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Interview [published January 2004]
J.G. Ballard: Entertaining Violence
Chris Hall talks to J.G. Ballard about Millennium People, the middle classes
and mail order Kalashnikovs
It’s been 70 years since H.G. Wells published The Shape
Of Things To Come but there has been a far more astute
chronicler of our contemporary reality living among us
in the suburbs for more than half a century. J.G. Ballard’s
gimlet eye for the psychopathology of everyday
life has never deserted him. Instead of characters with
emotions, a history and a moral compass, Ballard’s
fictional landscape is peopled with affectless casualties
of the nihilistic, over-mediated consumer landscape,
searching for meaning in a meaningless universe. This
is fiction as biopsy, and its results are devastating.
Millennium People is the last in a trilogy of detective
thrillers – along with Cocaine Nights and Super-
Cannes – to examine what might happen when all
we have left as an ideology is consumerism. “People
resent the fact that the most moral decision in their
lives is choosing what colour the next car will be,” he
says witheringly. “All we’ve got left is our own psychopathology.
It’s the only freedom we have – that’s a
dangerous state of affairs.”
I meet Jim Ballard at the Hilton International hotel
on Holland Park Avenue. “I used to come here a lot
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
because there was a Japanese restaurant called the Hiroku
for many years. It would be impossible to identify
your location,” he says approvingly, looking around
the virtually deserted lounge we’re sat in with its palm
trees and low-level skylight.
Despite reports, Ballard does not permanently reside
in the suburbs – he spends two or three days a week in
London visiting his girlfriend, Claire. “But living out in
Shepperton gives me a close-up view of the real England
– the M25, the world of business parks, industrial
estates and executive housing, sports clubs and marinas,
cineplexes, CCTV, car-rental forecourts … That’s
where boredom comes in – a paralysing conformity
and boredom that can only be relieved by some sort of
violent act; by taking your mail-order Kalashnikov into
the nearest supermarket and letting rip.”
Millennium People begins with a bomb attack at Heathrow
airport, which kills three people. The proposition
of the novel is that “the middle-classes are the new proletariat”,
with the residents of Chelsea Marina, another
gated community of his, so sick of school fees, private
healthcare costs, stealth taxes and parking meters that
027
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