Kingdom Come

"Yes, so, as I say, I really love his late period: Cocaine Nights , Super-Cannes , Millennium People , Kingdom Come , which are all basically the same novel again and again. I mean, the plot is pretty much always Heart of Darkness . This is pretty broad brush. But there’s someone who goes up river, and they lose themselves in that world, become part of the logic of that world. That’s what happens again and again in these last four. They are all centred on the idea of middle-class communities that have become bored with contemporary life and are entertaining themselves by playing around with violence, drugs, sex. Kingdom Come fertilises that with his observations about British society at that specific point in time. He gets slightly shaken by seeing so many St George’s flags proliferating around Shepperton—that’s probably around 2004, when a big football tournament is happening, but he was reading about Fascism at the time, doing research as he always did. He was interested in how Nazism was also a capitalist movement, and he thought that consumer culture was a slip towards a sort of soft Fascism, because the only moral code is money. So he uses all of those elements. There’s a substratum of Surrealism. It’s slightly abstracted and has that feeling of a warning. Honestly, I think that Ballard was an analyst of the present. This whole idea of him being a prophet, that he was predicting the future, sort of cheapens his achievements, really. What he was great at doing was observing the circumstances around him and extrapolating from that: you could end up here. That’s exactly what he’s doing in Kingdom Come."