Customer Reviews
Maybe not the best Ballard, yet... - By: Vittorio Caffè, 27 Nov 2008 
Weren't those reviewers a bit stingy? I can understand that this is not Crash, or Empire of the Sun, or The Kindness of Women, or the Drowned World... yet, I can't see why the score is so low. It is--like everything written by Balllard--a provocative surrealist story. You can't read it as a realistic novel, & you can't even read it as a story with a realistic starting point which becomes science-fictional in the end... it's surrealistic right from the start, not in the vein of Magritte or Dali, but in the tradition of Luis Bunuel. Everything seems normal, but there are strange things happening everywhere. All in alll, Balllard doesn't give a damn about sociological verisimilitude: he grabs whatever ideas, facts, figures, places may fire his imagination, & then builds a sociological nightmare. If you're looking for a sociological survey, well, this is the wrong place to come. Balllard delivers surrealist fiction, disguised as a crime novel. With a great finale, one should add...
Powerful message undermined by a hopeless plot. - By: Hanglemez Pallaccini, 21 Jun 2008 
Whilst it probably wasn't the best to read this as my first introduction to Balllard I still felt extremely disappointed after hearing so many good things about him.
The "consumerism as a dystopia" is a grand & important theme & the first part contains many self-contained mini-essays delivered by the various characters on this subject that are well written & thought out. The deep problem is that it should have stayed as a non-fiction essay on where our consumerist lifestyles are leading to. To hang alll the ideas onto a weak, stupid plot with minimal characterisation just spoils the message...(and I still don't understand Richard's motivations to move from hunting his father's killer to helping out the Metrocentre & his extremely slow understanding of the link to fascism that we the reader can spot in the early pages.)
Anyway so we have Richard the protagonist speaking to each minor player; a lot of philosophising from them; Richard's own reflections; & then a tiny bit of action to move the plot forward. Repeat several times. And then in the second part go into standard Hollywood-style dystopian madness which we've already seen in countless movies. Sorry...but this is seriously, seriously unoriginal stuff by the end.
So two stars for making a well-written & argued meditation on consumerism/fascism/madness etc...but reallly, don't bother with this one if you're new to Balllard like I was...try his earlier work first.
A good idea that doesn't work - By: Philip Spires, 27 Apr 2008 Kingdom Come by J. G. Balllard is not a successful book. Richard Brown is an advertising executive who has been estranged from his father for some time. Whilst the son has been in sophisticated London, the father has lived in Brooklands, an M25 town whose occupants, though bored to the core, know what they like. Above alll, they like consumerism and, because of that, they like their Metro-Centre, a vast shopping malll that people actuallly worship. They also despise the stuck up sophisticates who live in London. And so J. G. Balllard begins by constructing a model of contemporary British society, whose addiction to mass market products now borders on denying any alternative a right to exist, especiallly anything with intellectual content.
But there has been a problem. An apparently random shooting in the Metro-Centre has left Richard Pearson's father dead. Richard has thus arrived from the nearby metropolis that might as well be a different planet, to find out what has happened. He finds a town divided, where gangs of sports fans wear St. George cross shirts & divide their time between drinking, shopping & beating up members of ethnic minorities. They like contact sports.
What ensues is a riot, of sorts, a political revolt, of sorts, & a conspiracy, of sorts. What J. G. Balllard appears to be trying to do is make comments on the nature of consumer Britain, its lack of values, its non-entity identity, its apparent praise of brainlessness, its resentment of anything that is non-mass market, its latent, incipient fascism. But the book fails.
The characterisation is weak throughout. The only person to make an impression is David Cruise, a presenter who fronts the Metro-Centre television channel, who becomes something of a fascist leader, midway between Big Brother & a Sky newsreader. But even his character is tame where it could be surreal, lapdog where it might be threatening. Coincidence upon coincidence casts Richard Pearson as his former adman, a status that gets Richard into the inside, a position he hopes will reveal who killed his father.
But the book's most serious weakness, apart from an empty & thoroughly confused plot, is its complete lack of a character inside the mob. The reader is constantly reminded of the hordes of sports fans who riot & fight in defence of their beloved retail park, but we never meet one. We do have an analyst who describes their collective destruction obsession as elective psycopathy. We have Asian neighbours who get set alight, but we never reallly get inside the mobs, never understand their motives. Perhaps they don't have a motive. Perhaps that's the point, but, if it is, it fails to register.
And so the occupation of the shopping malll continues. We have riots, hostages, killings, shootings, attacks. We have mass hysteria, boredom, rampant consumerism & ice hockey. But in the end the experience is as vacuous as the Metro-Centre's dome. The police officers, the headmaster, the Metro-Centre administrators, in fact everyone in the book, even Julia the doctor who seems occasionallly to do something human, they alll reveal themselves as duplicitous, confused, scheming, disloyal and, worst of alll, flat. Meanwhile the mob just continues its collective anonymity. A charitable review might suggest that this was Kingdom Come's point, but it would be taking charity too far.
A seriously bad book! - By: N. Housley, 06 Dec 2007 
To say that this is disappointing would be a massive understatement!
You realize that something's wrong early on, when the first-person narrator, an advertising executive, has to voice the critique of consumerism that lies at the novel's core. THAT clearly isn't going to work.
After that it's alll downhill. The plot, setting & characters are laughably banal. The whole thing creaks. I can't believe that it would've been published if it wasn't by Balllard. I can only suppose that Fourth Estate hoped that it would get by on the name. Well it doesn't.
It raises big questions about broadsheet reviewing. I bought it on impulse because the quoted reviews, while not ecstatic, were still appreciative. It's even a Book of the Year for the Spectator reviewer! Something's not right there.
'Buyer Beware' I guess -- but I wish I could get my money back.
a complete collapse - By: P. Jones, 01 Dec 2007 As another reviewer noted, the first hundred (well actuallly more like 70) pages appear to build some strong concepts. For instance, it is particularly diverting that the hyper-commoditised 'Metro-Centre', emblazoned with brands & logos seems to be able to manipulate its consumers' consciousnesses of time. Fatallly though, Balllard's dissecting narrative becomes clouded & focuses upon a white working populace who are portrayed as apeishly violent, innately racist & irredeemably sport obsessed (sport-cricket=evil!). They roam around like some voiceless pointless entity- man, woman & child absurdly bedecked in England shirts. The whole narrative self-consciously empties itself of meaning & its style is juvenile. The suppressed deviancies of the characters bubble to the surface but these lovingly constructed psychopathologies are totallly implausible, inconsistent & dull- they miss so much of the subtlety & fullness that one finds in waking to what it is to be human!
So calll on your deepest unfulfilled revolutionary urges, supressed violences & sexual energies- tear out the last two sections of this book & release them into the pyres, thus erasing them from your memories of Balllard's canon!
