Thoughts on "Millennium People" by J.G. Ballard

This is my first J.G. Ballard novel, although I saw David Cronenberg's Crash when it played in cinemas. It did not take me long to realise the difference between Ballard's more condensed prose and the almost lyrical meanderings of C.R. Zafon in The Shadow of the Wind. Zafon is a true storyteller with a romantic imagination, whereas Ballard is a writer whose embellishments are more restrained and deliberate and operate in the realm of ideas and their relation to bourgeois or middle class cultural values and symbols, and whose lucid prose is strikingly British in its reserved tone. "I smell a Londoner".

But that is not saying much, least of all about the clever way in which Ballard gradually draws the reader into the slightly insane world of some of the main characters. The achievement is remarkable, and it becomes increasingly apparent when the events start to crystallise in the latter part of the novel. It is all the more effective because the world that he explores - the middle-class life spaces of Londoners in Chelsea Marina, and the cultural havens of the middle classes in general - includes precisely the familiar London places that I, too, value: the Tate Modern, the Royal Festival Hall, National Film Theatre, and Hayward Gallery, museums.

By making them physical targets of destructive and violent acts he succeeds in creating a truly unsettling atmosphere which does not play on mood but rather on the reality that the middle classes in general rely on for their livelihood and meaning in life. This is an achievement, an eye-opener.

The central meaning of the novel is not easily reducible to a particular transcription or idea. It is as much about David Markham's, the narrator, gradual exploration and realisation of the intentions and wayward ideas of the people into whose world he has stepped, as it is about the impotence of the middle classes and their ability to become aware of it, i.e. to still find some real meaning in their lives and pursuits despite their apparent meaninglessness and collective impotence. The latter idea - because despite the failed revolution in Chelsea Marina most of the residents eventually return and resume their middle class lives, apparently quite happily - was most meaningful to me as it gels with my own sense that the comfort zones of white collar professionals must be lived in despite their glaring inadequacies. But not without a knowledge of the inadequacies, at the very least.

I plan to do a personal update on this idea at a later stage, which in outline attempts to validate the economic necessity of professional income standards for middle class individuals and cohesive human groups (including families), but to indicate that the end goal is not, or should not, be the comfort zones and expensive life styles usually associated with the aspirations of affluent middle class professionals. More of that another time.

There are even cases in Millennium People that hint at what I have in mind - like these thoughts of Dr. Richard Gould's:

'... I was working with these desperate children. I was their delegate and I wanted an answer. If you're faced with a two-year-old dying from brain cancer, what do you say? It's not enough to talk about the grand design of nature. Either the world is at fault or we're looking for meaning in the wrong places.' (p. 255) 

Unless Nature or the Universe is sentient and aware of us humans as significant role players, it is pretty meaningless to speak of human meaning as anything other than human meaning: micro meaning, meaning amongst ourselves, anthropomorphic meaning, a human construct.

But what of the apparently meaningless universe - or our possible relation to it - even if it does not include us or consider us? That is the harsh place that David Markham and Richard Gould try to explore in their conversation about a void that only a psychopath can face unflinchingly:

'But I remember one or two things you said - the idea of God as a huge imaginary void, the largest nothingness the human mind can invent. Not a vast something out there, but a vast absence. You said only a psychopath can cope with the notion of zero to a million decimal places. The rest of us flinch from the void and have to fill it with any ballast we can find - tricks of space-time, wise old men with beards, moral universes ...' (p. 136) 

This meaninglessness cannot be filled except with our own projections. But what if we can conceive of the designs of this nothingness? That is a thought for another day (and I feel a little shudder as I say it).

From the similarities between Crash and Millennium People I deduce that Ballard's other novels also explore middle class lives and comfort zones when they come into contact with ruthless and apparently meaningless violence through strange and slightly messianic characters that lure the middle class characters into their warped worlds.