J.G. Ballard: Millennium People

Reviewed by STEPHEN JEWELL

It could be said that if you have read one J.G. Ballard novel you have read them all, but to say so would be to miss the point.

Most of the novels the 73-year-old Shepperton resident has written over 40-odd years, from his early science fiction such as The Drowned World and The Drought to his most recent contemporary novels such as Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, revolve around a somewhat naive but curious English protagonist who is drawn into a shady, dangerous world by a charismatic but malevolent authority figure, who is not what they seem.

In Millennium People, the lead protagonist is David Markham, a psychologist whose world is turned upside down when his first wife, Laura, is killed by a terrorist bomb at Heathrow Airport.

The senselessness of Laura's death drives a wedge between the obsessive Markham and his current wife, Sally, who, in shades of Crash, has long since recovered from a horrific car crash but still wields her crutches like fetishistic badges of honour and drives a car specially altered for the disabled.

Perhaps as a reaction to the hostility and rancour that greeted David Cronenberg's 1996 film of Ballard's most famous and infamous work, Crash, much of Millennium People echoes that novel as the characters interact against the eerie no man's land of London's motorway network and multi-storey carparks, while many vehicles also meet fiery fates.

Markham is drawn him into the shadowy enclave of Chelsea Marina, a luxurious Thameside estate whose residents are protesting against everything from maintenance charges to parking fines.

The marina's spiritual leader, Dr Richard Gould, a deranged paediatrician whom Ballard describes as "the Dr Moreau of the Chelsea set" takes Markham under his wing, submerging him in a deadly game of terror which includes the bombing of the National Film Theatre and the assassination of a famous television personality, which is obviously based on the real-life murder of Jill Dando.

Millennium People is the third novel in a thematically linked trilogy which includes Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, but it is the weaker of the three.

Gould is not as strong a nemesis as the psychotic likes of Super-Cannes' Dr Wilder Penrose or indeed Crash's Vaughan and he plays too peripheral a role in what is one of Ballard's less thrilling plots.

Unfortunately, Ballard's middle-class-revolution concept often verges on the wrong side of parody, such as when Markham attends a demo at a cat show, while the politeness of the Chelsea Marina's civil disobedience also means that the reader never really fears for the characters.

But while Millennium People is a gentler trip into Ballardland, it is still a literary excursion worth taking.

Publisher: Flamingo

Price: $34.99