super-cannes [j g ballard]

Despite not having read much Ballard, his transgressive British literary voice is so pervasive that it’s hard not to feel as though you know his work intimately. In part, one imagines, his success is down to the fact that, whilst transgressive, he’s also a consummate (and structurally conservative) storyteller. The narrative of Super-Cannes rattles along at a steady pace, even if it never really feels as though it’s close to hitting top gear. As a result, the concept behind the novel feels far more dangerous than the novel itself. 

This concept is beguiling; an exploration of a summarily twenty-first century world where corporate entities possess their own space, which they police themselves, a post-political space where you can invent your own morality. Super-Cannes is a large industrial/ residential park, near Cannes, where high-level execs get to do their thing. Which mostly involves working, but whose resident shrink has devised a novel way of letting off steam: organised petty crime. High-end execs don’t do squash or affairs; they go out into the streets and participate in some minor league brown shirt action, beating up immigrants, stealing valuables or sleeping with child prostitutes. Which in a Trumpian world doesn’t sound all that far-fetched. The narrator, a level-headed English pilot, Paul Sinclair, married to one of the site’s new doctors, gradually pieces together the truth of what is happening, before deciding to take radical action to bring down this neo-fascist enclave. The level-headed Englishman is one of the few prophetic notes that jars, but in so many other ways Ballard seems to be putting his finger on the brutal new realities of a world run by corporations. 

Having said which, the novel itself, which is framed as a detective story, with Sinclair investigating why his wife’s predecessor went on an insane shooting spree, feels somewhat prosaic. The twists and turns really do sometimes feel as though they’re going round in circles. The writer’s research is worn on the sleeve, and one imagines Ballard hanging out on the Cote D’Azur for months, suffering terribly as he made notes for his latest masterpiece. There’s something of a conjurer’s trick about it all: a story which claims to rent asunder the shroud of contemporary society, dressed up in the bows and ribbons of a highly consumable literary approach.