This was the first thing I wrote about Ballard, and may have got me yesterday’s Waterstones interview.
It was published in the Guardian.
As you’ll see, I’m a lot less respectful of Ballard than I would soon become.
What do I feel about this now?
A bit ashamed. I was playing the critical young writer. That was the brief, as I understood it — not more veneration.
Millennium People still reads to me as a deliberately comic take on Ballard’s earlier self. It’s not where you’d suggest anyone start with his books. And would rank fairly low down in most fan’s Top Twenty Books.
But, as with Kingdom Come, it has aged well. Most Ballard seems to do that. Perhaps something to do with the unmodish stiffness of his prose.
What he built, he built to last; what he wanted to crash, went up with a bang.
Although J.G.Ballard’s is the only name on the spine of Millennium People, this, his sixteenth novel, reads very much like a collaboration. One of the co-writers is unmistakably Ballard:
‘We set off for Hammersmith… Gould lay back, gazing at the single-storey factories, the offices of video-duplicating firms and the lighting arrays of unknown stadiums. This was his real terrain, a zone without past or future, civic duties or responsibilities, its empty car parks roamed by off-duty air hostesses and betting-shop managers, a realm that never remembered itself.’
Although Ballard’s first novel, The Drowned World, was published just over fourty years ago, even then the peculiar rhythm of his sentences was already set. They swing back and forth, from clause to clause, in a regular and dignified way, between action and metaphor. Often, however, the metaphor is where the real action is taking place.
By the time he came to write the novels of the seventies, Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise, Ballard had settled in to his own ‘real terrain’, a dreamy, slow-motion London of motorways, airports, hospitals – all transit zones of one sort or another. It was as distinctive a fictional territory as Graham Greene’s Greeneland.
So distinctive, in fact, that when he returns to it in Millennium People, the reader feels a sense of familiarity bordering on the cosy. But another writer seems to be accompanying him on this journey to the past, and they have quite a different character. The easiest thing would be to describe this second writer as conventional. Ballard has often been content to let his novels exist in a mesmeric stasis, where obsessive compulsiveness stood in for character development, and routines were more likely than revelations. The conventional writer, however, doesn’t feel secure without all the benefits of a conventional plot. And so the action of Millennium People begins with David Markham’s ex-wife, Laura, being killed by a bomb at Heathrow airport. This type of mini-catastrophe – most often a car-crash – has initiated many of Ballard’s previous novels. Markham, who narrates the book, begins his own private investigation of who planted the bomb. In doing so, he is drawn into a strange underworld. He makes surprising discoveries about those he thought he knew well; he finds unexpected allies in those he most suspected. All of which could easily happen in a conventional crime novel or TV drama.
Yet, being co-written by Ballard, this advancing plot has already been undermined. On the first page there is a synopsis of almost all the rest of the novel:
‘Even I, David Markham, a trained psychologist infiltrated into Chelsea Marina as a police spy – a deception I was the last to discover – failed to see what was going on. But I was distracted by my unusual friendship with Richard Gould, the hard-working paediatrician who was the leader of the revolt – the Doctor Moreau of the Chelsea set, as our shared lover, Kay Churchill, christened him.’
This is a fast-forward parody of Ballard’s usual schema. And it is the over-the-top self-parodic elements of Millennium People which provide some of its greatest pleasures.
Ballard has often set his stories up as a dialogue of seeming opposites. In The Drowned World it was contemporary London submerged by Triassic period flora and fauna. In Crash it was the automotive and the autodestructive. In Millennium People, it is the not-so-petty bourgeoisie and the revolutionary proletariat. ‘This,’ as Markham puts it, ‘is Kropotkin with pink gins and wall-to-wall Axminster.’ The use of middle-class props for acts of civil disobedience is a running-joke throughout the novel. ‘Banners hung from dozens of balconies, sheets of best Egyptian cotton from Peter Jones, gladly sacrificed for the revolution.’ Luckily, it’s a very good running-joke, and it culminates in a stand-off with the police at the Chelsea barricades. ‘Chortling toddlers were lifted into the air to give them a better view and, more to the point, expose them to the breakfast TV audiences…’ The police are shocked, but as Markham observes, ‘any social group that would exile its offspring to the deforming rigours of boarding-school life would think nothing of exposing them to the hazards of an exploding bonfire.’
Yet the reader may be slightly confused as to whether it is Ballard or the conventional writer who is in charge here. Ballard has often been funny but that amusement has tended to issue from a particularly wry and very English despair. At one point in the book a group of protestors outside a cat show begin to chant, ‘Moggie! Moggie! Moggie! Out! Out! Out!’ It’s hard to imagine the author of Crash going for as cheap, and straightforwardly silly, a gag as that.
As the novel progresses, an escalating series of terrorist acts takes place in which Markham is sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly involved: a video-shop is attacked, the NFT is torched, Tate Modern is bombed. The high-point is reached when a blonde female TV presenter ‘both famous and a complete nonentity’ is executed on her doorstep. Again, there is a strange collaboration between the old Ballard, who in Crash involved Elizabeth Taylor in a fantasized car accident, and the conventional writer, who takes the real-life murder of Jill Dando and vaguely fictionalizes it. The most important difference is that the conventional writer runs along after events whereas Ballard has seemed, often unnervingly, to have been predicting them.
Much of the fun of Millennium People, and it is one of the most amusing novels I’ve read in a long time, comes from watching as the world finally catches up with Ballard and as Ballard, wryly, reacts. If part of him has become a conventional writer it’s because the world has adopted the conventions that he so idiosynractically established. Whereas before his attitude was It’s the end of the world as we know it, he’s now seen that he had been proved right right and so has added what, for REM, was the pay-off (And I feel fine). He gets to make serious points throughout, putting a virtual Ballardian manifesto in Richard Gould’s mouth: ‘People don’t like themselves today… We tolerate everything, but we know that liberal values are designed to make us passive… We’re deeply self-centred but can’t cope with the idea of our finite selves. We believe in progress and the power of reason, but are haunted by the darker sides of human nature. We’re obsessed with sex, but fear the sexual imagination and have to be protected by huge taboos.’ But, come the end, the amusing middle-class revolution is put firmly and conventionally back in its predestined box: ‘Nature had bred the middle class to be docile, virtuous and civic-minded. Self-denial was coded into its genes.’