JG Ballard, Consumerism and Prophetic Stones

Reading the Book Reviews section of the Irish Times Weekend Review on Saturday and came across review of JG Ballard’s latest novel Kingdom Come, by the IT’s Literary Correspondent, Eileen Battersby. Introducing Ballard’s previous work, she opened the review with the following comment,

“Belief incites war and its atrocities form the stuff of daily news. Yet there is a further evil, equally mindless and potentially even more destructive: the consumerist fantasies that breathe amoral discontent. Leisure is the new danger—it creates boredom and, with it, an idle propensity for random violence. Greed is a tyranny, satisfaction is elusive and probably impossible. The middle class is the new enemy, depraved beyond salvation and prepared to eat itself.”

Ballard is the one, she says, ‘who keeps watch, waiting for increasing horrors to fall from an already polluted sky down on a diseased earth’. Great stuff.

The novel sounds interesting too. In it, the suburbs are presented as the lost frontier, inhabited by citizens whose existence is determined by how much shopping they can cram into the day. The narrator is the story is a former advertising executive who walks away from his agency saying,

‘I had spent my advertising career in an eager courtship of the suburbs…The suburbs, we would all believe to our last gasp, were defined by the products we sold them, by the brands and trademarks and logos that alone defined their lives.’

Sounds a real laugh. And maybe a little too close for comfort. Remember that scene in the Gospels when some people wanted to silence the people from singing Jesus praise, and he said, if I do that, the very stones would cry out? Ballard may be one of those stones, sounding a prophetic voice in a way the church never would or could, perhaps because we’re too sold out.

Maybe.