So far, all is normal; most readers will recognise this type of area. But Ballard’s suburbia quickly becomes more sinister. Pearson, an out-of-work advertising executive, arrives in Brooklands, near Weybridge, following his father’s murder in the Metro-Centre, the town’s vast retail complex. When a mentally ill man with a known grudge against the Metro-Centre is arrested, the case seems to be closed, but the man is given a curiously watertight alibi by his doctor, his psychiatrist and his former head teacher — all trustworthy people who just happened to be in the right place to confirm his innocence.
Pearson realises that something is wrong in Brooklands. The population, half-mad with ennui, has begun to revolt. Race riots occur nightly, with Asian and eastern European families being savagely beaten by middle-class thugs while the police avert their eyes. The Metro-Centre appears to be the touchstone for all this. The local people congregate around it, watch its satellite TV channel and support its official sports teams, and then, in a frenzy of jingoistic emptiness, descend on to the streets in St George shirts, looking for trouble.
In opposition to these people, there is a minority who long for the old, pre-consumerist Brooklands, and orate in the most improbable way about the dying of culture; this lot want to destroy the Metro-Centre. Pearson is both appalled and fascinated, and is soon drawn into the Metro-Centre’s orbit.
What separates Ballard from most current writers of fiction is that he remains unafraid to exaggerate. In an age when moral boundaries are further back than ever and people constantly search for extremes, most literary novelists have found themselves producing either straight realism or, more often, understatement. Not so Ballard, who instead uses the current predilection for excess as a springboard towards even greater excess. When the Metro-Centre is declared a fascist republic, it becomes comfortingly clear that art can still occasionally be stranger than life.
Ultimately, this isn’t one of Ballard’s better novels. Its plot is too diffuse, its anti-consumerism too often repeated. Better editing might have helped, and certainly would have prevented the Metro-Centre’s PR manager, Tom Carradine, from being called ‘David Carradine’ three times on one page. But, notwithstanding that, Ballard still retains a clear-sighted, almost vatic quality, which makes him appear to be telepathically linked to the subconscious mind of Middle England. Even his weaker novels make us stop and think.
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