The Edge Online - Reviews: JG Ballard

Super-Cannes
JG Ballard
Flamingo hardback, 392 pages, £16.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (2000)

‘I just don’t want to die without a few scars, I say. It’s nothing anymore to have a beautiful stock body. You see those cars that are completely stock cherry, right out of a dealer’s showroom in 1955, I always think, what a waste.’ (Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, 1996)

Paul Sinclair and his bright young wife Jane are motoring south, to France, to the gated high-tech business park of Eden-Olympia, situated just above the decadent Rivera splendour of Cannes. He is recovering from a plane crash, she a go-getting doctor called on to replace the unfortunate David Greenwood, former community physician who ran amok with an automatic weapon, leaving a trail of high profile corpses in his wake. They are welcomed by resident psychiatrist Wilder Penrose to this ‘ideas laboratory for the new millennium’, but very soon Sinclair starts to question the vision. He witnesses random beatings on the eerily unsullied streets, evidence that the official report into Greenwood’s death is concealing the truth.

Too often JG Ballard’s fictions have been, if not actually ignorant of politics, then at the very least dismissive. Its intrusion into his corpus has been as infrequent as his own pronouncements: the odd mention of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher as iconographic – merely a sense of celebrated being – more than for their ill-conceived evils. It seems fair, in the absence of contrary evidence, to assume Ballard belongs, either consciously or unconsciously, to a tradition of warm beer and the thwack of leather on willow: in-bred cosy conservatism. All of which has, curiously, never seemed to matter before. Ballard’s fiction – the limits of his described purlieu – existed at the very least outside of – arguably even parallel to – the one the rest of us inhabit. The participants of Ballard-space do not vote, shop at Tesco or spend their evenings in front of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? They are supported by social and economic structures that allow the infestation of their lives with Grander Themes. Doctors, architects, pilots: professionals. Ballard space is one of idea, not character. And it is not (with the notable exception of his last great book, The Kindness of Women) one encumbered with emotional baggage.

And yet as we slide into the new millennium this rejection of what, for want of a better word, we will call normality seems quaint and old-fashioned. Ballard has always written of a world that is more corporate than democratic, and yet, at a time when the essential tenets of democracy themselves seem at greater risk than ever before – a time when we might expect Ballardian fiction to come into its own – his vision of Eden-Olympia is too rooted in a real past to engage the narrative. His descriptions of the hi-tech park conjure up images of the Bloomsbury shopping centre Antonioni used in The Passenger (1975). There is the heady whiff of Betamax futurism. Here is a vision of the Brave New World that seems to have been bodily torn from Space 1999.

Ballard’s vision is too parochial. Whereas before he would have been inclined to take the psychopathological into the outside world – cruising the sexual super highways of Crash, for example – his tendency to retreat to these gated communities (signalled previously by Running Wild) demonstrates a fear of the world that some, with no little evidence, suggest is increasing xenophobic. Super-Cannes engages only with itself, whereas Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club – and the comparison is anything but invidious, the two sharing a personal-violence-as-social-solution philosophy – attempts to engage the world. Palahniuk’s vision is viral; Ballard’s as airless and privileged as an English public school.

Fight Club, therefore, offers things at an extreme; a Crash for the new age. Super-Cannes could have been written anytime in the last thirty years. The best it offers, in contrast to Palahniuk’s pugilistic anti-everything, is ‘a carefully metered measure of psychopathology. Nothing too criminal or deranged.’ The transgressive as parlour game, as palliative. A startlingly quotidian reality indeed. The text is riddled with Ballardian shibboleths: ‘Going mad is their only way of staying sane’; ‘Controlled and supervised madness. Psychopathology is its own most potent cure’; the vaguely fascistic, ‘Work is the new leisure.’ Eden-Olympia is immediately labelled ‘among the most civilised places on the planet . . . open to talent and hard work . . . You feel anything could happen.’ Later, that they’ve ‘gone beyond leisure . . . beyond morality.’ Guards ‘are for show, like the guides at Euro Disney.’ ‘Everything is possible at Eden-Olympia. That’s its raison d’être.’ Just like the previous Cocaine Nights. Continuing our Gallic theme, that nagging tingle in the back of your skull is déjà vu.

More than anything, though, Super-Cannes is a betrayal of the work Ballard pursued previously, particularly in his consensual urban trilogy (Crash, High Rise, Concrete Island) of the early 1970s: it is a book with villains. And worse, Super-Cannes is a novel with victims. It is as though, as his years advance, he has either moved to embrace convention or, worse, allowed convention to sweep across him like an advancing tide. The participants of Crash in particular move, through the intervention of the violent act, into that parallel reality, a Twilight Zone: Ballard space. They embrace a new pathology that Ballard’s greatest creation, the ‘hoodlum scientist’ Vaughan, instigates. Crash is a book that invites us into its polymorphous perversity to such an extent – through its dislocating narrative, its adoption of textbook prose to circumnavigate the automobile, the physical psychology of the car accident, the technical absolutism of sex – that the subversion of its message is absorbed almost by default. If we are morally and socially susceptible (read: free) we go wherever Ballard chooses to take us. And – here lies its genius – it’s no free ride. It was that joyfully joyless completeness that David Cronenberg so brilliantly captured in his film; that makes the film as dangerous as they told us it was.

Super-Cannes, on the other hand, is a book that operates too close to conventional detective fiction. Yes, in the opening paragraph Paul Sinclair tells us he will kill Wilder Penrose, but far from a subversion of convention, all Ballard does is rearrange the pieces on the board; he is not fucking with the rules. There is something ineffably safe in signalling checkmate before the game even begins. He offers us, as our American cousins might say, closure. Which is to say that, as an attempt to shock us, he creates arguably his most cosy fiction to date. (Contrast it with Crash’s dislocating gambit of announcing Vaughan’s demise at the outset.) The writing here is lazy, glib, solipsistic. (You cannot hope to continually end a chapter with an ellipsis and not be noticed, Mr Ballard.) Similarly, kiddie-fiddling is now such a staple of contemporary crime fiction (especially British crime fiction) that to see an author of this standing not only visiting those shores but wading ashore with a lazy Alice in Wonderland metaphor to boot is dispiriting.

Dispiriting but somehow typical of a book that seeks to use convention with no sense subversion at its heart. Either Ballard has read a handful of clumsy crime novels and attempted an ugly pastiche, or else he has somehow hatched from within his own head an entire riot of its most obvious cliché. Either way, Super-Cannes is an ugly book. It is ugly in its perfunctory plotting, in its wafer-thin characterisation (the Daily Mail would be proud of its non-white players), and even in the sheer quality of Ballard’s prose. Over the course of a long career he has developed a pleasingly gelid descriptive style born of the technical (the textbook as narrative model), but Super-Cannes is riddled with lurid third rate airport thriller crassness. There is the occasional flash of inspiration (a Mercedes that is ‘as black and impassive as the Stuttgart night’; a flare that ‘hung in the sky like a melting chandelier’; fur that has every hair ‘as vibrant as an electron track in a cloud chamber’), but much of this dialogue-driven novel (and he never has been able to write dialogue) is turgid indeed.

But all to be expected in a novel work inhabitants are the most banal of libertines; their misdemeanours lurk, furtively quaffing Martini, behind battle-lines defended since the 1960s: voyeurism, lesbianism, sedate drug abuse, child prostitution. Ballard’s notion of the transgressive is as dated as Eden-Olympia itself; an old man’s spike-heel Helmut Newton fantasy. Super-Cannes describes a world in which Crash the film (let alone the book) never existed. There is nothing here that cannot be – as Jane ultimately demonstrates – walked away from. Nothing is at stake. What it cries out for is a vision more akin to Palahniuk’s capitalist/self-help culture gone sour – the rebel as American psycho – or, at the extreme, Pasolini’s Salò, that downward spiral of Boschian debauchery and degradation. A film, as Gary Indiana notes in his recent book, that stands as: ‘the very model of life as most human beings have known it in the 20th century, a metaphor of feudalism as reinvented by the multinational corporation, the military coup d’état and the mediation of all reality via the symbolic.’

Super-Cannes, by contrast, is vestigial, both to contemporary literary fiction and, worse, the Ballard canon. The 21st century should have been made in his image but here hangs on him like an ill-fitting suit. With this novel, regrettably, JG Ballard has written himself into redundancy.