J G Ballard: The ciabatta revolution

A matter of months ago, only a stone's throw from the novelist J G Ballard's home in peaceful suburban Shepperton, Army tanks rolled past on their way to Heathrow airport following warnings of an imminent terrorist attack.

For the writer, whose work is so often concerned with the dark and violent forces created by the shape of modern life, it was a striking moment; it also showed that the themes of his latest novel, Millennium People (Flamingo, 15th September, £17.99, 000225848X), had been prescient.

Ballard's new novel--following Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, both of which earned him renewed success in the trade, attracting a new generation to his work and swelling sales--is a tale of terrorist attacks creating havoc in the heart of London. Arson wrecks the National Film Theatre and a bomb brings carnage at the bookshop in Tate Modern.

The main character is a psychologist, David Markham, whose first wife has been killed in an anonymous terrorist attack at Heathrow. Desperate to identify those responsible, Markham sets out to infiltrate fringe groups agitating in the capital, and becomes drawn into a seductive group of middle-class revolutionaries led by a shadowy guru, Dr Richard Gould.

Appalled at their numerous burdens, from parking charges to a deadening cultural environment, the revolutionaries set about releasing themselves from the straitjacket of civil responsibility and foment unrest from their book-lined rooms on the suburban estate of Chelsea Marina.

Ballard, now in his 70s, is a benign and hospitable presence in his modest Shepperton semi, where his living room is adorned with Father's Day cards from the children, now grown up, whom he brought up alone following the tragically early death of his wife.

Yet despite this tranquil familial scene, his work has lost none of its power to disturb: Millennium Nights dissects a society without purpose, in which a population is numbed by an infantilising culture and invigorated only by the appeal of violence--which, as in Ballard's most controversial novel, Crash, first published in 1973--also has an erotic dimension.

The novelist describes his works as "guidebooks to the present". "I'm very interested in change," he muses, his voice distinguished by something of a languorous drawl. "When I first came to England just after the war in 1946--[he had been interned in a Shanghai prison camp with his family, a horrific experience which he explored in Empire of the Sun]--I was very conscious of the fact that this country desperately needed change. It was stuck in the past in a really rather sad way."

In the following decades, tremendous alterations took place: "the first motorways, the first supermarkets, the first package holidays, business parks, gated communities; the whole kind of new suburbia, where I live--which is not a suburb of London, but of London airport. England has changed enormously, it has gone through several revolutions, and a new kind of psychology is emerging. That's what I'm interested in."

If the idea of the middle classes in revolt produces a certain note of perverse comedy in Millennium People--with Twickenham located as the new "heart of darkness", while the act of buying an olive ciabatta takes on the resonance of a political statement--the oppression of the middle class is an idea Ballard takes very seriously. He insists that the idea of a middle class in revolution against their own exploitation is far from being a preposterous notion.

"I never poke fun at the middle classes--which would be very easy to do; I take their resentment at the way things have turned out seriously. I hope the reader will share the anger my middle class protesters feel about the way they have been used by society."

The sense of civic responsibility which is a defining attribute of the class has been taken for granted, Ballard argues. "A sort of compact was agreed in the middle of the 19th century: the middle class was offered security, a certain status, a salary that could provide a comfortable lifestyle, and in return they gave willingly of their commitment. That compact has broken down now, and it's rather ominous.

"You've got a new class of super-rich--mostly in the City of London, but not just there--and they have already begun to distort social life in London. Now with the rise in house prices, they are driving the salaried middle class out of London."

In Ballard's dark vision, acts of terrorism are less a political act than a psychological compulsion. The novelist is occupied with what it is within our own society that prompts seemingly meaningless acts of violence, whether it is the killers who fire randomly into crowds of strangers--a phenomenon which can be dated fairly precisely to America in the 1960s--or apparently irrational acts of violence such as the murders of John Lennon or Jill Dando.

"Al-Qaeda is a fairly recent phenomenon, but of course we had the IRA for 30 years and numerous other terrorist groups--the animal liberation activists who set bombs off in laboratories and under the cars of scientists," he says.

"I am interested in whether there is something in the air we breathe that encourages a very small minority of people to carry out violent acts of terrorism, I won't say as a cry for help, but as an act of last resort-- an act of desperation.

"There's a huge hole in the middle of modern life, as we live in a meaningless world, frittering our time away in pointless travel, and living in an entertainment culture that means nothing."

Benedicte Page