King Konsummon and the Kingdom Coming?
Mark Greene considers Britain’s most prescient novelist’s latest salvo at British culture
Big ideas have legs. They take you somewhere. Big ideas have a direction, an inner logic. Christianity, for example, has a direction – it always moves towards love, always towards selflessness, always moves towards peace and reconciliation, towards the Sermon on the Mount, towards the Cross – selfless love.
Atheism has a direction. It may sound realistic and rational, sober and scientific but it leads somewhere. It leads to valuing human beings less. After all, if human beings are not created by a loving God, then human beings are no higher than the animals, have no eternal value and can therefore be treated like animals. Atheism leads somewhere. If you follow it far enough, atheism leads to Stalin and the Gulags, to Pol Pot and the Killing Fields. It doesn’t make atheists Stalinist or uncaring, but if you let atheism follow its logic, if atheism goes large, it’s where you end up.
Islam has a direction too. And so does Hinduism. But none of these ‘isms’ are the biggest challenge to the way of Christ in Britain today. The biggest challenge is consumerism and consumerism has legs. Nice legs, sleek and smooth and lightly tanned, and sheathed in16 denier satin. But powerful legs too. Legs that move fast.
Consumerism is of course more than materialism in new clothes, more than shopping til we drop, and so on. Yes, consumerism is looking for one’s identity and purpose and esteem in the things and products and services we buy:
“Foraging for Eternity in a bottle, yearning for some heavenly scent,More than that, consumerism is a way of thinking about what makes life significant, what makes me significant, what makes others significant. And it is why the day in the school year that is least well attended by teenagers is non-uniform day. It’s not just that if you’re poor you usually have to pay for the privilege. It’s that if you don’t have the right clothes, there is simply no way you are going to expose yourself to verbal ridicule, to curled lips, or even the silent inner sneers of those who may no longer wish you to be part of their gang, their gang, their gang, oh, no-o-o-o. In sum, teenagers deliberately exclude themselves from their community, from their friends, because they do not trust their community to still accept them – in the wrong clothes.
A universe away from the dark, messy liquids of Lent.”
Right now there’s a poster campaign up in London for a fashion label. The headline reads: “Looking good isn’t important. Looking good is everything. Ben Sherman 1963.” It may sound stupid, actually it is stupid, but it is utterly credible in our culture.
It is not just about things – about the logo on my trainers, for example – it is also the film I’ve seen that you haven’t, the experience that I’ve had that you haven’t, the even more out of the way tropical island that we’ve been to that you haven’t, the new ingredient for a stir fry that you’ve never heard of... or that you have but I have too, you know.
No, King Konsummon, the hypnotically handsome son of Mammon, the boy with the viral smile and the addictive voice, doesn’t really care whether you liked what that ingredient did to the taste and texture of your stir fry, he doesn’t really care whether you run more comfortably in those trainers, whether watching that film was edifying, whether you came back from that remote tropical island any more rested and refreshed and enriched in the inner person than if you’d rented a caravan in the New Forest. No, Konsummon is all surface and no substance. And besides Konsummon is already on to the next thing, has already hopped off to the next island. Konsummon lives for the next thing, for the next experience, for the moment. Konsummon is a shark – he never stops moving, never stops hunting for the next thing. And if you stop, you’re dead.
Konsummon turns everything, every high and noble thing, every private and intimate thing into a commodity to be marketed – whether that’s War and Peace spiced up for the TV version with scenes unimagined by the writer, or the intimate story of a relationship with a Princess, or some torrid if transient affair with a married footballer with two children and another on the way – nothing is sacred.
But this we know. And struggle against.
But where is King Konsummon, son of Mammon, leading us?
That’s the question that has been the subject of much of J G Ballard’s fiction over the decades. Ballard, like Huxley in Brave New World, is less interested in what is happening right now and more interested in where we might end up. Ballard is not our most important novelist, nor even one of our most popular, but he may well be our most prescient. As Will Self put it on the flyleaf of Kingdom Come, Ballard’s latest book: “Sitting in his Shepperton semi, Ballard has issued a series of bulletins on the modern world of almost unerring prescience. Other writers describe; Ballard anticipates.” Ballard then stands in the tradition of Huxley’s Brave New World.
Huxley, writing in 1932, looked ahead to a world of test-tube babies and genetic engineering, a world where all negative emotions would be soothed by drugs, a world of easy sex and shallow relationships, a world where it was a civic duty to consume goods, a world where an underclass of workers served an elite.
And so today we already have the beginnings of genetic engineering, we already have the example of the Singapore Government allowing graduate couples to have four children but limiting non-graduate couples to two. We have a world where our kids are on Prozac, and so are we, a world of teenage sex and shallower relationships, a world where post 9/11 Americans were encouraged to come to New York and shop to show the terrorists they hadn’t won, a world where migrant workers serve affluent indigenous populations, a world where we, the Western elite, leave the imprint of our Timberland boots on the backs of the third world poor .
Ballard’s fiction which includes Crash, SuperCannes, Millennium People looks at where he thinks consumerism leads. And it is not a pretty place. And invariably a violent one:
“The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait passionately for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world ...”
So begins Kingdom Come, a story set in near-future southern England. It is the tale of an ex-ad executive who goes searching for the murderer of his father, an apparently random murder committed in an enormous shopping mall. Who did it? And why? And is this part of some bigger conspiracy? And, if it is, which aisle will the adman walk up?
The mall is called The Dome and does indeed act as substitute for the church: from the earth’s four corners they come, obedient to the whisper of the mall, along the tarred arteries of the town, here to the Cathedral of the Fall. As one of Ballard’s characters puts it:
“It’s like going to church. And here you can go every day and you get something to take home.”
But Ballard is not convinced that consumerism will in the end win. For him, underneath our apparent mass acquiescence to its brain-numbing, sense-dulling, creativity-sapping, relationship-hollowing anaestheology are the seeds of rebellion. We know we are deeply bored.
“Every citizen of Brooklands, every resident within sight of the M25, was constantly trading the contents of house and home, replacing the same cars and cameras, the same ceramic hobs and fitted bathrooms. Nothing was being swapped for nothing. Behind this frantic turnover, a gigantic boredom prevailed.”
We behave the way we do not because we really enjoy it but because we can think of no other way to pass the time. Our lives are bereft of any worthwhile cause that has the capacity to stir any authentic passion in us, any sense that we are truly alive.
Ballard’s thesis is that bored people become violent people – not just bored unemployed disaffected youth, but bored corporate executives in SuperCannes and bored middle-class suburbanites in this novel. There is nothing left to make us feel alive, except the threat of violence in the air, a violence we may experience or a violence we may be part of perpetrating.
Importantly, the novel explores how it is that individuals become subsumed in a mass movement. How, for example, was it possible for the German people, one of the most highly educated and cultured nations on the face of the planet, to decide to vote for a man like Hitler whose tactics of violence and intimidation were already well known to them? Ballard’s answer is ‘willed madness’ – a group psyche that overrides individual objections, that accesses some deep engine of evil that catapults people over the walls of reason into a vivid world of primeval action, of passionate engagement – a world to feel truly alive in. The Rwandan genocide? As Sangster, a psychiatrist puts it,
“People are bored. Deeply, deeply bored. When people are that bored anything is possible. A new religion, a fourth reich. They’ll worship a mathematical symbol or a hole in the ground. We’re to blame. We’ve brought them up on violence and paranoia.”
And here Ballard points up a vital question.
Why are we being brought up on violence and paranoia? Consider for a moment just how much of prime-time television is about violence, about murder, whether that violence and murder is motivated by personal anger, state ideology or rebel conviction? Spooks, CSI, Frost, Midsommer Murders. Consider how our paranoia is fed by the way that news privileges tales of murder and mayhem, by the surveillance cameras in every high street, shopping centre and car park, by the security guards – not just in the jewellers’ of Bond Street – but in the supermarket. Oh, yes, they are needed. Or they wouldn’t be there.
Violence is in the air. It’s a dangerous gas at the best of times but more dangerous in a land where people are weary and heavy laden not just by long hours and long commutes but by the terrible, terrible weight of life without a cause. Rebels, as the Bible tells us, we are. And rebels wreak mayhem. Even rebels without a cause.
Christmas is almost here.
On Oxford Street, 50 yards from my office, the Christmas lights have been gleaming for many a week. This is now King Konsummon’s season. Christ came to liberate the captives, to free the poor but after Christmas the poor will in fact be deeper in debt, and the souls of those captive to Konsummon’s sparkling promises will be no more nourished than a Darfur refugee’s body would be nourished by a stick of sugar-free gum.
This article was first published in Christianity magazine and is reproduced by kind permission.
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