Fiction/Brian Dillon: The French philosopher, Paul Virilio, recently curated an exhibition entitled Unknown Quantity, a "museum of accidents" dedicated to the prevalence of obscure and unpredictable catastrophes at the turn of the century.
Commenting on the enigmatic nature of the modern disaster, he wrote: "The sense of insecurity that has appeared over the last 10 years is not just linked to so-called 'anti-social acts' affecting urban dwellers, but is, it seems, the symptom of a new horizon of expectation, the third of its kind after the horizons of expectation of 'revolution' and 'war'."
Virilio's insight could stand as a précis of the career of J.G. Ballard, whose fiction has attempted to map in advance the contours of this novel territory opened up by technological advance and social decay.
Ballard's key works have always seemed oddly out of time; they appeared to describe a universe which was both horribly here and now, and just, terrifyingly, out of reach: an unknowable future for which the world was waiting in technologically airlocked dread. That eerie prescience has also had the effect of turning each new Ballard novel into an eagerly and edgily awaited oracular pronouncement, as if the geometry of whatever geopolitical or socio- cultural inferno awaited us would be dimly discernible in his narratives: the future would look (though never precisely, hence its fascination) like a Ballard novel. The brilliance of Millennium People (which is also the seed of its potential failure as both fiction and prophecy) lies in the way it treats the very recent past as a possible chart of future disaster areas.
The novel's narrator, David Markham, a psychologist in the pay of big business, finds himself stranded between the twin disasters of his ex-wife Laura's death in a bomb attack on Heathrow airport and the darkly comic unfolding of a middle-class revolution in the fictional London district of Chelsea Marina. In several senses, we are on familiar Ballardian ground here: Markham sets out to investigate Laura's murder and the bourgeois insurrection with a sense that the city's air is charged with a new and random violence, that the shockwaves of destruction have become "part of the strange metropolitan weather". The territory is populated by quintessential Ballard personae: a former lecturer turned seethingly paranoid agitator, a compassionate doctor who is also a lethal terrorist, Markham's glamorously crippled wife - all of whom are gradually revealed to be lost, unwittingly or otherwise, in the same fog of urban anxiety and millennial tension.
To note that we have been here before in Ballard's fiction is not to deny the unsettling force of Millennium People, the way in which it slowly reveals the most atrocious acts of violence to be the result of apparently pure motives or cosseted modern anomie. It is, however, to suggest a certain hardening of the arteries of Ballard's fictional flow, a sense that his motifs have become desiccated, sclerotic, their outlines settling just short of the point of caricature. The Chelsea Marina rebellion - complete with middle-class mothers torching their four-wheel-drives - may be a neatly ironic skewing of contemporary clichés about a rampant underclass (as well as - who knows, yet - a very real warning), but it is also a direct fictional descendant of the disintegrating gated communities of his last two novels, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes. In fact, Ballard had already sketched that set-up with more ferocity in 1975, with the feral tower-block enclave of High-Rise, just as, in Crash, he had brilliantly exposed the perverse possibilities of medicine and motoring: metaphors which eke out the merest ghostly half-life in Millennium People.
In the end, perhaps, none of this is especially Ballard's fault: in a sense, he is simply, like his B-list antecedents, Burroughs and Beckett (we might add Baudrillard), refining his obsessions, in late career, to a point of diamond sharpness. The world, too, has belatedly and terribly caught up with Ballard's blurred acceleration into a future marked by unreal technological distance and the very present threat of random, chaotic and meaningless violence. If Ballard is in danger of transmuting into the merely "Ballardian", he has also vanished into the everyday, evanesced into the air we breathe and the tales we tell about our own uncertain futures.
Millennium People By J.G. Ballard Flamingo, 242pp. £16.99
Brian Dillon is working on a book on private and public memory