Product Description

Violent rebellion comes to London's middle classes in the extraordinary new novel from the author of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60368 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-07
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The peasants, goes a tedious old joke about Wat Tyler's mob, are revolting. In JG Ballard's unnerving, prophetic novel Millennium People, however, it's the middle classes that are staging the revolution: blowing up the NFT, burning their books and defaulting on their maintenance charges. Rejecting, in short, everything that they've worked so hard for--The Bonfire of the Volvos, as one rather droll chapter heading has it.

At the forefront of this petit bourgeois insurrection are the occupants of Fulham's Chelsea Marina, (as ever with Ballard) an exclusive housing community. Led by the charismatic Dr Richard Gould, a disgraced paediatrician turned "Doctor Moreau of the Chelsea set", Marina residents Kay Churchill, a former film lecturer; civil servant Vera Britain and Stephen Dexter, the parish vicar and an injured airman (another Ballard perennial) have unleashed an arson campaign against targets deemed suitably middle class.

David Markham, a psychiatrist and the book's steely narrator, is drawn into the Marina's inner circle after his ex-wife Laura is killed in an apparently meaningless bomb attack at Heathrow airport, (prime Ballard territory, of course). Meaningless is the insistent motif: Markham's current wife Sally was crippled in a freak accident and the murder of a banal if inoffensive television presenter (loosely modelled on Jill Dando) is one of the seemingly random violent acts unleashed by Gould, precisely because of their apparent randomness. "The absence of rational motive", as he says, "carries a significance of its own".

A master of sustained unease, Ballard has again excelled in fashioning a gripping, psychologically disturbing novel, that, like High Rise or Super-Cannes, is part cultural analysis and part surreal social prediction. --Travis Elborough

Joan Bakewell, Observer
'Ballard does a great job at subverting a familiar urban landscape... He manages to capture the mood of tomorrow.'

Sunday Telegraph
'Full of delightful touches'

Customer Reviews

Excellent
If you like Ballard's themes of what happens when polite society breaks-down then you'll love this book - if you don't ... then you won't!

I loved it. Excellent stuff.

The dinner party disaffected
This book was based on a ridiculous premise, namely that the middle classes, spouting the same psycho-babble with which they have fuelled many a post-party conversation, rise up from their Sloane heartland and declare themselves the "new proletariat". Their "charismatic" leader in this revolt, wandering amongst asylums of disabled children, doling out a healthy spot of paedophilia along with his toys, is neither charismatic and engaging, and his disciple, the book's protagonist, seems more bored than involved. How he manages to jump from weary onlooker to "chief co-conspirator" is never explained, and his mere four meetings (even the FSA did better for Northern Rock) with this doctoral great leader inspire little vigour into the proceedings. The prose is laboured and repetitive, and the rhetoric of revolution reads with the slow drawl of the disaffected dinner party revolutionary - unconvincing and unfelt. I felt like I was reading an extended short story, which repeated itself out of an inability to say anything new, but was, like the inebriated evening guest, unaware of its position as chief drone.

Pretentious and dull
This is among the worst books Ive ever read. I couldnt follow the plot,and the language was over pretentious and unexciting. I have heard alot about J.G. Ballard but he is highly overrated and dull.