Kingdom Come

I've been driving to work for nearly a year now. The one thing I do miss about this, compared to taking the train, is that it really cuts down the amount of time I have for reading. However, much to my surprise, this is really the only downside for me. I don't know why I have spent over 20 years putting up with the overpriced, unreliable service provided by greedy operators and their surly, unhelpful and often downright rude staff. Whatever anyone will tell you about the misery of commuting by car, it is nothing compared to the appalling, soul-destroying alternative.

But I do miss my books. Over Christmas, I took the opportunity of catching up with some reading and even made a (now very occasional) loan from the local library. For this choice I went for JG Ballard's Kingdom Come. I must admit to liking the odd bit of dystopian fiction and have read the likes of Anthony Burgess and George Orwell in the past. JG Ballard is one of the major writers of this genre but I had only ever read his semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun before now. I thought I'd give one of his more typical books a go and Kingdom Come was the one the library had in.

Kingdom Come was Ballard's last novel - I hadn't realised that he had died until he popped up on one of those end-of-year lists of people who had kicked the bucket. I gather from the reviews I've seen that this was not one of his best and I can see what they mean. The basic premise of the book is actually quite interesting - in the early 21st century social cohesion has broken down to the point that consumerism is the only reality in peoples lives, backed up by supporting sports teams which have no connection with the local community and are merely consumer fodder themselves - much like the English Premier League. Consumerism has, in fact, become a new form of fascism with St George's Flag shirted sports fans as the new brown-shirts - taking out their frustrations on South-Asian and Eastern European migrants.

This is a really interesting premise and would have made for a fantastic short story, but the problem is that the narrative through which the story is told is just not that gripping in itself. The best dystopian stories usually make their point by telling the story of a pawn or minor character - think of Winston Smith in 1984. The main protagonists in this story appear to have been added in to flesh out an essay on the emptiness of consumerism. That, in itself, would have been worthwhile but for the purpose of story telling it would have been more enlightening to see this told from one of the St George shirted football hooligans or from the Bangladeshi family living in fear of them.

Even so, I thought that Ballard managed to capture a world that did not seem that far away from the one we live in and that is the basis for any good dystopian story - take the trends of the modern world and exaggerate them into a foreseeable near future. On that basis I'd be more than happy to dig into Ballard's past catalogue and see what neurosis he has to offer.