I don't read many novels, but reviews of J.G. Ballard's Millennium People drew me to the book. "Violent rebellion comes to London's middle classes in the extraordinary new novel from the author of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes." says the publishers' blurb. Ballard's widely celebrated as being a contemporary prophet of sorts. This book seems to suggest why.
I finished it today. Its thesis, as described by Will Self in Prospect, is that
The real job of the class system ... "isn't to suppress the proles, but to keep the middle classes down, make sure they're docile and subservient." The logical conclusion of this - that the middle class must be roused out of its conformist stupor by attacking its own cultural shibboleths - is detailed with loving silliness.
So the inhabitants of Chelsea Marina take it out on the BBC, Tate Modern, the National Film Theatre and ultimately, on their own formerly-comfortable streets in a violent standoff with police using their own cars as barricades, in a chapter delightfully titled 'The Bonfire of the Volvos'.
In a New Statesman review John Gray wrote:
"Millennium People is a dark, comic study of middle-class nihilism. The book's coolly detached narrator, David Markham, sums up the sense of emptiness that drives these improbable - and yet oddly credible - rebels against modern life. "The absence of rational motive," he observes, "carries a significance of its own."
It's almost believable, this rebellion. And equally believable the return to 'normality' at the end, but a new kind of 'normal' in a world increasingly defined by seemingly meaningless acts of violence. What's eating me about the book is that one of the chief protagonists, one who bought into the 'revolution' at enormous personal cost, is a young idealistic clergyman.....