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Books : Kingdom Come
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Kingdom Come by: J.G. Ballard List Price: £7.99 CD-Charts Price: £5.99 You Save: £2.00 (25%)Prices subject to change. |
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Binding: Paperback EAN: 9780007232475 ISBN: 0007232470 Label: HarperPerennial Manufacturer: HarperPerennial Number Of Pages: 304 Publication Date: July 02, 2007 Publisher: HarperPerennial Studio: HarperPerennial Sales Rank: 134815 Related Items:
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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Laying it on with a trowelI did finish the book in spite of myself, just to find out what end Ballard would spin to it this time. But I read it in a very irritated mood. Not only is it very much like the other ones I have read of him lately, but he is laying it on with a trowel and then some. He raises interesting questions, but why not let us draw the conclusions for ourselves, instead of spelling out sentence after sentence what we can so easily see with our own eyes? Blimey. (Sigh). Rating:  - Maybe not the best Ballard, yet...Weren't those reviewers a bit stingy? I can understand that this is not Crash, or Empire of the Sun, or The Kindness of Women, or the Drowned World... yet, I can't see why the score is so low. It is--like everything written by Ballard--a provocative surrealist story. You can't read it as a realistic novel, and you can't even read it as a story with a realistic starting point which becomes science-fictional in the end... it's surrealistic right from the start, not in the vein of Magritte or Dali, but in the tradition of Luis Bunuel. Everything seems normal, but there are strange things happening everywhere. All in all, Ballard doesn't give a damn about sociological verisimilitude: he grabs whatever ideas, facts, figures, places may fire his imagination, ... Read More: Rating: - Powerful message undermined by a hopeless plot.Whilst it probably wasn't the best to read this as my first introduction to Ballard I still felt extremely disappointed after hearing so many good things about him. The "consumerism as a dystopia" is a grand and important theme and the first part contains many self-contained mini-essays delivered by the various characters on this subject that are well written and thought out. The deep problem is that it should have stayed as a non-fiction essay on where our consumerist lifestyles are leading to. To hang all the ideas onto a weak, stupid plot with minimal characterisation just spoils the message...(and I still don't understand Richard's motivations to move from hunting his father's killer to helping out the Metrocentre and his extremely slow ... Read More: Rating: - A good idea that doesn't workKingdom Come by J. G. Ballard is not a successful book. Richard Brown is an advertising executive who has been estranged from his father for some time. Whilst the son has been in sophisticated London, the father has lived in Brooklands, an M25 town whose occupants, though bored to the core, know what they like. Above all, they like consumerism and, because of that, they like their Metro-Centre, a vast shopping mall that people actually worship. They also despise the stuck up sophisticates who live in London. And so J. G. Ballard begins by constructing a model of contemporary British society, whose addiction to mass market products now borders on denying any alternative a right to exist, especially anything with intellectual content. But there ... Read More: Rating:  - A seriously bad book!To say that this is disappointing would be a massive understatement! You realize that something's wrong early on, when the first-person narrator, an advertising executive, has to voice the critique of consumerism that lies at the novel's core. THAT clearly isn't going to work. After that it's all downhill. The plot, setting and characters are laughably banal. The whole thing creaks. I can't believe that it would've been published if it wasn't by Ballard. I can only suppose that Fourth Estate hoped that it would get by on the name. Well it doesn't. It raises big questions about broadsheet reviewing. I bought it on impulse because the quoted reviews, while not ecstatic, were still appreciative. It's even a Book of the Year for the Spectator ... Read More: |
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