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had apparently gone insane and killed seven very senior
executives. Sinclair says: “It occurred to me that three
of us would sleep together in this large and comfortable
bed, until I could persuade David to step out of my mind
and disappear for ever down the white staircase of this
dreaming villa.” As so often with Ballard’s fiction, a
fusion of inner and outer landscapes has already begun.
Sinclair is amazed to find that, as a psychologist,
Wilder Penrose is prescribing madness as a form of
therapy at Eden-Olympia, which Wilder clarifies for
him: “I mean a controlled and supervised madness.
Psychopathy is its own most potent cure, and has
been throughout history. At times it grips entire nations
in a vast therapeutic spasm. No drug has ever
been more potent.”
Even though to some extent Super-Cannes, like Cocaine
Nights, uses the conventions of a detective novel it
nonetheless contains few of the dead sentences a genre
novel would have. There are no characters crossing the
room to pour themselves a drink – instead they wonder
“how the Reverend Dodgson’s Alice would have coped
with Eden-Olympia. She would have grown up quickly
and married an elderly German banker, then become a
recluse in a mansion high above Super-Cannes, with a
fading facelift and a phobia about reflective surfaces.”
And yet there are passages that are almost parodic of
Ballard’s ‘concrete and glass’ period: “Her hip pressed
against the BMW, and the curvature of its door de-
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
flected the lines of her thigh, as if the car was a huge
orthopaedic device that expressed a voluptuous mix of
geometry and desire.”
Ballard has said elsewhere that whereas the 20th
century was mediated through the car, the 21st century
will be mediated through the home, and as far as
Super-Cannes goes home means work. “The dream of
a leisure society was the great 20th-century delusion,”
says Wilder Penrose. “Work is the new leisure. Talented
and ambitious people work harder than they have ever
done, and for longer hours. They find their only fulfilment
through work. The last thing they want is recreation.”
There are references to the flats and houses of
Eden-Olympia as service stations “where people sleep
and ablute”. The real home is now the office.
It’s not quite correct to say, as some have, that Super-
Cannes is a companion piece to Cocaine Nights though
both take place within gated communities of one kind or
another and both involve on a superficial level a naive
narrator trying to solve a mystery. It’s more that some
of the ideas in Super-Cannes are taken further than they
are in Cocaine Nights. Ballard is unapologetic about
this new employment of detective genre conventions
saying that if it’s good enough for Dostoevsky in The
Brothers Karamazov it’s good enough for him.
With his last two books one feels that he is reaching
a new, younger audience – one perhaps attracted by the
drug reference in the previous novel – and he obviously
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