Ballard & Coupland
Mark Greene explores Ballard’s and Coupland’s very different responses to consumerism and random violence.
Woe, woe, thrice woe to the middle-aged, middle class!
How their trust has been abused! How their law-abiding civic sensibilities have been exploited! And how the deal has changed! Promised in their youth that there would be a good education and free university for their children, a responsive health service, a secure pension and the expectation of not having to pay to park in their own high streets – what is left?
Worked to the point of exhaustion, trapped between the whip of a highly insecure job-market and the vice of high mortgages wherever there is a decent school, angry about the spectre of their graduate children starting working life £15K in debt, anxious about the health service, furious that they will have to work till they are 70 to afford to be able to retire at 65, and apoplectic that they are charged 20p to park within 600 yards of their local newsagent, how long before this poisonous potion leads to civil unrest?
Not long, according to one of Britain’s most prescient writers, J G Ballard, whose new thriller Millennium People explores what he perceives to be the rising resentment and disillusion of the British middle classes.
And about that he isn’t wrong. As a glimpse of the BBC’s engaging Grumpy Old Men series demonstrated. A lot of people, particularly men between 35 and 55 are very fed up indeed with the double standards of a society of gargantuan superficiality – railing against male desire whilst dressing six year olds like pole-dancers, complaining that the British male is ill-dressed while criticizing those wearing anything remotely stylish for trying to look young… and so it goes on. And on. A culture without a heart. Was this really what we all wanted to create? How, we wonder, did it get so out of control, so unlike the easy going, leisure oriented, enlightened community we were promised. Indeed, as Wilder Penrose in Ballard’s previous novel Super-Cannes points out:
“The dream of a leisure society was the great 20th century delusion. Work is the new leisure. Talented and ambitious people work harder than have ever done, and for longer hours. They find their only fulfillment through work. The last thing they want is recreation.”
Ballard has long been the vivisector of consumer culture, exploring how consumerism’s insatiable lust for our money is forced to proffer ever darker pleasures to our psyches to lure us into subservience.
Again in Super-Cannes, Wilder Penrose comments:
“The consumer society hungers for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that will keep us ‘buying’? Psycopathy is the only engine powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the arts, sciences and industries of the world.”
Consider for a moment how much darker and more sexually explicit advertising has become in the last decade – not only about heterosexual sex but homosexual sex and transvestism. Consider how much more obsessed with the bizarre and the deviant magazine covers and late night chat show trailers have become. Degeneration has its own momentum – to remain alluring sin must grow darker.
Not that Ballard’s prophetic glimpse into a very near, more violent future restricts itself to the merely material or the sexual. On the contrary, his point is that the collapse of the material deal will lead the middle classes to see just what an empty life they have been suckered into accepting. As one character puts it:
“People don’t like themselves today. We’re a rentier class left over from the last century. We tolerate everything, but we know that liberal values are designed to make us passive. We think we believe in God but we’re terrified by the mysteries of life and death. We’re deeply self-centred but can’t cope with the idea of our finite selves. We believe in progress and the power of reason but are haunted by the darker sides of human nature. We’re obsessed with sex, but fear the sexual imagination and have to be protected by huge taboos. We believe in equality but hate the underclass. We fear our bodies and, above all, we fear death. We’re an accident of nature, but we think we’re the center of the universe. We’re a few steps from oblivion but we hope we’re somehow immortal.”
One day, Ballard argues, the middle-class will wake up, smell the cappuccino, and recognize the vacuity of their existence. And that will take them to the barricades. And that is precisely what happens in Millennium People. Fed up with paying huge amounts for terrible council services, working long hours just to keep the mortgage going, etc the residents of Chelsea Marina mobilize themselves for civil disobedience. Behind them, however, lurks a more sinister figure, someone who understands that only a violence that cannot be understood, only a violence that cannot be obviously connected to a particular cause will be sufficient to wake any of us up. Something deliberately random. So it is that Ballard mimics the murder of Jill Dando – the assassination of a good-natured minor celebrity for no apparent reason. Famous enough to catch the public attention but bland enough not to be identified with any particular cause. Why would anyone kill such a person? What possible motive could there be?
Ballard’s well-paced detective thriller may not offer much as an alternative to the numbing afflictions of affluence; but his implicit call is for a radical, non-consumerist alternative. It’s hard to argue with that, though he has nothing except opposition to put in its place. The hero of the novel, if hero is the right word, is a serial adulterer married somewhat contentedly to a serial adulterer – both atheists, both coming to terms with the randomness of personal tragedy. She, forever consigned to limp as the result of a car crash; he, as the novel opens, coming to terms with the motiveless murder of his ex-wife. What kind of universe is this? Not, according to Ballard, a very kind one. And not one with a God who makes much difference.
Ballard’s dystopic vision is however accurate and compelling enough to deserve consideration. Maybe the Christian community is more conformed to the world than we would prefer to think. Maybe the middle classes have not yet risen up in rebellion but maybe we should. After all, in precisely whose interest is the whizzing conveyor belt that we all find ourselves on? Moving too fast to see anything except as a blur, moving too much to be anything but terminally tired and addicted to an ever increasing arsenal of energy-boosters – Pharmaton and Red Bull and Shark and double caffeine cola – to keep us going. Precisely who or what is it all for? Are the barbarian hordes massing off the white cliffs of Dover? Is there a world that we are trying to save? A pandemic that we are working night and day to keep at bay? Surely, there is another way to live this life.
Consider for a moment Jesus’ sobering warning in the Parable of the Sower:
“Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful.” (Mark 4:18-20)
Do these words apply?
If Jesus’ yoke is easy and his burden is light why are so many of us buckling at the knees as we plough our furrows?
What is driving our entire nation to exhaustion? “Ah,” we are told, “economic necessity.” The French, however, have enforced a 35 hour working week. Two interesting things happened. Not surprisingly unemployment went down. Surprisingly productivity went up. Or is it so surprising?
Ballard’s nihilistic vision is, however not the only fictional voice to be raised in the debate about the future of a West caught in the coils of consumerism and stung into outrage and eerie fascination by acts of random violence. Indeed, Douglas Coupland’s splendid new book Hey Nostradamus explores the impact of a Columbine style high school massacre on the lives of the survivors and those they love. The novel opens with Cheryl, one of the massacred, and now dead, speaking to us just before she enters heaven; whilst we hear Jason trying to make sense of it 11 years later, his girlfriend heather three years after that and finally his father one year later still. It is a compelling and moving story – bereft of sentimentality and full of hope. Its frontispiece is adorned by this quotation form I Corinthians 15:51-52:
“Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall all be changed.”
In other words, Coupland sets the pain of the human condition in the context of eternity. Indeed, whilst the book attacks the petty legalisms of Cheryl Christian youth group and the cold, granite certainties of Jason’s father, its conclusions are far, far from negative towards God or Christianity. There is a brilliant understanding of the human capacity for sin, so Cheryl begins the novel thus:
“I believe that what separates humanity from everything else in the world – spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss and Mount McKinley – is that humanity alone has the capacity at any given moment to commit all possible sins.”
Such insight abounds. So later Cheryl says:
“To acknowledge God is to fully accept the sorrow of the human condition.”
To compare Hey Nostradamus with Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov might be a step too far but in his wrestling with the difficulties of faith in the face of terrible loss and in his affirmation of the possibility of grace on grace overwhelming the most deep frozen heart, Coupland is both eloquent and persuasive. Like Ballard, Coupland’s work from Generation X to Girlfriend in a Coma has gazed long and hard at consumerism and the superficiality of Western culture but Coupland, unlike Ballard, clearly believes that there is something we can do about it, that we have a duty to do something about it, to pursue and live truth with all our heart and mind and soul and strength. In this latest work, he reminds us of the possibility of that great hope not only for eternity, but for the transformation of the heart now. And by so doing he not only critiques Ballard’s nihilism, he reminds us that it is not too late for Ballard to turn to Christ, nor for our culture. Let us pray.
Millennium People, JG Ballard, Flamingo, 2003, £16.99
Super-Cannes, J G Ballard, Flamingo, 2001, £6.99
Hey Nostradamus!, Douglas Coupland, Flamingo, 2003, £16.99
This article first appeared in Christianity magazine and is reproduced by kind permission.
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