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they begin to dismantle the “self-imposed burdens” of
civic responsibility and consumer culture. They are led,
as is the psychologist narrator David Markham, by a
charismatic paediatrician, Richard Gould, into attacking
the shibboleths of the middle-class metropolis – the
National Film Theatre, the BBC, Tate Modern – and
then out into the suburbs.
But how seriously do these middle-class rebels take
their claims of oppression? At one point in the book,
there is the suggestion that the residents of Chelsea Marina
might change the street names to those of Japanese
film directors, but this is quickly scotched as it “might
damage property prices…”
It is full too of perverse inversions and unsettling
paradoxes – “Nothing brings out violence like a peaceful
demonstration’ or “If your target is the global money
system, you don’t attack a bank. You attack the Oxfam
shop next door.”
Millennium People describes in part a murder with
strong affinities to the Jill Dando case. “What all these
murders – Hungerford, Dunblane, Jill Dando – have
in common,” says Ballard, “is that they appear to be
meaningless. There are no motives. Dando wasn’t even
a celebrity. It may be that this is their great appeal.
“There are shifts in the unseen tectonic plates that
make up our national consciousness. I’ve tried to
nail down a certain kind of nihilism that people may
embrace, and which politicians may embrace, which
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
is much more terrifying; all tapping into this vast, untouched
resource as big as the Arabian oilfields called
psychopathology.”
Ballard continues to be endlessly engaged in what’s
happening now. And as he says himself, he’s bucked the
trend by becoming more left-wing as he’s got older. He
is particularly disturbed by the apparently motiveless
actions of our Prime Minister and has been following the
“great smokescreen” that is the Hutton Inquiry. “Blair
has this evangelical commitment to what he believes is
right, and he invents the truth when he can’t find it out
in front of him,’ he says incredulously. “I think we’re
living in dangerous times and most people aren’t really
aware of it. They’re worrying about asylum seekers or
abortion or paedophilia…”
Does it get harder the older he gets (he’s 73), to anticipate,
as he’s put it before, the next five minutes?
“I have no shortage of ideas and a peculiar kind of
compulsion to get them down. Not that it makes a damn
bit of difference…”
In what way?
“When you’re a young writer you want to change
the world in some small way, but when you get to
my age you realise that it doesn’t make any difference
whatsoever, but you still go on. It’s a strange way
to view the world. If I had my time again, I’d be a
journalist. Writing is too solitary. I think journalists
have more fun!” �
028
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