Microdoses of Madness

ALEX CLARK Acclaims the sinister
corporate creation of JG Ballard
with his book, Super-Cannes

Super-Cannes
JG Ballard
392pp, Flamingo, £16.99

It is tempting to see Ballard as the seer of Shepperton, the self-styled suburbanite who carves out grim dystopias of technology, corruption and perversion from the safety of the sofa. Or indeed as the child internee of Empire of the Sun, who transforms every social space into a prison in which savagery is the necessary corollary to survival. Neither of these descriptions is particularly untrue, but in Super-Cannes - in many ways a companion piece to Ballard's previous novel, Cocaine Nights - we might identify the author of other kinds of fiction, the detective novel, the tender travelogue and the supremely subtle parody also jostling for attention.
The hero of Super-Cannes is a typically Ballardesque character, the ex-RAF pilot who finds himself cut asunder from modern life and stands on the sidelines patiently attempting to unravel its message and find the key to his own alienation. But the novel also has a powerful anti-hero, the sick psychiatrist Wilder Penrose, whose description on the first page as an "amiable Prospero" fits his creator equally well. Penrose is the Lord of Misrule who presides over his territory with unnerving sang-froid, winding up his charges then fondly regarding the havoc they create.
Penrose's "ideas laboratory for the new millennium" is the grandly named Eden-Olympia, a monstrously hi-tech business park nestling in the hills above the French Riviera which plays home to the new elites. Here, absorption in work has eclipsed the need for play, and the ornamental ponds, sports centres and cafes that landscape the complex stand deserted as the executives of Siemens, Mitsui and Unilever move silently from glass-fronted office buildings to sleek chauffeur-driven cars. Social life, in its broadest sense, has been dispensed with, and there is no place among the smooth planes and surfaces for the church, the council house or the police station. Monitored by surveillance cameras and guarded by an under-employed security force, the community polices itself; all that matters is the quiet accretion of wealth and the dedicated pursuit of commerce.
Into this capitalist paradise glides an antique Jaguar bearing Paul Sinclair - an aviation buff deprived of his pilot's licence and the use of a knee following a bungled take-off - and his wife Jane, a youthful paediatrician whose bolshieness and taste for the occasional recreational drug marks her out from the beginning as a character likely to end up in trouble. Indeed, their arrival - ushered in by a beaming Penrose - is already tainted; Jane is to replace David Greenwood, a clinician who some months earlier had rampaged through the cool green spaces and mirrored offices of Eden-Olympia, taken a rifle to 10 people and then slaughtered himself. Becalmed by the curse of enforced leisure - "a new kind of social deprivation" - and intrigued by the teasingly casual response of the business park's senior personnel, Paul sniffs conspiracy and turns sleuth.
The remainder of the novel is vintage Ballard, a gripping blend of stylised thriller and fantastic imaginings rendered in deceptively bland, unruffled prose. One of its virtues lies simply in its compulsive readability; as the story unfolds, the reader is engaged at the level of pure plot, infected by Sinclair's quest to penetrate the mystery behind Greenwood's "dance of death". Yet Ballard's flair for the surreal and the sinister dictates that neither Sinclair nor the reader will remain untouched by the world they behold. For Sinclair, the process of collusion with the criminality that underlies life at Eden-Olympia begins early, with a cheery piece of vandalism on Penrose's car and a sexual fillip after his wife shoplifts a copy of Paris-Match.
"It's irritating to be reminded of the contingent world", remarks Penrose as he outlines his plans for the "intelligent city" he is creating. At first sight, that intelligence takes the form of advanced health screening, up-to-the-minute gadgetry and the replacement of the civic by the commercial. But as the novel progresses, his vision is seen to be far more concerned with the accommodation and encouragement of baser instincts. "A controlled psychopathy is a way of resocialising people and tribalising them into mutually supportive groups," he explains in defence of the violent "special actions" carried out by the bowling club. "The consumer society hungers for the deviant and unexpected - psychopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the arts, sciences and industries of the world."
All the best madmen make a certain kind of sense, and Penrose's development of homeopathic violence - "microdoses of madness like the minute traces of strychnine in a nerve tonic" - holds Eden-Olympia in a "state of undeclared war", its occupants beguiled into an inhuman and unnatural state of hyper-effectiveness. Ballard's grotesqueries also hold the reader in their sway, thrown into relief by the lovingly evoked ambience of the old Riviera and a vanished cultural life hinted at by references to Saint-Exupéry and Graham Greene. That world is gone, replaced by identikit versions of Silicon Valley reproducing themselves across the globe, self-contained communities free to create their own morality. It is a form of madness that only madness can combat, and as Paul Sinclair sinks further into his own "dream of death", the reader can only just cling on to the hope that he will wake up.

Source: The Guardian