Millennium People

The peasants, goes a tedious old joke about Wat Tyler's mob, are revolting. In JG Ballard's unnerving, prophetic novel Millennium People, however, it's the middle classes that are staging the revolution: blowing up the NFT, burning their books and defaulting on their maintenance charges. Rejecting, in short, everything that they've worked so hard for--The Bonfire of the Volvos, as one rather droll chapter heading has it.

At the forefront of this petit bourgeois insurrection are the occupants of Fulham's Chelsea Marina, (as ever with Ballard) an exclusive housing community. Led by the charismatic Dr Richard Gould, a disgraced paediatrician turned "Doctor Moreau of the Chelsea set", Marina residents Kay Churchill, a former film lecturer; civil servant Vera Britain and Stephen Dexter, the parish vicar and an injured airman (another Ballard perennial) have unleashed an arson campaign against targets deemed suitably middle class.

David Markham, a psychiatrist and the book's steely narrator, is drawn into the Marina's inner circle after his ex-wife Laura is killed in an apparently meaningless bomb attack at Heathrow airport, (prime Ballard territory, of course). Meaningless is the insistent motif: Markham's current wife Sally was crippled in a freak accident and the murder of a banal if inoffensive television presenter (loosely modelled on Jill Dando) is one of the seemingly random violent acts unleashed by Gould, precisely because of their apparent randomness. "The absence of rational motive", as he says, "carries a significance of its own".

A master of sustained unease, Ballard has again excelled in fashioning a gripping, psychologically disturbing novel, that, like High Rise or Super-Cannes, is part cultural analysis and part surreal social prediction. --Travis Elborough

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The dinner party disaffected - Rated
This book was based on a ridiculous premise, namely that the middle classes, spouting the same psycho-babble with which they have fuelled many a post-party conversation, rise up from their Sloane heartland and declare themselves the "new proletariat". Their "charismatic" leader in this revolt, wandering amongst asylums of disabled children, doling out a healthy spot of paedophilia along with his toys, is neither charismatic and engaging, and his disciple, the book's protagonist, seems more bored than involved. How he manages to jump from weary onlooker to "chief co-conspirator" is never explained, and his mere four meetings (even the FSA did better for Northern Rock) with this doctoral great leader inspire little vigour into the proceedings. The prose is laboured and repetitive, and the rhetoric of revolution reads with the slow drawl of the disaffected dinner party revolutionary - unconvincing and unfelt. I felt like I was reading an extended short story, which repeated itself out of an inability to say anything new, but was, like the inebriated evening guest, unaware of its position as chief drone.

Pretentious and dull - Rated
This is among the worst books Ive ever read. I couldnt follow the plot,and the language was over pretentious and unexciting. I have heard alot about J.G. Ballard but he is highly overrated and dull.

Prescient and unnerving - Rated
Like many of Ballard's books, 'Millennium People' deals with the unravelling of society's structure and strictures. Like 'High Rise', this story is set within a middle-class enclave and details the manner in which the bourgeoisie, given the right circumstances and stimuli, can revert to a form of savagery just as quickly as any other sector of society.

Ballard's use of random acts of terrorism are certain to strike a chord given the current mindset of paranoia concerning the eventuality of such attacks, and as ever, his characters are well-developed and unpredictable.

A must for anyone who enjoys this great author's work.

Finding Meaning in Meaningless Times - Rated
There isnt really an appropriate way to begin this review other than to say that this is, for me, Ballard's best and that he has clearly only improved with age. Millennium People could not be more typical Ballard from the outset: Urban setting, usual themes, dystopian vision etc. but he has excelled himself by sticking to his strengths and improving on them.

Characters in Millennium People are far more sophisticated than a Ballard reader might expect. From the mysterious Richard Gould to the fiery Kay Churchill this improvement in characterisation helps convey the many messages in the story. What Messages? Well as usual, themes are around society, psychology, philosophy and politics, but instead of being deduced from the outcomes of the plot (as you might with say, High Rise), the morals come directly from the characters mouth and being the ever naive and passive David Markham, you get to hear everyone's side of the story.

The development around middle-class society, violence and even the meaning of life is very well handled and kept interesting and relevant with a twisting, mystery plot to which you're always trying to guess the ending whilst grappling with the challenging questions the characters ask of you and Markham.

To summarise, this is exciting, accesible, thoughful, sophisticated, interesting and enjoyable. It has the feel of an author reaching perfection with the complexity of The Atrocity Exhibition combined the atmosphere of High Rise...

...and to top all of that, this edition from the nice people at Harper-Perennial comes with a lovely jacket and an interview thingy at the end so read it and enjoy!

Good, but not great... - Rated
'Millennium People', the latest novel from J. G. Ballard, describes how violent dissent gradually infects a section of the affluent British middle-class. As in 'Cocaine Nights' and 'Super-Cannes', the narrator is a man - ordinary but troubled in his own way - investigating an unexplained death; and here, just as in those two books, the narrator becomes ensnared, and eventually blinded, by the world he investigates. David Markham is not as convincing or as interesting as the protagonists in Ballard's earlier, thematically and structually connected novels; but his abject gullibility and startling lack of intuitive thinking holds the reader's attention - it is less that we sympathise, and more that we look on in sheer bewilderment. But Markham is very clearly protagonist as blunt tool of the author, his impotence necessary if the narrative is to unfold as it does, and Ballard is happy for us to know this.

The setting of most of the action is Chelsea Marina, an estate inhabited by doctors and architects, middle-managers and orthodontists; trouble is brewing, and the usually placid inhabitants are breaking laws they would never previously have even considered breaking. Like Ballard's earlier explorations of social disharmony, the motif of 'Millennium People' is chaos encroaching on normality; characters talk energetically, struggling to express their dissatisfaction with their lives, their society - their world - while holding on to the very things that don't satisfy. The problem, however, is that the chaos in 'Millennium People' seems too neat, the normality too thinly sketched. Very few of the characters really come to life, with Sally, although rarely seen, a notable exception.

While 'Millennium People' is a less accomplished work of fiction than 'Cocaine Nights', it is more entertaining than 'Super-Cannes', and every bit as thought-provoking as you would expect a book by Ballard to be. Altogether, it is a novel deserving of your time; but be prepared to finish it aching to read more - itching to see where Ballard goes next, now this cycle of novels is complete.