J G Ballard knows about selling. As a young man he briefly peddled children’s encyclopaedias, working the psychological relationship between the middle-class hawker and the punter bent on self-improvement. “Selling is like wooing a girl,” says Ballard. Ballard “believed in” The Waverley because he had read it as a boy. Whenever he was bored his mother had told him, ”’Go and read The Eight Volumes.’ That was her name for them,” he chuckles. “It was the nearest thing to television.”
Ballard’s new novel, Kingdom Come (Fourth Estate, £15.99), puts his usual Cassandra-like spin on the dangers of retail therapy. In Brooklands, a Thames Valley motorway town dominated by its domed shopping mall, the most taxing moral decision is which washing machine to buy. But even the sedated want sensation. At night, the shoppers who flock to the Metro-Centre reincarnate as mobs of sports fans, parading their St George T-shirts and attacking immigrants.
