Millennium People - Softcover

Ballard, J. G.

3.37

2,663 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007173059 ISBN 13: 9780007173051

Publisher: Flamingo, 2003

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Violent rebellion comes to London’s middle classes in the extraordinary new novel from the author of ‘Cocaine Nights’ and ‘Super-Cannes’.

When a bomb goes off at Heathrow it looks like just another random act of violence to psychologist David Markham. But then he discovers that his ex-wife Laura is among the victims. Acting on police suspicions, he starts to investigate London’s fringe protest movements, falling in with a shadowy group based in the comfortable Thameside estate of Chelsea Marina.

Led by a charismatic doctor, the group aims to rouse the docile middle classes to anger and violence, to free them from both the self-imposed burdens of civic responsibility and the trappings of a consumer society – private schools, foreign nannies, health insurance and overpriced housing.

Markham, seeking the truth behind Laura’s death, is swept up in a campaign that spirals rapidly out of control. Every certainty in his life is questioned as the cornerstones of middle England become targets and growing panic grips the capital...

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of 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:

‘Wonderfully warped, blackly comic...written with Ballard’s customary panache, its potent mix of sex, violence and radicalism will keep his fans happy. “Millennium People” is at once deadly serious and slightly ridiculous – and somehow all the more unsettling for it.’ Economist

‘Much of the fun of “Millennium People” – and it is one of the most amusing novels I’ve read in a long time – comes from watching as the world finally catches up with Ballard and Ballard, wryly, reacts.’ Guardian

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

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.