An advertising executive’s father is murdered in an apparently random shooting in a shopping mall in Brooklands, a suburb near the M25. He then discovers that sinister forces are at work and that nothing is as it seems.
‘Kingdom Come’ is an exploration of themes – or, more accurately, obsessions– mined in JG Ballard’s three preceding novels, ‘Cocaine Nights’, ‘Super-Cannes’ and ‘Millennium People’: the deep, unconscious interrelations of gated communities, consumer capitalism, boredom and violence.
To say that Ballard repeats himself is to miss the point. His terrain is ‘the next five minutes’ and the imagery he uses – the drained swimming pools, abandoned hotels and so on – reinforces the idea that reality is a stage set onto which the furniture of our minds is projected.
‘Kingdom Come’ fuses an absurdist, seer-like imagination with a humdrum, but nevertheless dystopian, mise en scène. The effect is characteristically unsettling. Ballard’s satire of consumerism is hammered home with brute force, and several haunting phrases linger in the mind. ‘Nothing is true; nothing is untrue.’ ‘Madness is the only freedom.’
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