This is my third novel but British author J.G. Ballard. Super-Cannes is a "luxury enclave on the heights about the Croisette". It is a story about Europe's silicon valley, a world set apart from the rest of Riviera. Everyone works, no one plays, and that is where it all goes wrong. In this Eden where the gods of Olympus can do anything they want, things go wrong. Dr Jane and her injured pilot husband take a temporary position there and are soon sucked in to the "waiting madness" of Eden-Olympia. As is typical in Ballard novels, there are roads, planes, autos, buildings, parking ramps. There are also swimming pools with dust on the water. The book has the feel of a thriller, a science fiction/fantasy novel but really isn't one. Some futuristic look at disease and infection, need to social distance, the electronic record and the monitoring of health by big business. On the other hand, the book has violence, sex, drugs. ( )

Anyone who's read say, half a dozen Ballard novels could probably identify this as such from the first paragraph. A first paragraph that stayed with me through-out the book. Indeed I re-read it twice, once at about the 1/3 mark and once right after finishing the book.

One is rapidly led to believe that this novel deals with all of Ballard's normal tropes; medical doctor characters, nutters, aviation, social microcosms, veneer of civilisation which is easily ripped away. In the case of one of these, though, one is being mis-led, which makes the book more interesting. Instead of pulling a Lord of the Flies re-set (see High Rise, Concrete Island, Rushing to Paradise) here the characters, despite all working in a giant science park on the French Riviera, do not lose their connections to the outside world completely - at least not physically, making the book more realistic than say, High Rise, where everybody inexplicably chooses to give up work and never leave their middle-class tower apartment block home. Most of the characters still behave like a-moral aliens or depraved loonies, however. This seems to have been one of Ballard's core beliefs; we're all just pretending to be sane until we can get to a situation where we don't have to pretend anymore. I don't really buy it.

There's a murder mystery at the core of the book, which provides a narrative drive sometimes absent with Ballard. Who did what and why seems to be pretty much wrapped up by about half way and then the book meanders for about 100p before further revelations wind things up again for a denouement that is quite satisfying, particularly the very end.

If there's a real antagonist in this book, it's the psychiatrist, Wilder, who's views are disturbing. I immediately reacted against them; this must be wrong! But I had to stop and seriously think things through to see where the error was hidden. A novel hasn't made me do that since Starship Troopers. It's one of those scary philosophies all the more dangerous and superficially plausible because there is just enough truth mixed with the insanity.

Ballard is such a hit-and-miss writer. High Rise was an unmitigated disaster, Rushing to Paradise is a bull's eye, this is somewhere between. More interesting for being a believable setting, more readable for its use and subversion of murder-mystery trappings, clever in the character arc of the protagonist, but suffering still from being too much of a re-tread of Ballard's basic themes, never-the-less worthwhile. ( )

The problems with this book are:

* it's a real nothing-burger. A few things happen in a sea of alienation
* it's all about alienation, in the same way that porn is about 'doing it'. Every scene has to divolve into some alienated pastiche.
* I guessed, roughly and correctly, what was going to happen at the start.
* nothing really happens.
* there's a kinda approval or you-know-you-like-it approach to sex with 12, 13 year old kids collected in orphanages which is kinda off and off-putting. No, that's actually not my cup of tea. Another layer of alienation
* oh, kinda justified open racism, violent beatings of immigrants "Paul, it really is for the best" which is riske', but lame.

There is a good 'citizen sleuth' thing, and the alienation is attractive, but not nearly enough. Like having to eat only Chinese food for a week.

( )

“Representative democracy had been replaced by the surveillance camera and the private police force.”

This novel revolves around a gated capitalist paradise, Eden-Olympia. Eden-Olympia, with its ornamental ponds, sports centres and cafes, is a hi-tech business park nestling in the hills above the French Riviera, home to the new elites of major multi-national companies like Siemens and Mitsui etc. Its inhabitants, monitored by surveillance cameras and guarded by the complex's own security force, have no need or time to interact with the larger community. All that matters is the accumulation of wealth, work and company profits have eclipsed the need for play.

Into this capitalist paradise arrives an ex-RAF pilot and his wife. Paul Sinclair is recovering from injuries to his knees sustained in a botched aeroplane take-off where he was the pilot whilst his wife Jane is a youthful paediatrician with a taste for the occasional recreational drug. Jane is to replace David Greenwood, a doctor who some months earlier had rampaged Eden-Olympia with a rifle killing 10 people before dying himself himself. Because of his injuries, Paul finds himself with plenty of free time on his hands which he increasingly spends alone due to Jane's burgeoning work schedule. Smelling a conspiracy Paul, an prompted by resident psychiatrist Wilder Penrose, turns sleuth trying to uncover why David Greenwood, whom his wife knew back in Britain as a mild mannered doctor, turned mass murderer.

As Paul delves under the skin of Eden-Olympia he discovers a serious programme of violence, designed and promoted by Penrose, to counteract executive stress in which Arab pimps and Senegalese trinket merchants are left bleeding in the gutters and robberies committed. Sinclair is appalled by the criminality he uncovers but also feels a grudging admiration of the rationale behind it and finds himself unable to inform the Police or tear himself away.

This is a well crafted novel and the action progresses at a good clip meaning that the reader ends up caring for Paul and willing as he sinks further into this murky other world that he will not only wake up and come to his senses but also actively do something to halt it it's expansion. Twisted Penrose is a well written villain, an "amiable Prospero", the anti-hero of this insular little world, viewing the encouragement of baser instincts as an engine to drive the arts, sciences and industries of the world who treats those around him almost as clockwork toys, to wind-up then sit back and revel in the havoc that they cause. On the whole I really enjoyed it yet it also missed that little something that would have made this a really good read. ( )

A wonderful novel, oozing with millenarian angst and chock-full of Ballard’s favourite icons, played from his deck like tarot cards – the Grounded Pilot, the Closed Community, the Unhinged Doctor, the Sexy Car-Crash – with the theme, as always, having to do with the dark poles of eros and thanatos lurking just beneath the veneer of human society.

The plot involves Paul Sinclair, a former airman recovering from a plane crash, who accompanies his young wife Jane to an ultramodern business park on the French Riviera, where she is to work as an on-site physician. Paul gets drawn into uncovering the mystery surrounding Jane’s predecessor, who went on a killing spree and murdered ten people before being killed himself.

At first the place seems paradisiacal, full of rich happy people like something from the 30s – ‘a vanished world of Cole Porter and beach pyjamas, morphine lesbians and the swagger portraits of Tamara de Lempicka’. But something is very wrong at the Eden-Olympia complex: in each tiny, everyday detail there is an undercurrent of cheap sex, casual violence, sickness. (It is very Lynchian in that sense: god I wish Lynch would film this.) ‘Over the swimming pools and manicured lawns seemed to hover a dream of violence,’ we are told at one point; but often the hints are more subtle and unnerving. Innocuous body parts become creepy and upsetting as Ballard describes them:

My exposed big toes unsettled her, flexing priapically among the unswept leaves.

I love this sentence so much. It makes me laugh at how ridiculous it is, while also making me shudder because it works. There is more lurking menace when Paul and Jane arrive at their new home:

The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.

—Actually let me just stop there for a second so we can appreciate that admirable sentence. Doing a lot of work, isn’t it! Direct but efficient. Ballard goes on:

Reflections from its disturbed surface seemed to bruise the smooth walls of the house. The light drummed against Jane’s sunglasses, giving her the edgy and vulnerable look of a studio visitor who had strayed into the wrong film set.

The reference to the movie business is an example of Ballard’s tendency to choose his similes and metaphors from the realms of modern technology and celebrity culture. The world of Super-Cannes is not natural but rather scientific, medical: a flag flutters ‘like the trace of a fibrillating heart’, the sea is ‘smooth enough to xerox’, every hair on a fur stole is ‘as vibrant as an electron track in a cloud chamber’, crowds of tourists clump around the shop-fronts ‘like platelets blocking an artery’.

This is only the third or fourth Ballard novel I’ve read, but I’ve never enjoyed his cold, efficient prose style more than I did here. Some writers explore themes; Ballard dissects them, using a scalpel. Like his main influence, William Burroughs, and his main disciple, Will Self, Ballard sees social problems as a matter of pathology: sexual perversion for him is about psychosexual dysfuction; casual violence is about clinical psychopathy. This medicalisation can make for an eerie worldview, but it gives you some descriptive passages you wouldn’t get from any other writer. And for once, I genuinely cared about the characters here – I was really rooting for Paul and Jane to get out in one piece.

As well as being a mystery story, this is a stonking novel-of-ideas, and the main idea is this: if the modern world is making us all less sociable and more atomised, what might the psychological consequences be? Because the madness and violence at Eden-Olympia are intimately tied to the erosion of community that Ballard sees around him:

People find all the togetherness they need in the airport boarding lounge and the department-store lift. They pay lip service to community values but prefer to be alone.

Or again:

The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.

I’m not sure I entirely accept Ballard’s thesis, or his speculation that ‘meaningless violence may be the true poetry of the new millennium’; but then I don’t think he does either – it’s thrown out there as a way of working with the issues. Watching him at work, scalpel in hand, is disturbing, thought-provoking, and enormously enjoyable. ( )