A LIFE IN FULL

Introduction

The dog beneath the skin ; What has the modern world done to the human
soul? What is technology - cars, cities, television - doing to our
behaviour? These are the constant concerns of J G Ballard, in whose
work shocking, sudden violence is never far away, a warning of our
species' atavistic nature. JOHN WALSH meets our leading literary seer
to discuss his new novel, `Millennium People'

You catch sight of the novelist J G Ballard as he stands on the
pavement in west London's fashionable Holland Park Avenue, peering
suspiciously at the Pay and Display machine. Generously girthed and
jowled, hair worn long and sleek like a Cromwellian puritan's,
jauntily dressed in a summer jacket and pink-patterned tie, he looks a
decade younger than 73. He and the machine regard each other with
blank hostility, just as Ballard had regarded the ever-more-
sophisticated Western world with dislike and awful warnings,
throughout his career.

He was born in Shanghai, where he witnessed the turmoil of the
Japanese invasion during the war (as documented in the novel Empire of
the Sun) and came to the Blitzed and rubble-strewn England in 1946. He
studied medicine but turned more and more to writing in the 1960s. His
first works were science fiction stories, but after 1962, he wrote a
series of apocalyptic novels portraying the world beset by natural
upheavals - The Drowned World, The Drought, The Wind from Nowhere.
Later he came to address various blank and soul-destroying features of
the modern world, from skyscrapers (High Rise) to city planning
(Concrete Island) to man's twisted relationship with automobiles
(Crash, controversially filmed by David Cronenberg). His most recent
books have explored the territory of super- sophistication and its
effect on the human soul: in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, both
alarming hybrids of detective story and Awful Warning, he portrays the
inhabitants of business parks and high- tech enterprise zones, places
where both work and leisure are regimented, as driven to acts of
violence and insanity.

The nation's most vividly imaginative literary seer and scourge of
complacency, Ballard lives in Shepperton. His exuberantly radical new
novel, Millennium People, goes further and portrays the middle-
classes of London in the act of rebellion - bombs at the BBC, arson at
the NFT, murder at Tate Modern and the inhabitants of Chelsea Marina
refusing to pay their council tax. From St John's Wood to Richmond,
bourgeois insurrection hits the streets. Molotov cocktails are
fashioned from bottles of vintage Burgundy filled with petrol and
stoppered with regimental ties...

JOHN WALSH: Your last couple of books were both about the human spirit
asserting itself in a nightmare world of blandness. How much of a
departure is the new book?

J G BALLARD: I'm not sure it is a departure. The previous books,
Cocaine Nights, set in Spain, and Super-Cannes, set in south of
France, were at arm's-length from where I live in south-east England,
whereas the new one, Millennium People is set right where I live. It's
not about expatriates living on the Mediterranean. It's about my own
people, the English middle class, having to cope with the world of
2003 and not liking it. For the first time, they're refusing to accept
the unwritten contract into which their class entered about 150 years
ago, when their ancestor formed the first great British bureaucracies.
And they're rebelling simply because they feel ruthlessly exploited.
It's something we'll very conscious of today. Look in the papers and
you see polls of doctors - one of the great pillars of society - in
which 50 per cent of doctors would like to do something else, would
like to give up medicine. Not 5 per cent, but 50. There's a huge
dissatisfaction in this country, across the board.

JW: Isn't there something inherently a bit ridiculous about writing
about radical extremists at a cat show, people firebombing Blockbuster
Video and saying things like: "This is hard-core. From now on,
ordering an olive ciabatta is as political act".

JGB: [Laughs]. Well, I hope there's a lot of humour in it. The trouble
with my humour is, it's very deadpan. What I try not to do when
writing is to poke fun at the middle classes - they're such an easy
target. I don't want to become a dime-store satirist. There's no
satire in this book at all. The middle-class complaints that are
levelled at society by the characters are things I take seriously.
Take the case of my own daughters, for instance. One works for the BBC
and other worked for many years for the Tate Gallery. Almost all their
after-tax salaries went to pay for the nannies and child- care,
without whom they couldn't have gone out to work at all. There they
are, trapped in this circular bind. Both are well paid in real terms,
both earn much more than I earned as a parent with young children, but
they're up against a society that has de-privileged the middle
classes.

JW: Some of the characters claim "the middle class is the new
proletariat". Do you think there's a germ of truth in that?

JGB: Yes indeed. They have no job security, just as the old
proletariat did not, they have an education that doesn't equip them
for anything much, like the old proletariat getting a craft skill
that's no longer needed.

Fifty years ago, if you had a degree, it guaranteed you a job for
life, in middle management or in the civil service - so long as you
didn't seduce the office manager's wife, you were safe. You'd never be
sacked, and you'd enjoy a slightly higher standard of living than the
great mass of the people. That's not true any more. A degree doesn't
guarantee you a job for life. It's about as valuable as a diploma in
flower-arranging. All the privileges that came the way of the
middle-class salariat have been lost. More and more, they can't afford
private education, they can't afford private medical treatment - they
can't enjoy these status symbols that used to be conferred on the
middle classes. So my book envisages middle- class dissatisfaction
reaching crisis point - when they reach that moment where you start
overturning cars.

JW: The bourgeois revolutionaries in your book - what are they
protesting about, beyond the school fees and the delicatessen culture?

JGB: Many of the people I envisage living in the Chelsea and Fulham
estates, they've talked through their grievances and come to
conclusion that the middle classes have been brainwashed. First by the
BBC, with its old Reithian values of education, enlightenment and so
on, then brainwashed by their middle-class education, which is just a
means of turning out people who are docile - a cowed bureaucracy that
is going to run society and the professions - and they resent that
docility. They see even something as innocuous as Tate Modern as a
sort of middle-class disco, designed to anaesthetise any real
aesthetic challenges that might occur to them and fob them off with an
emasculated version of modernism - which was revolutionary in its day,
and challenged everything that the then middle classes held most dear.
Now it's just another disco tune. They've thought about their own role
in society, and they realise they're an exploited class just like the
old working class. The new proletariat. And you start to feel the
ground shaking under your feet.

JW: How much of it is a kind of warning for the future?

JGB: My children are in their mid-40s. They're going to cope, as you
and I are going to cope. But one looks ahead. I look at my
grandchildren who'll be adult in 15 to 20 years' time, and I wonder -
how're they going to cope? Because then a house in London, even a
small two-up-two-down in Acton, is going to cost a million quid.

JW: I understand that the cheapest one-bedroom flat in London now
costs pounds 130,000. That's beyond the reach of anyone earning less
than about pounds 27,000. So the chances of most people in their early
20s buying property are very slim ...

JGB: Absolutely. The salaried middle classes are being pushed out.
It's already happened in Manhattan, where middle-class professionals
like teachers and accountants have been pushed out to the suburbs, to
Brooklyn and Queens. Only the very rich or very poor are left actually
living in Manhattan. The same will happen in central London.

JW: In Millennium People, a character very like the television girl
Jill Dando appears as random killing. She's described as having
"developed a persona of good-natured blandness and therefore had no
enemies". But in your terms, the persona of blandness is precisely
what people can't stand and that's why she was killed. Are you
commenting on the cult of celebrity - the elevating of uninteresting
people whom we're told we should admire but don't?

JGB: Well, it's all part of the con, isn't? Part of the whole project
of turning us into docile, uncomplaining wage-slaves. Everything's
designed to be bland, homogenised, user-friendly. As someone says in
the book (and I've used it before, I know, but it's a slogan I'm going
to keep pushing) the totalitarian regimes of the future will be
ingratiating, subservient. No longer will it be Orwell's vision of a
boot stamping on a human face. We'll have something highly subservient
and ingratiating, where the tyranny is imposed for our own good. We
see it all the time.

JW: You do? Here? In modern England?

JGB: Here in London. Ken Livingstone's Orwellian congestion zone is an
example of just that. It's for your own good, cutting down the numbers
of cars so you can get about more. Everything's for our own good. The
new totalitarians come forward, smiling obsequiously like head waiters
in third-rate Indian restaurants, and assuring us that everything is
for our benefit, everything's been thought out very carefully. And of
course we fall for it - if we're middle class, we think everyone is as
responsible as ourselves. So one gets this smiling tyranny, which is
something my characters rebel against.

JW: But why did you want to have Jill Dando in the narrative?

JGB: I don't. I never mention Jill Dando. I hardly know who she is, or
rather was.

JW: Vapidly pretty young women who ran a holiday programme and looked
a bit like Princess Di.

JGB: The whole entertainment world we inhabit is a tyranny of blandness.

One reason why the Big Brother series were so popular is that for a
few weeks, people briefly got a glimpse of what reality was - a whole
lot of louts lying scratching themselves, and looking bored. This was
genuinely something new. You were never allowed to see Jill Dando
looking bored, though I'm sure she was a lot of the time. People who
make these programmes screen out anything that might threaten the
viewer.

JW: You used to claim that you stayed in Shepperton because it gave
you unique insights into what middle-class England was up to. Do you
meet doctors and lawyers in Shepperton who are capable of doing
something violent? That's the big difference isn't? Because the
real-life middle classes aren't capable of a rebellion. They aren't
really going to start overturning cars and running riot ...

JGB: That's because it's been bred out of them. The ability to resist
physically has been bred out of them. You can, though, find a
surprising number of middle-class professionals resorting to violence
when they join fringe protest movements. There's a whole spectrum of
middle-class protest groups - animal rights, Neighbourhood Watch
groups, anti-hunt demonstrators, anti- abortionists, Green
campaigners, you name it - where the middle- classes are heavily
involved and are prepared to do violence, even to the extent of
putting bombs under the cars of animal experimenters. And I suggest it
would only need a turn of the screw before you'd get an explosion of
the kind I describe in this book. It's not that far-fetched.

JW: All the stuff about "the proletariat" - are you now, or have you
ever been, a Marxist? Did you go through a Marxist phase when you were
young?

JGB: No, John, I went through a Marxist phase when I was older.
Actually I've just read The Communist Manifesto for the first time. A
very powerful piece of work, I'd recommend it to anybody.

Very sharp. Written about 150 years ago and feels like it could have
been written yesterday.

JW: But did you believe in a revolution as an inevitable thing, in
which the working class would take over?

JGB: When I was young, I did. When I was a student.

JW: Did you study politics at university?

JGB: No, I read medicine. And like most students, I was left- wing, I
could see that Clement Atlee's post-war government was bringing about
some much-needed changes to this country. I first came to England in
1946, as a 15-year-old boy. I took one look at England and didn't like
what I saw... We'd virtually lost the war. That's what it looked like.
Looking around, you saw a class-ridden society, in which everything
was cold and worn out and didn't work. The institutions didn't work.
If it was going to change, we needed a crash course in change, we
needed to Americanise the place.

But we didn't. Corelli Barnett, in his book The Audit of War, argues
that the British wasted the aid they received from America after the
war on rebuilding the infrastructure - new housing, now town centres,
new hospitals - instead of ploughing the money into new industries, as
the Germans, the French and the Italians were doing, re-tooling car
plants and the rest of it. With the result that, once they'd recovered
from the war, they had all these brand new factories, while in England
we had nothing but lots of brand- new housing, shopping precincts and
factories that went back to the Stone Age.

JW: There are so many landscapes of disillusion in your work. You seem
to have a positive fetish for business parks in which nobody used the
leisure facilities. Manicured lawns, immaculate but deserted swimming
pools, empty expensive gymnasia, play areas with no children ...

JGB: I rather like all that stuff. Give me an abandoned hotel or a
drained swimming pool any day ...

JW: ... so I wondered if you have an ideal landscape, in the town or
the countryside, in Britain or abroad. Of course, some of your
characters are distrustful of abroad, and see tourism as a kind of
pabulum for the masses. Do you share that view?

JGB: Yes, they see tourism as part of this brain-washing process. It's
a sort of vast soporific. It's like Valium for a mass audience.

JW: But is there nowhere you can find an authentic landscape today, a
town perhaps that's hung on to its own identity?

JGB: Nowhere. It's all gone. It's all over.

JW: Mind you, I've seen shopping centres in Antwerp that are
indistinguishable from shopping malls in Croydon or Gateshead ...

JGB: No, it's all part of a universal phenomenon. "You can travel from
London to Tokyo in the air-conditioned comfort of our corridors" as
the advertisements say. It's just a vast marina complex with Autotels.
shopping malls, airports, perimeter roads, car-hire franchises, all of
them just rolling round the planet. That's all there is.

JW: Come now, surely there's some fields in Dorset or Wiltshire or the
Highlands of Scotland where you can look at the view and say, "Look -
it's still there. This is still recognisably and truly England"?

JGB: Yes, well, if you can get into them. They're probably owned by
some investment company in the Cayman Islands, and they've probably
got - not in this country yet, but they soon will have - men in
Range-Rovers with pump-action guns, keeping you out. I think that
[heavy pause] that part of the human story is now complete - the story
that's been running since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The
Industrial Revolution has run its course. It's consumerised the
Western world and a large part of the Third World. And now it's over.

JW: You mean, we can't get any more sophisticated than we are now?

JGB: It's hard to see how. I don't know if you've read Samuel
Huntingdon's book on the clash of civilisations. He sees the West in
slow decline and the core civilisations of Asia, Islam and China are
rising to a point where they may confront a declining West, in open
military combat. Assuming that it won't happen, things will carry on
as they have done for the last 50 years, and everything will be turned
into, say, Monte Carlo. Have you been there? It's totally dedicated to
expensive shopping. You go to these gallerias and walk past a great
temple to ultra-expensive watches, and then another to ultra-expensive
clothes. It's quite incredible - you see the future of the human race
there. There's a particularly big galleria, which never has anyone
inside it. It's five or six floors of cool, scented air, with no one
in it. I thought to myself - is this supposed to be Heaven? And I
realised that, no, it's not Heaven. It's The Future.

JW: So we're all heading for a future with no people in it?

JGB: Look at this lounge we're in [at the Kensington Hilton Hotel].
Everything aspires to the condition of those gallerias in those
high-priced enclaves in Monte Carlo, or Palm Springs, or Miami Beach -
or certain suburbs of Tokyo for all I know. Once everyone achieves an
imitation of that shopping world (and it won't be the real thing, it
will be just a simulacrum that they can afford) - well, what then?

I believe that, in a totally sane society, madness is the only
freedom. I think people will turn to bizarre religions, or odd strains
of psychopathology or retreat into the Internet, immerse themselves in
some weird forms of pornography that they don't feel sexually
attracted to at all.

JW: What do you mean?

JGB: Reading horrific cases of paedophile sex and accounts of
policemen and others who've been accused of downloading child porn
onto their PCs, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe they're not even
sexually aroused by this stuff. People may be drawn to bizarre forms
of sexual fantasy in the way they're drawn to bizarre forms of
religious fantasy. They don't actually believe in this peculiar god,
but assuming a posture of belief gives them something that they can't
get from a shopping mall. Maybe the human race will lean in that sort
of direction. It suggests a rather scary future ...

JW: When 11 September broke - what did you think? The central idea of
taking the most sophisticated technology of a society and using it
against itself - it seemed a very Ballardian concept ...

JGB: It certainly took me surprise. Like everybody who saw it, I felt
stunned by pity for the people who were lost, but then I had this odd
feeling that we were looking at something conjured up from our
innermost destruction fantasies. This was a scene that had been
rehearsed again and again, in US comic books and disaster movies,
images of skyscrapers, and aircraft flying into them. Whether
intentionally or not, the 11 September hijackers were using our own
deepest dreams of self-destruction against ourselves. As if a
blueprint had been laid down: this is the way to attack the West, by
using its own fantasies against it. Play on these infantilising dreams
and you'll destabilise them, and derail their psyches. It's an attack
on sacred things. It's rather like finding that Micky Mouse and Alice
have VD, that Snow White has a nasty little complaint. Is nothing
sacred? It's these deep myths that sustain the Western imagination
that are under challenge. Crashing two planes into skyscrapers in the
heart of the American capitalist system, and bringing them down so
easily, was enough to shock American into launching a couple of nasty
wars. Had plane Number Four succeeded in hitting the White House, I
really believe America would have gone nuclear. You can see there's an
unconscious need on the part of the present American government to
nuke the rest of the world. They started with Afghanistan. But they
won't be satisfied. You can see they're already lining up the French.
[Laughs].

JW: For being part of "Old Europe"?

JGB: "Old" has a special sort of echo or vibration, doesn't it, and
it's not a good one. You don't want an old car, you want a new one,
not an old fridge, you want a new one. Saying "old" means: Junk it,
get rid of it, replace it with a new model. But as I was saying, 11
September, in addition to the enormous human tragedy, was a raid on
the collective unconscious of the Western mind. If you look at old
newsreels of the Blitz, the wartime German bombing of London, you feel
compassion for the Eastenders and, although the scene looks
apocalyptic, you know that it isn't. It's just war, it's what happens.
This is war, but that's all there is. But if you look at the 11
September footage, you feel something quite different inside your
brain - a kind of tremor.

JW: Remember the footage of the plane as it headed for the second
tower? It was banked over at an angle then suddenly it straightens up
to crash head-on into the building - as if the pilot was thinking,
"Whoops - nearly missed it". The idea of those human hands adjusting
the controls just a an inch or two ...

JGB: Or it's like watching a video game in an arcade ... Very scary.

JW: If one were to ask about literary antecedents, are you more a
George Orwell or a William Golding? Golding thinks that human nature
will always conspire to screw things up. Orwell would argue that it's
human society organising a system that screws things up. Are we more
screwed up by ideology than by our own flawed selves?

JGB: I feel close to Orwell. But we're strangers in a strange land. We
humans weren't designed to sit around in the lobby of the Hilton
hotel, or to fly on package holidays to the Seychelles. Hundreds of
thousands of years of biological programming weren't designed to end
in nothing more significant than a bar code. It's in our nature to be
extremely combative. It's probably in our nature to be unhappy...

JW: I thought you believed that our combative, warlike genes had been
bred out of us.

JGB: Not all of them. I think they're still there. We still are
incredibly warlike. Our potential for violence is enormous. In my
book, the character Richard Gould, the doctor who is basically my
mouthpiece, takes the view that nothing in life has any meaning. He
says that things we most value, like love for children or spouse, are
programmed into our genetic codes like nest-building in birds, and
that we can't take credit for them. Nothing, he says, has any meaning.
The kinds of meaning we like to ascribe to the universe don't stand up
to scrutiny. It's only completely meaningless acts that can answer the
universe in its own terms. And therefore, meaningless acts are all we
can do to make sense of anything. Like killing the TV entertainer in
the book is a meaningful act, by virtue of the fact that it's
pointless. What I'm saying is, there are no answers. But maybe that is
the answer.

JW: As a writer, how would you characterise the present government?

JGB: Six years ago, people elected a man who was, frankly, a very
personable hotel greeter. You know? Walking across the carpet of a Las
Vegas Hotel, greeting the slightly nervous tourists from Cleveland or
Milwaukee who aren't quite sure what's in store for them. Saying:
"You're all going to have a great time. The taps don't work in the
rooms? Don't worry. We're dealing with it ..."

People realised six years ago, in the first Labour term, there was no
way they could have a better health service, better schools, less
crime, better transport, without paying higher taxes. The only way you
could bridge that gap was through PR. And they had the perfect PR man
in this very likeable, quite handsome man with his wife and 3.2 kids,
driving a People Carrier. He seemed like a guy who paid the mortgage
bills and worried about the schools and the rest of it. He was their
kind of guy - and they voted for him. They know only PR could fill the
gap.

Unfortunately, the gap has got wider over the last six years. People
feel that hospitals are slightly worse, and the schools, the transport
system's broken down, and the PR is stretched to breaking point. The
problem from Blair's point of view is that one little tear and the
whole thing will unzip. The trouble is, there's no alternative.
Nobody's going to vote for Iain Duncan Smith.

JW: Of the first government, all you can remember is a huge fuss about
foxhunting. Of the second, all we will remember is a long row about
weapons of mass destruction. It seems to be the politics of
distraction ...

JGB: I think going to war with the Americans revealed an unseen side
of Blair, the evangelical side. It was a damned strange thing to do,
to take this country into war. It revealed a vulnerable side. His
subsequent behaviour - well, he's suddenly started smiling again, like
a child who's caught out setting fire to the bicycle shed, and has got
away with it for a bit, but knows the day of reckoning is going to
come. Something very strange is going on in Blair's psyche. There's
something going on, inside his head.

JW: What do you make of Cherie as a psychological phenomenon?

JGB: They're a very strange family, aren't they? A psychoanalyst I
know thinks she's profoundly depressed. I don't know if that's true or
not. But what we see is a big effort to look a cheerful, normal and
happy prime minister's wife. But in fact, she's this deeply depressed
woman who needs constant attention and sympathy.

JW: Is all your visionary stuff, the writings about social collapse
and the human spirit - does it all come from the boy you once were,
standing there in Shanghai aged eight of nine, and watching the world
collapse? Or was it from the business of coming to England and finding
everything destroyed?

JGB: I think our characters, our personalities, are set at an early
age. Probably by the time we're 10, our world views are virtually
hard-wired into our brains. Coming to England in 1946 was the biggest
shock. Not just the physical dereliction, but the social and mental
dereliction, the class system collapsing like an old country house.
Nothing worked. None of the institutions and traditions worked any
more. The monarchy was ludicrously top-heavy; it took half a century
to self-destruct. You can't go through a war as a child without it
having a big effect on you.

But maybe I've just got that sort of mind. If you're not brought up in
a place, you always go on seeing it afresh every day. I think I still
do. I've been living in Shepperton for 43 years, but I look out of the
window every morning and think, "This place is a bit odd - what's
going on?" m The first chapter of J G Ballard's `Millennium People'
appears on page 28

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