Paul Sinclair seems an unlikely narrator for a J.G. Ballard novel. Too sane, too normal, possibly too passive, he is the besotted older husband of a new young wife. She is a doctor, by now a stock figure in Ballard's work, and for Paul much of Jane's appeal lies in her attitude of child-like, sloppy rebellion. He also enjoys telling people he is married to a physician. The couple arrive in a bland, hitech technology park in the South of France where Jane has accepted a job, and Paul, an aviation magazine editor, plans on recuperating from the flying accident that led him to a London hospital and Jane.
From the outset the science park setting appears a neat variation on the weird resort complex plonked in the middle of a dead Spanish landscape which featured in his last novel, Cocaine Nights (1996). Yet early in this new book, an important distinction is made. His previous book explored the thesis of what happens to a society unable to deal with the new leisure. Now he sees work as the new narcotic and for a population of work obsessives, the only true release lies in violence. The sterile perfection of EdenOlympia, the technology park and luxury enclave, is an appropriate place for its cynical inmates.
The brave new world of corporate glamour, scratched car paintwork, and long hours the Sinclairs enter has already been disturbed by a shooting spree that left several executives dead. The gunman was non other than the doctor Jane has come to replace; and with whom she had once been involved. As with Cocaine Nights, Super- Cannes quickly establishes itself as another of Ballard's gripping pornographic morality plays, with Sinclair the narrator abetting as affable part-observer part-voyeur concerned about his damaged leg and lamenting his revoked private pilot's licence. Yet whereas the previous book was ultimately more parable than thriller, this proves the reverse. Still, regardless of mental or physical shifts, Ballard remains that very rare thing, an original. He is most undoubtedly, the most exciting of contemporary British novelists: he is also the most surreal.
Lucid madness has long featured at the heart of his bizarrely visionary psychological fiction. This most subversive and original of novelists is a maverick fascinated by extreme states of mind. He has taken Greene's vision of guilt and sin on to a darker, more impersonal level. Ballard is detached and therefore liberated, almost clinical. His offbeat, obsessive imagination has consistently produced strange, surreal worlds in which motorway by-passes, deserted shopping malls, crashed cars, empty swimming pools and vacant aerodromes prove potential death traps for a society which has forgotten how to live.
Since the publication of The Drowned World, Ballard has created a fictional chronicle of moral amorality, which culminated in his pornographic, underground classic Crash (1972). It is hugely ironic that the book which first made him internationally famous, was his least typical - his autobiographical war memoir, Empire of the Sun (1984). Though detached, it is extraordinarily moving. As is The Day of Creation (1987), in which Mallory, a mad, idealistic doctor determined to bring water to the Sahara, tells his story. Ballard's vision tends towards the strange. There is a mood of waiting for alien objects to fall from a cloudless sky. Even at their most decadent, however, his novels are cautionary fables - no novelist has examined the modern world from such a highly anthropological viewpoint. The super-executives in the new novel are programmed work machines. Play is impossible, so effective methods of relaxation have to be found.
Meanwhile, back with the Sinclairs, the nervy young Jane, having got over her initial misgivings about her new job - which includes their luxury apartment, previously occupied by David Greenwood, the dead gunman - becomes another work-slave. It comes as no surprise, despite her initial sarcastic dismissal of the place, "Culture shock? . . . actually, I love it here already . . . All this alienation . . . I could easily get used to it." Paul concedes "the sense of focused brain power was bracing, but subtly unsettling."
BALLARD'S work has often hovered between high literature and flat, trash prose. Even at its most fantastic he sustains a common sense tone which invariably counters the often improbable. From misplaced hippie, Jane quickly becomes a depraved heroin addict existing in a drugged state and indulging in recreational sex. While the insane doctor is a favourite Ballard device, Jane has nothing in common with his previous drifter-doctor figures. Paula Hamilton in Cocaine Nights, whose pigtail of long black hair follows her "like a faithful snake", brilliantly personifies Ballard's abiding theme of disease and dis-ease. Jane is merely a corrupt Alice reverting to the role of wayward teenager. But she is merely a minor symbol.
A far more meaningful doctor-figure is the calmly deranged Wilder Penrose, the business park's resident psychiatrist, who emerges as a prophet of sorts, handing down crazed pronouncements such as "The dream of a leisure society was the great twentieth-century delusion. Work is the new leisure. Talented and ambitious people work harder than they have ever done, and for long hours. They find their only fulfilment through work." Having survived Greenwood's attack, he wanders about as a spokesman in a place where the residents are healthy and their insanity only fleeting. References to Lewis Carroll and reports on the latest outbreak of muggings and car vandalism stroll hand in hand. Security men have become the new state police.
Even at his best Ballard is never an inspired writer of dialogue; his characters exchange functional, lumpy pieces of information. It is all very English, almost a parody. "Paul? You're trembling. Not with rage, I hope?" inquires Penrose, to whom the narrator replies, "Just for the moment. I'm tempted to punch you in the face." Even the chapter headings have a deliberate baldness, just as most of his characters are misfits on the edge.
Ballard's genius lies in the mood he creates and his often dazzlingly surreal images. Many of these images describe the chaos and violence undercutting the novel and the lives of the characters in it. As Jane is quickly and predictably sucked into the ethos of Eden-Olympia, Paul becomes involved with Frances, an ambivalent character who - having escaped Greenwood's massacre - has another agenda.
But the neutral, non-heroic Paul has already become obsessed with Greenwood's motives. The intelligence of the book, its perceptions are Paul's as he begins his investigations in a typical Ballard landscape. "Ornamental pathways led to the electricity substations feeding power into the business park's grid. Surrounded by chain-link fences, they stood in the forest clearings like mysterious and impassive presences. I circled the artificial lakes, with their eerily calm surfaces, or roamed around the vast car parks. The lines of silent vehicles might have belonged to a race who had migrated to the moon."
Cocaine Nights, with its image of a vicious tennis machine firing balls across empty tennis courts, is the better novel. Super-Cannes possesses a relentless energy and an atmosphere of calculated corruption, but while the love story never engages, the chilling narrative succeeds as an apocalyptic comment on modern society's inhuman dance of death.
Eileen Battersby is the Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
