded me of Lake Geneva with its old League of Nations headquarters, another attempt to blueprint a kingdom of saints. Apartment houses lined the waterfront, synchronized brises-soleils shielding the balconies. Jane slowed the car, and searched the windows for a single off-duty resident.
‘A fifth of the workforce live on-site,’ Penrose told us. ‘Middle and junior management in apartments and townhouses, senior people in the residential estate where you’re going. The parkland buffers the impact of all the steel and concrete. People like the facilities yachting and water-skiing, tennis and basketball, those body-building things that obsess the French.’
‘And you?’ Jane queried.
‘Well…’ Penrose pressed his large hands against the roof, and lazily flexed his shoulders. ‘I prefer to exercise the mind. Jane, are you keen on sport?’
‘Not me.’
‘Squash, aerobics, roller-blading?’
‘The wrong kind of sweat.’
‘Bridge? There are keen amateurs here you could make an income off.’
‘Sorry. Better things to do.’
‘Interesting…’ Penrose leaned forward, so close to Jane that he seemed to be sniffing her neck. ‘Tell me more.’
‘You know…’ Straight-faced, Jane explained: ‘Wife-swapping, the latest designer amphetamines, kiddy porn. What else do we like, Paul?’
Penrose slumped back, chuckling good-humouredly.
A rare burst of genuine comedy in Ballard. And a moment’s reflection suggests why: it’s because humour, to some extent, relies on the unexpected. A good punchline reveals a hidden connection or punning misinterpretation you hadn’t seen, and the sudden short circuit makes you laugh.
Careful to remain calm, and glad of the day’s first injection, I returned the sergeant’s salute…
Pondering this made me realise that there is little or no humour in Ballard because, in a way, everything in his stories is totally predictable and expected. In pretty much all his novels and short stories the characters do one and the same thing, which is go downhill – from an initial position of pukka British correctness they descend by carefully calibrated steps into mania and psychosis.
Frances gripped the steering wheel as if to brace herself before a collision. Trying to calm her, I moved her hands to her lap…
Arguably High Rise is the epitome of this narrative arc because it pushes the classic Ballard narrative of decline and fall to genuinely gruesome depths, into final scenes where it is revealed that some of the characters have resorted to cannibalism, which did come as a surprise.
The release of this long-repressed material seemed to calm her, rage diffused into the cooling waters of truth.
This is one of the reasons Rushing to Paradise is disappointing, because the characters follow exactly the same downward spiral as in all the other novels, but the descent only gets as far as the vengeful women hunting Neil through the tropical rainforest in scenes which, far from taking us into new levels of late 20th-century psychosis, ought to remind any reader of Lord of the Flies. I.e. instead of going forward, the novel, in the end, takes the reader (surprisingly) backward to a conclusion about human nature first made (much more powerfully) in the 1950s. That’s not prophecy: in a twisted kind of way, it’s almost nostalgia.
Her moment of panic had passed, and she spoke calmly.
Anyway, in a sentence, Super-Cannes is the best of these later novels because the narrator is as funny and savvy as the reader. And these moments of banter with the resident shrink, Dr Wilder Penrose, are indicative of a kind of confidence which the book exudes overall. It’s not perfect as a thriller, but I actively wanted to get back to reading it, whereas I had to more or less force myself to read Rushing To Paradise which is brilliantly written but whose plot I found a predictable chore.
I wrenched myself from him, and raised a fist to strike his face, but he clamped his hand over my mouth, trying to calm me. ‘Mr Sinclair… take it easy. I’m with you.’
The plot – 2
The tour of the murder scene Running Wild, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes are all set in gated communities of upper-middle-class professionals which go badly off the rails and become the scenes of massacres. Each of them features a tour of the crime scene, in the company of a police or security guard, which allows Ballard to describe the gruesome and sadistic killings with lipsmacking precision. Thus the nervy black security guard, Halder, takes Paul on an extended recreation of the route taken by Dr Greenwood as he went on his killing spree.
I pulled away from them and leaned against the roof of the Mercedes. Calmly, I said: ‘I’m glad I came. What exactly is going on?’
The Big Speech explaining everything In the second half Paul – with breath-taking naivety – decides he’ll go meet and share with the business park psychiatrist, Dr Wilder Penrose, what he’s discovered so far, and the scenes he’s witnessed, specifically the gangs of leatherjacketed vigilantes who let off steam by beating up pimps and low-level crims in the backstreets of Cannes.
Only to discover that, of course, Wilder knows all about it. In fact Wilder is given a BIG SPEECH in which he explains the secret of life at the business park. He explains that the park managers slowly realised that these busy executives were working themselves to death and coming down with all kinds of psychosomatic ailments. They needed some RELEASE. What started as tentative suggestions that they try transgressive behaviours (the usual checklist of banned drugs, BDSM sex, combined with violent forays into the rougher parts of Cannes where they beat the crap out of East European pimps and Arab immigrants) turned out to be spectacularly successful at curing the busy executives’ many psychosomatic illnesses, boosting their immune systems and, above all, improving their decision-making and managerial effectiveness. Boosting profits. Thus every level of Eden-Olympia has been drawn into turning a blind eye to, or actively encouraging, the violence and decadent behaviour of the most aggressive executives.
She peered at me over her sunglasses, unsettled by my restless and eager manner.
The whole conception that our ‘innocent’ hero confronts the mastermind behind a wicked plan, who then proceeds to give an extended explanation of what is really going on, and how the hero ought to ‘join us’, comes straight out of a James Bond movie or any number of other tuppenny thrillers.
The victim turns out to be as bad as the baddies Similarly, just as we slowly learned that Frank, who’s been locked up for the arson attack in Cocaine Nights, is not as innocent as his brother thinks, in fact by the end we learn that he is deeply implicated in all the criminal activities at Estrella de Mar; so we now slowly learn that the Dr Greenwood who went nuts and went on the shooting spree that triggers the start of Super-Cannes, was himself deeply implicated in some very unsavoury behaviour. He was a volunteer at a clinic for immigrant children in a poor part of Cannes which sounds noble enough, he has thirty or more copies of Alice Through The Looking Glass in his spare bedroom which – apparently -he read to them;, but slowly the truth emerges that he took these vulnerable children back to his villa in Eden-Olympia for sex. The other doctor in the clinic, who he shot? She helped round up likely child sex victims from the slums of Cannes. They were both in it together.
The hero’s wife becomes involved Paul has realised from quite early on that his wife Jane is perfectly suited to the park. She loves working long hours. He has previously told us that she’s always been a rebel, a loose cannon, previously a punk and into drugs, she did a medical degree to piss her parents off, and was insubordinate to the male medical hierarchy. As the months go by Paul realises she only married him on an impulsive whim, and also begins to realise their marriage is ending at Eden-Olympia.
Jane becomes notable for two things:
1. She starts to have a lesbian affair with the Belgian woman who lives opposite and often traipses around naked on her balcony, Simone Delage, late-night sex with marijuana. Which turns into a threesome with the husband, Alain.
2. Paul’s knee continues to play him up and Jane takes to prescribing him painkillers, so much so that he wanders round in a daze and finds himself going along with the increasingly outrageous behaviour he sees around him. Eventually he stops taking the painkillers Jane is mixing for him, and has them analysed in a lab and discovers they contain a very strong tranquiliser used on mental patients. I.e. Jane has gone over to Eden-Olympia and is doping him.
The party at the Villa Grimaldi How far they have both fallen becomes clear on the night of a swanky party at the Villa Grimaldi overlooking Cannes attended by lots of swells from the Cannes Film Festival. After some satire about the film world, a complex little sequence of events follows. Greenwood had shot dead the park’s previous head of security. He had been replaced by a big boorish drunk, Pascal Zander. Paul learns that on one of the many evenings when he’s in Cannes late, Zander had been at his house and had come on very strong to his wife Jane. When Paul arrived home that night it was to find Jane in bed with a bruised mouth and face where Zander hit her.
Now, at this party, Paul goes in search of Zander and nearly has a fight with him,. He’s dragged away to her car by his lover Frances Baring (Paul has started an affair with this nervy woman who works in Eden-Olympia’s personnel department and had herself had an affair with Dr Greenwood). They leave the party a few moments later and slowly become aware that they’re being followed by an Audi. But then Paul realises that the Audi is itself being chased by two huge BMW limousines. He and Frances duck into a side street to let the other cars overtake them, then pull out again and watch the chase become more intense, like a scene from Crash. Eventually the big BMWs railroad the Audi into crashing through a roadside barrier and flying down onto the beach below, landing on its roof upside down on the edge of the surf.
Paul and Frances park up and Paul goes down onto the beach where he discovers the driver – who is dead – is Pascal Zander. He was a loose cannon, he had been finding out too much about the illegal activities at Eden-Olympia and so the leatherjackets killed him.
But here’s the thing. Paul walks up from the beach to the limos, opens the door and discovers… his wife Jane cowering in the back seat, stoned off her face. Next morning he describes all this to her and she point blank rejects it. She has been told Zander died in a freak car accident, that she went down to the beach to verify the body – neither of which is true. But she believes it. Paul grasps the extent to which she really has been sucked into Eden-Olympia’s dark underbelly.
She had relaxed a little, no longer unsettled by my presence,
Racism And just a note that this is the first Ballard novel I can remember where the issue of race is mentioned. Frank Halder, who guards Paul and intervenes at key moments to rescue him, is black and resentful of the way he is made to feel it by the powers-that-be at the park. Paul witnesses half a dozen violent outings or ratissages carried out by the leatherjackets, and it is obvious that they target Arab immigrants. Early on he witnesses some park security guards severely beating a harmless Arab street vendor. There’s a strong element of racism in the fact that Pascal Zander, the admittedly fat, sweaty, creepy drunk who takes over as head of park security, is eventually hounded to his death, partly because he was trying to blackmail the leading organisers of the park’s criminal activities, but just as much because he was an Arab.
This element of race-awareness is new in Ballard, and permeates the entire novel, and is part of the justification for characters making rather wild comparisons with Hitler and the Nazis (both mentioned twice in the text), which lead up to the preposterous idea that European business parks might be the breeding ground for the next fascist leaders (see below).
A lot more happens but it closely follows the same broad trajectory as Cocaine Nights, namely Paul finds himself drawn more and more into Eden-Olympia’s dark underbelly, but not in a good way. There are two more key elements:
Paul’s presence in Eden-Olympia is an experiment Between Wilder Penrose and the security man, Halder, Paul realises that the park authorities housed Paul and Jane in Dr Greenwood’s old villa as an experiment. They wanted to understand what made Greenwood snap. Why? Out of more than scientific interest. As the novel approaches its climax we learn that a second, far more extensive business park is being planned and laid-out close to the original Eden-Olympia. 20,000 people will end up living here, and Penrose and his clique will be wanting to extend their experiments in psychopathy to the new inhabitants. Therefore it’s vital they understand what factors drove Greenwood off the rails. And thus Paul realises he is the lab rat in an experiment; they are trying to recreate the circumstances which led to Greenwood snapping, so they can prevent it happening in the future. That’s why Penrose approved Paul’s ambiguous interest in the 11-year-old sex worker in the back streets of Cannes; he was excited that Paul really did seem to be going down the same track of paedophile exploitation which eventually led Greenwood to such a pitch of self-loathing that he set out on his killing spree which, Paul now realises, was designed to expose what was really going on at the park to the world at large.
They murder Paul’s lover, Frances Baring The key trigger point comes when he drives out to his lover Frances’s apartment and discovers she has been beaten to death by the leatherjackets. At that point something in him snaps, and he realises he is going to have to repeat Greenwood’s modus operandi. He acquires guns and ammunition from the brother of one of the chauffeur-hostages who was killed in the Greenwood massacre, and gets Halder’s co-operation. Halder gives him his gun and then promises to take Jane, stoned off her box, to the British consul in Marseilles and then packed on a plane back to London.
And the novel ends early in the morning as Paul psychs himself up to go and finish what Greenwood began, to kill all the senior personnel at the park starting with Penrose. Just as Charles Prentice turns into his predecessor, his transgressive brother, in Cocaine Nights, so Paul Sinclair turns into his predecessor, Dr Greenwood, on the last page of Super-Cannes.
I loaded the shotgun, and then stowed it under the rear seat. By the time I reached Eden-Olympia my targets would still be asleep. I would start with Alain and Simone Delage, drowsy after their late night in the Rue Valentin. Jane had told me that Simone kept a small chromium pistol in her bedside table, so she would be the first. I would kill her while she slept, using Halder’s handgun, and avoid having to stare back into her accusing eyes. Then I would shoot Alain as he sat up, drenched in his wife’s blood, moustache bristling while he reached for his glasses, unable to comprehend the administrative blunder that had led to his own death. The Delages slept with their air-conditioning on, and no one would hear the shots through the sealed windows.
Wilder Penrose would be next, ordered from his bed at gunpoint and brought down to the bare white room where he had set out his manifesto. He would be amiable, devious and concerned for me to the end, trying to win me with his brotherly charm while unsettling my eyes with the sight of his raw fingernails. I admired him for his hold over me, but I would shoot him down in front of the shattered mirror, one more door to the Alice world now closed for ever.
Destivelle and Kalman would follow, and the last would be Dmitri Golyadkin, asleep in his bunk in the security building. I would reach the TV centre in time for a newsflash on the early-afternoon news, but whatever happened I knew that Eden-Olympia would lead the bulletins. This time there would be questions as well as answers… I drove on, thinking of Jane and Frances Baring and Wilder Penrose, ready to finish the task that David Greenwood had begun.
In both cases I think the reader is meant to be shocked and horrified by this last-page revelation, and that we are meant to have shared the hero’s descent into psychosis. But, I’m afraid to say, in both instances I saw it coming a mile off and felt the endings were cheesy and predictable.
Ballard’s bogus futurology
‘The future is going to be like a suburb of Stuttgart.’ (Paul Sinclair to Frank Halder)
Only it isn’t, is it? It’s going to be a world of sprawling slums without clean water or enough food, in an overheating world subject to more and more extreme weather events and characterised by the extinction of species, the destruction of entire eco-systems, and increasingly desperate mass migrations of people.
The future is emphatically not going to be a sanitised business park full of trim, fit chief executives of Siemens and BMW who are so bored they indulge in heavy drugs and kinky sex with a bit of vigilante work against foreign pimps thrown in on the side.
You could only possibly believe that this is a useful idea of the future if you live in an upper-middle-class professional bubble, or have the poor grasp on reality of a literary critic or a university-bound academic, both groups which tend to mix with unrepresentative, well-educated, young cosmopolitan progressives.
But the London I live in is now 45% white i.e. the majority of modern Londoners in the London I live in come from an amazing range of non-caucasian ethnic groups.
At the 2011 census, London had a population of 8,173,941. Of this number 44.9% were White British. 37% of the population were born outside the UK, including 24.5% born outside of Europe
In my borough there are high-profile Somali and Brazilian communities, plus a whole range of African and Caribbean nationalities, alongside the usual groundswell of hard-working Polish labourers. Every day I’m amazed at the number of dirty, exhausted-looking Chinese labourers on my train home, and I don’t understand why most of the people having loud mobile phone conversations on my commuter train are Spanish.
So the future I’m already living in is one where huge mongrel populations from all over the world inhabit sprawling cities and live in a sort of surly indifference alongside each other, none of them speak what was once the native language, most scratching a living on zero hour jobs, as Uber drivers or riding Deliveroo scooters, work long hours labouring on building sites or as cleaners or who knows what activities in the black economy.
Towards the end of the book Paul’s lover, nervy Frances Baring, wails that ‘they’re’ coming to get us, the business parks are expanding in all directions, that one day a new Hitler or Pol Pot will emerge from them.
‘Their moral perception of evil was so eroded that it failed to warn them of danger. Places like Eden-Olympia are fertile ground for any messiah with a grudge. The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.’
That just struck me as preposterous. For a start, Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot didn’t emerge from any desert, they were both well-educated revolutionaries and both had experience of front line combat. They emerged from armies. For seconds, the worrying populist leaders we now have did not emerge from a business environment but from repressive state/party apparatuses, I’m thinking of Xi Jinping of China (lifelong Communist Party functionary) and Vladimir Putin of Russia (former KGB official), Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (lifelong politician) and Jair Messias Bolsonaro (graduate of military academy and the army before becoming a professional politician). The notable exception to this rule is Donald Trump, who doesn’t have military or political experience, who does indeed come from a business background, but is assuredly not one of the tightly-wrapped, quiet and efficient, but secretly psychotic, types Ballard is describing in this novel.
‘Wilder Penrose and Delage have to be stopped, along with their lunatic scheme. Not because it’s crazy, but because it’s going to work. The whole world will soon be a business-park colony, run by a lot of tight-lipped men who pretend to be weekend psychos.’
That’s just melodramatic tripe.
They are entertaining, written with real style and inventiveness and full of hundreds of brilliantly perceived details – but Ballard’s three novels about über-privileged, gated communities full of entirely white, upper-middle-class professional types – Running Wild, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes – degenerating into sadism and savagery might as well be messages from the moon for all the relevance they have to my life and the life of my times.
Related links
Reviews of other Ballard books
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– This appears to be an updated edition of the Penguin edition, which has been expanded to cover some 15th century poems, but the division into four categories and the introduction (some of which you can read online) appear to be identical to the Penguin edition.
Books & Boots 