With Johnny Rotten now revealed as light entertainment joker (and an obvious candidate to host a relaunched Saturday Night at the London Palladium), there are precious few of the old shockers still able to pack a punch.
So three cheers for J.G. Ballard, whose new one, Millennium People, I’m currently reading. I find that I keep mentioning Ballard. It’s not that he’s a favourite author; it’s that he seems to demand comment.
Ballard isn’t necessarily a great author. He’s too relentless. He sees madness around him too clearly to engage in the soft-hearted banter of characterisation. But he’s undoubtedly an author of great power, and capable of greatness within his writing.
Millennium People carries through a typical Ballardian conceit: London suffers a middle-class revolution, a revolution born of boredom and city-sickness. Ballard’s joke, thumped up endlessly through the novel, is that the revolution is about middle-class concerns; vague, incoherent feelings of dissatisfaction and wrongedness. And at heart, of course, self-loathing.
All the same, he can take your breath away with a pungent phrase out of the blue. A middle-class neighbourhood is described as housing a “convicted antiques dealer”.
I find that it’s Ballard’s titles that deliver the most punch. This novel contains some gems, including “The Upholstered Apocalypse” and “The Bonfire of the Volvos”.
I wonder if old J.G. was influenced by that Ikea “Chuck Out Your Chintz” advertisement where blameless suburban women piled their soft furnishings into skips. It’s a small step to imagine them torching it all and dancing around the bonfire in an orgiastic frenzy, a postmodern potlatch.
Or, to take the thought the other way, perhaps Ballard should have been an adman, a copywriter for the heat-death of civilisation.
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