When modernity itself seems to be tearing apart at the seams, best to turn to J. G. Ballard.
The English novelist, who died in 2009, retains his prophetic edge; while the West has yet to become an actual Orwellian nightmare—the elections still free and the deracinated super-states still a globalist fantasy—it is easy to find traces of Ballardian horror everywhere. Dead-eyed consumerism, soul-less high-rises, and climate-related catastrophes, all made up the stuff of Ballard’s near-term dystopias. Violence looms, but it is not Big Brother imposing it from on high, nor a gang of droogs menacing us from below. It’s in all of us.
Ballard’s final novel, 2006’s Kingdom Come, is not well remembered. He found much more acclaim (and controversy) for novels such as Crash, about a group of fetishists who become sexually aroused by staging automobile crashes, and the 1968 short story “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” a fictional scientific report cataloguing experiments intended to measure the sexual and psychological appeal of the California governor. It’s Kingdom Come, though, that unsettlingly foreshadows the recent upheaval in Ballard’s homeland, where anti-immigrant riots consumed towns and cities across England and Northern Ireland earlier this summer.
This sort of unrest, driven by the alienated white working class, is at the center of the novel. Richard Pearson is a London adman who has lost both his job and his wife. Sensible, and ostensibly middle of the road politically and socially, he travels to the suburbs to investigate the death of his father, a retired airline pilot shot dead in a shopping mall. The mall, Metro-Centre, is a domed marvel, wondrous and monstrous, and Richard soon finds there is a budding neo-Fascist movement bound to the consumerist haven.
While the West has yet to become an actual Orwellian nightmare, it is easy to find traces of Ballardian horror everywhere.
Men roam the nearby streets, wantonly assaulting foreign-born shopkeepers under the banner of Saint George’s cross. “The Asian community is deeply concerned,” says a local named Kumar. “In the old days there were organized attacks, but they were predictable. Now we see violence for its own sake.”
“The churches are empty, and the monarchy shipwrecked itself on its own vanity,” a psychiatrist tells Richard. “Almost no one has any civic feeling…. Anyone who’s had children knows that the greatest danger is boredom. Boredom, and a secret pleasure of one’s own malice.”
The recent U.K. riots began when three girls at a Taylor Swift dance class in a northern English town called Southport were murdered. A rumor spread that the attacker was a Muslim refugee who had illegally entered the U.K., though he actually was born in Britain to a Christian family from Rwanda. A mosque was attacked in Southport, and over several weeks the riots spread, with anti-immigrant protesters clashing with police, attacking homes and businesses owned by immigrants, and targeting hotels housing asylum seekers.
They were, like the rioters of Kingdom Come, largely leaderless. And they came from disaffected towns where the social fabric had been frayed: plenty of electronic entertainments and drugs on tap, but also emptying churches and social clubs, and little in the way of trade unions to organize them or provide a sense of purpose. The media was quick to blame X, though most false rumors of the killings actually spread through Telegram.
In Kingdom Come, there are no smartphones or social media, but there are the age-old resentments and time enough to act upon them. “Who needs liberty and human rights and civic responsibility?,” Sangster, a school headmaster, asks Richard. “What we want is an aesthetics of violence. We believe in the triumph of feelings over reason.” Destruction feels good. The rioters of Ballard’s unfashionable London suburbs and the rioters of 2024 who terrorized Southport and elsewhere had no workable or conceivable endgame, no political path forward.
In Ballard’s view, it’s the constructs of 20th- and 21st-century society that got us here, those false gods of capitalism and the alienation inherent in technological progress. His Metro-Centre denizens are television-obsessed, making a Führer out of a handsome sports commentator whom Richard draws near. Even he eventually loses control.
If anything, our contemporary ennui—both in the U.S. and the U.K.—transcends what Ballard imagined in his last decade of life. Shopping malls themselves are dying off as commerce goes digital. Sangster calls consumerism a “collective enterprise” and declares that, when we go shopping, we “take part in a collective ritual of affirmation.” We no longer affirm each other in such a way, though. The medicinal glow of the smartphone screen has replaced the colossal Metro-Centre. We are no less violent for it, but we are certainly more alone.
Ross Barkan is a New York City–based writer. His next novel, Glass Century, will be published in 2025
