Millennium People - Softcover

Ballard, J. G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006551610 ISBN 13: 9780006551614

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2014

Synopsis

Violent rebellion comes to London’s middle classes.

As he searches for the truth behind the Heathrow bomb that killed his ex-wife, psychologist David Markham infiltrates a shadowy protest group based in the comfortable Chelsea Marina. Led by a charismatic doctor, it aims to rouse the docile middle classes and to free them from the burdens of civic responsibility. Soon Markham is swept up in a campaign that spirals out of control – as the cornerstones of middle England become targets and growing panic grips the capital.

This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard’s works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Martin Amis, Ali Smith, Hari Kunzru and China Miéville) and brand-new cover designs.

About this title

Review:

The peasants, goes a tedious old joke about Wat Tyler's mob, are revolting. In JG Ballard's unnerving, prophetic novel Millennium People, however, it's the middle classes that are staging the revolution: blowing up the NFT, burning their books and defaulting on their maintenance charges. Rejecting, in short, everything that they've worked so hard for--The Bonfire of the Volvos, as one rather droll chapter heading has it.

At the forefront of this petit bourgeois insurrection are the occupants of Fulham's Chelsea Marina, (as ever with Ballard) an exclusive housing community. Led by the charismatic Dr Richard Gould, a disgraced paediatrician turned "Doctor Moreau of the Chelsea set", Marina residents Kay Churchill, a former film lecturer; civil servant Vera Britain and Stephen Dexter, the parish vicar and an injured airman (another Ballard perennial) have unleashed an arson campaign against targets deemed suitably middle class.

David Markham, a psychiatrist and the book's steely narrator, is drawn into the Marina's inner circle after his ex-wife Laura is killed in an apparently meaningless bomb attack at Heathrow airport, (prime Ballard territory, of course). Meaningless is the insistent motif: Markham's current wife Sally was crippled in a freak accident and the murder of a banal if inoffensive television presenter (loosely modelled on Jill Dando) is one of the seemingly random violent acts unleashed by Gould, precisely because of their apparent randomness. "The absence of rational motive", as he says, "carries a significance of its own".

A master of sustained unease, Ballard has again excelled in fashioning a gripping, psychologically disturbing novel, that, like High Rise or Super-Cannes, is part cultural analysis and part surreal social prediction. --Travis Elborough

Review:

‘Unsettling and subversive ... terrifically good’ Sunday Times

'Terrifying and strangely haunting ... A riveting work from a writer of rare imaginative largesse, a bearer of bad tidings, unforgettably told' Daily Telegraph

'Wonderfully warped, blackly comic ... written with Ballard's customary panache, its potent mix of sex, violence and radicalism will keep his fans happy’ Economist

‘Ballard’s instinct for the future is unnerving ... Very few writers possess this kind of intelligence: to use it with such wit is almost criminal’ Independent on Sunday

‘The terrifying thing about Ballard is his logic; is this science fiction or history written ahead of its time?’ Len Deighton

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0006551610
• ISBN 13: 9780006551614
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320