MILLENNIUM PEOPLE
J.G. Ballard
(Flamingo £16.99)
According to Marx and Engels, one of the key stages in the unravelling of capitalism would involve the proletarianisation of the middle class: tightening economic circumstances would tip the comfortable bourgeoisie into crisis, robbing them of the sense of status and security which is the ultimate badge of their stake in society, thus cutting away their support for the system which had hitherto sustained them.
So what form would a middle-class revolution take? Would the radicalised bourgeoisie blow up the National Film Theatre or the Tate Modern? Picket the BBC? Form enclaves in their communities under banners like WE ARE THE NEW POOR and FREE THE NEW PROLETARIAT? Would disgruntled middle managers, teachers and doctors toss petrol bombs at coppers and bailiffs from behind their burned-out Saabs?
Not quite what George Orwell had in mind back in the 1930s when he attempted to persuade his fellow bourgies that ‘we have nothing to lose but our aitches,’ but this is, more or less, how the inhabitants of Chelsea Marina (well, strictly speaking it’s closer to Fulham) stage their revolt in JG Ballard’s latest novel. The middle classes are mad as hell and they ain’t gonna take it any more. “Cheap holidays, over-priced housing, educations that no longer buy security.. Anyone earning less than £300,000 a year scarcely counts. You’re just a prole in a three-button suit.”
Ballard’s protagonist, psychologist David Markham, is watching the news when he sees reports of a bomb attack on the arrivals lounge at Heathrow Terminal 2. In the TV footage, he sees his ex-wife. Following her death from her injuries — and the suspicion that she might have been one of the bombers rather than simply a victim — he decides to investigate, and soon enters the orbit of radical paediatrician Dr David Gould, Chelsea Marina’s Lenin of middle-class activism. Soon Markham is involved in a steadily escalating campiagn of urban terrorism, beginning — farcically enough — by bombing a branch of Blockbuster.
In a sense, Ballard has been here before: in his 1970s ‘urban’ trilogy. Of those three novels, Crash was the most famous (or notorious — one publisher’s reader, perusing the manuscript for the first time, opined that the author was ‘beyond psychiatric help’) but the others were no less disturbing in rather more subtle ways. In Concrete Island, a motorist goes off the road on London’s Westway, finding himself on a small patch of ground invisible from the road and populated by a small bunch of misfits who’ve accidentally found themselves completely cut off from the bustling world around them. And in High-Rise, the wealthy inhabitants of a luxury apartment block go feral on each other.
From his classic Sixties science fiction through his avant-garde years (remember, this was the author of short stories like The Assassination Of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As A Downhill Auto Race and Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan) and beyond, Ballard has always been fascinated by systems breaking down: the systems of the world which contains us and the systems inside our heads by which we attempt to make sense of that world. In the world of Millennium People (which is, effectively, our own beloved contemporary Blairland), the system which sustains the middle class starts to break down. The inhabitants of Chelsea Marina don’t all sign up to a Trotskyist sect and start selling newspapers on street corners; they go for full-on insurrection, but in an impeccably middle-class way which provides Ballard with the scope for some wonderful satirical strokes at bourgeois manners and preoccupations. “It’s a question of ethnic rivalries,” a Pakistani minicab driver tells Markham. “The people here have their own little Kashmir problem. There’s a dominance struggle between the traditional Guardian supporters and the new middle class from the financial services field.”
Millennium People is as prescient and timely a novel as Ballard has ever written. As ever, his smoothly glacial prose blurs the distinctions between ostensible naturalism and dream-logic fantasising, spiked with coruscating satirical barbs. Age doesn’t seem to have dimmed Ballard’s infallible sense of the psychological truths behind social trends — or anything else, for that matter. It’s a zestily energetic performance, a novel of ideas which, like all great art, tells us more about what’s going on in the world we live in than any number of broadsheet comment pieces. Ballard used to be fond of saying that, as far as a science-fiction writer should be concerned, the only alien planet is Earth and the only relevant future is fifteen minutes away. This particular future seems an awful lot closer than that.
Word, 2003
