Kingdom Come
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3.2 • 5 Ratings
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
‘Anticipates today’s Britain with eerie precision’ Guardian
A masterpiece of fiction from J. G. Ballard, which asks could Consumerism turn into Facism?
A gunman opens fire in a shopping mall. Not a terrorist, apparently, but a madman with a rifle. Or not, as he is mysteriously (and quickly) set free without charge.
One of the victims is the father of Richard Pearson, unemployed advertising executive and life-long rebel. Now he is driving out to Brooklands, the apparently peaceful town on the M25 which has at its heart the shining shoppers’ paradise where the shooting happened – the Metro-Centre. Richard, determined to unravel the mystery, starts to believe that something deeply sinister lurks behind the pristine facades of the labyrinthine mall, its 24-hour cable TV and sports club.
In this, his final novel, Ballard holds up a mirror to Middle England, reflecting an unsettling image of suburbia and revealing the darker forces at work beneath the gloss of consumerism and flag-waving patriotism.
This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard’s works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Ned Beauman, Ali Smith, Neil Gaiman and Martin Amis) and brand-new cover designs.
Reviews
‘“Kingdom Come” is important, germaine, timely and creepy, a tidal wrack of ideas washed up on the artificial beach of our resort culture.’ Will Self
‘As outré as ever, and still as keen to understand the national psyche … Ballard retains a clear-sighted, almost vatic quality’ Spectator
‘As fertile as ever … “Kingdom Come” is impressively packed with brilliant apercus’ Observer
‘Ballard’s vision is scary and utterly real … compelling’ Financial Times
About the author
J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai. After internment in a civilian prison camp, his family returned to England in 1946. His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His controversial novel Crash was made into a film by David Cronenberg. His autobiography Miracles of Life was published in 2008, and a collection of interviews with the author, Extreme Metaphors, was published in 2012. J.G. Ballard passed away in 2009.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With all the attention paid lately to terrorist narratives and novels of suburban malaise, the prescience of Ballard's last novel, receiving its better-late-then-never American publication after six years, will come as a shock even to hardened veterans of the late author's psychosexual parables and visceral sci-fi. This is a pitch-black comedy of consumer fascism hooked to wary hero Richard Pearson, a recently unemployed advertising exec who returns to suburban London to investigate his father's death inside the monolithic Metro-Centre mall at the hands of a machinegun-wielding madman. But something much more sinister is at play, an evil that lurks inside boutiques and car parks, transmitted by commercials that make it seem as if everyone is a suspect except for the killer. Racial violence is on the rise, suburban assassinations and bombings have become as ubiquitous as strip malls, and Metro-Centre looms as a new church awaiting its messiah (or its f hrer?). Pearson goes deep into a bizarre conspiracy that extends beyond mere capitalist critique to a murderous vision of 21st-century Britain. But it is the connections Ballard makes between anti-Muslim violence, elective insanity, and governments complicit with autocratic corporate agendas that make this novel a compulsory read and a wicked masterpiece of postmodern post-9/11 literature, a chilling vision of things as they are.
