A good idea that doesn't work - Rated 
Kingdom Come by J. G. Ballard is not a successful book. Richard Brown is an advertising executive who has been estranged from his father for some time. Whilst the son has been in sophisticated London, the father has lived in Brooklands, an M25 town whose occupants, though bored to the core, know what they like. Above all, they like consumerism and, because of that, they like their Metro-Centre, a vast shopping mall that people actually worship. They also despise the stuck up sophisticates who live in London. And so J. G. Ballard begins by constructing a model of contemporary British society, whose addiction to mass market products now borders on denying any alternative a right to exist, especially anything with intellectual content.
But there has been a problem. An apparently random shooting in the Metro-Centre has left Richard Pearson's father dead. Richard has thus arrived from the nearby metropolis that might as well be a different planet, to find out what has happened. He finds a town divided, where gangs of sports fans wear St. George cross shirts and divide their time between drinking, shopping and beating up members of ethnic minorities. They like contact sports.
What ensues is a riot, of sorts, a political revolt, of sorts, and a conspiracy, of sorts. What J. G. Ballard appears to be trying to do is make comments on the nature of consumer Britain, its lack of values, its non-entity identity, its apparent praise of brainlessness, its resentment of anything that is non-mass market, its latent, incipient fascism. But the book fails.
The characterisation is weak throughout. The only person to make an impression is David Cruise, a presenter who fronts the Metro-Centre television channel, who becomes something of a fascist leader, midway between Big Brother and a Sky newsreader. But even his character is tame where it could be surreal, lapdog where it might be threatening. Coincidence upon coincidence casts Richard Pearson as his former adman, a status that gets Richard into the inside, a position he hopes will reveal who killed his father.
But the book's most serious weakness, apart from an empty and thoroughly confused plot, is its complete lack of a character inside the mob. The reader is constantly reminded of the hordes of sports fans who riot and fight in defence of their beloved retail park, but we never meet one. We do have an analyst who describes their collective destruction obsession as elective psycopathy. We have Asian neighbours who get set alight, but we never really get inside the mobs, never understand their motives. Perhaps they don't have a motive. Perhaps that's the point, but, if it is, it fails to register.
And so the occupation of the shopping mall continues. We have riots, hostages, killings, shootings, attacks. We have mass hysteria, boredom, rampant consumerism and ice hockey. But in the end the experience is as vacuous as the Metro-Centre's dome. The police officers, the headmaster, the Metro-Centre administrators, in fact everyone in the book, even Julia the doctor who seems occasionally to do something human, they all reveal themselves as duplicitous, confused, scheming, disloyal and, worst of all, flat. Meanwhile the mob just continues its collective anonymity. A charitable review might suggest that this was Kingdom Come's point, but it would be taking charity too far.
A seriously bad book! - Rated 
To say that this is disappointing would be a massive understatement!
You realize that something's wrong early on, when the first-person narrator, an advertising executive, has to voice the critique of consumerism that lies at the novel's core. THAT clearly isn't going to work.
After that it's all downhill. The plot, setting and characters are laughably banal. The whole thing creaks. I can't believe that it would've been published if it wasn't by Ballard. I can only suppose that Fourth Estate hoped that it would get by on the name. Well it doesn't.
It raises big questions about broadsheet reviewing. I bought it on impulse because the quoted reviews, while not ecstatic, were still appreciative. It's even a Book of the Year for the Spectator reviewer! Something's not right there.
'Buyer Beware' I guess -- but I wish I could get my money back.
a complete collapse - Rated
As another reviewer noted, the first hundred (well actually more like 70) pages appear to build some strong concepts. For instance, it is particularly diverting that the hyper-commoditised 'Metro-Centre', emblazoned with brands and logos seems to be able to manipulate its consumers' consciousnesses of time. Fatally though, Ballard's dissecting narrative becomes clouded and focuses upon a white working populace who are portrayed as apeishly violent, innately racist and irredeemably sport obsessed (sport-cricket=evil!). They roam around like some voiceless pointless entity- man, woman and child absurdly bedecked in England shirts. The whole narrative self-consciously empties itself of meaning and its style is juvenile. The suppressed deviancies of the characters bubble to the surface but these lovingly constructed psychopathologies are totally implausible, inconsistent and dull- they miss so much of the subtlety and fullness that one finds in waking to what it is to be human!
So call on your deepest unfulfilled revolutionary urges, supressed violences and sexual energies- tear out the last two sections of this book and release them into the pyres, thus erasing them from your memories of Ballard's canon!
Hard work to finish - Rated
I love Ballard but found this to be one of his weakest efforts yet. Beautifully written, naturally, but I struggled to finish the book over a period of several weeks. I think possibly the problem is the weakness of Ballard's targets here - after all, a suburban shopping mall hardly inspires real extremes of feeling - these things are so ten-a-penny now that, even in a town like Brooklands, the concept can hardly be a novelty. This is the first Ballard book where I can honestly say, with reluctance and disappointment, that I found the notes and interviews section at the end more entertaining than the novel itself. Hopefully the next one will be a return to form.
Missing the Point - Rated
This novel is a huge let down. As another reviewer points out, the prose is of excellent quality, and so too the setting. In fact, the first 100 pages are very enjoyable, with the main character Richard Pearson negotiating himself through an urban nightmare of consumerism, racism, and violence in order to find out who shot his father.
However, there are two main problems. Firstly, weak characterisation means that it is impossible to engage with, or care about the story. We are told that the people of this dystopia need consumerism and insanity above all else, but the reader never gets to the chance to explore this through the experiences of the characters. And neither do we end up caring about the victims of violence: there is too much of it, and not once do we get the chance to empathise with its victims. By the end of the novel, I couldn't care less who lived and who died. It is also quite preposterous that Ballard has two main characters sleep with each other and form a bond, yet hardly has any dialogue between them in the last 70 pages of the book, when they are supposedly in great danger.
The second problem with the novel, is the logic of the dystopia Ballard creates. In an attempt at originality, Ballard creates a world in which fascism emerges from the masses, rather than being created top-down by politicians. This occurs because Britain is a country of bored citizens whose main value-system is based around the purchase of consumer goods. How a general indifference, and an obsession with consumerism leads to a bottom-up revolution is not explained. As another reviewer has already hinted at, we already live in an increasingly authoritarian society, what with CCTV cameras, internment, and rules against public protest, and one could argue that it is easier for a government to pass such measures when citizens care less about politics and more about the development of a new mobile phone. It seems to me that consumerism breads apathy, rather than mass violence, allowing for top-down authoritarianism to develop.
Like other readers, I struggled to finish this book. It is conceptually weak, and more damagingly, fails to show the reader what it would actually feel like to live in this world. Orwell brilliantly demonstrates this in 1984 by placing human emotion at the centre of his story. Ballard on the other hand, fails completely.
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