Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17252 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-02
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Mail on Sunday
'Kingdom Come is full of sharp insights into a world where people
live in 'an eternal retail present'.'

The Times
'Funny, chilling and prescient, this is certainly a novel whose
message no one can afford to ignore.'

Literary Review Literary Review
'J.G. Ballard is the undisputed laureate of suburban psychosis...a
brilliant novel.'

Customer Reviews

Powerful message undermined by a hopeless plot.
Whilst it probably wasn't the best to read this as my first introduction to Ballard I still felt extremely disappointed after hearing so many good things about him.

The "consumerism as a dystopia" is a grand and important theme and the first part contains many self-contained mini-essays delivered by the various characters on this subject that are well written and 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 all 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 and 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; and 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 and argued meditation on consumerism/fascism/madness etc...but really, don't bother with this one if you're new to Ballard like I was...try his earlier work first.

A good idea that doesn't work
Kingdom Come by J. G. Ballard 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 all, they like consumerism and, because of that, they like their Metro-Centre, a vast shopping mall that people actually worship. They also despise the stuck up sophisticates who live in London. And so J. G. Ballard 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, especially 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 and divide their time between drinking, shopping and beating up members of ethnic minorities. They like contact sports.

What ensues is a riot, of sorts, a political revolt, of sorts, and a conspiracy, of sorts. What J. G. Ballard 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 and 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 and 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 and 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 really 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 mall continues. We have riots, hostages, killings, shootings, attacks. We have mass hysteria, boredom, rampant consumerism and 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 occasionally to do something human, they all reveal themselves as duplicitous, confused, scheming, disloyal and, worst of all, 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!
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 all downhill. The plot, setting and characters are laughably banal. The whole thing creaks. I can't believe that it would've been published if it wasn't by Ballard. 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.