His Dark Material

Aside from Charles Dickens or Franz Kafka, not many novelists get their own adjective. But there is Ballardian, in Collins English Dictionary: "Resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J.G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments."

A mouthful, but Ballard has earned every word of it. In 20 novels and 20 story collections over his half-century as a writer, he has created an anti-utopian gulag of ostensibly placid communities — island resorts, luxury apartment towers, high-tech research parks — where civility deteriorates and darkness rises. In Kingdom Come, his latest and perhaps most unsettling work yet, Ballard exposes a particularly nasty cesspool of social pathology: the shopping mall.

First, a clarification. Confusingly, Ballard is perhaps best known for Empire of the Sun, a surprisingly sunny best seller based on his World War II boyhood in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai — and the inspiration for Steven Spielberg's 1987 feel-good movie of that name, starring Christian Bale. But Ballard is also famous for a more sinister novel, Crash, about car-wreck aficionados in outer London, which David Cronenberg made into that notoriously creepy 1996 film, set in Los Angeles.

Even typical Ballard tales, like Cocaine Nights (1996) or Super-Cannes (2000), are not exactly walks in the high-tech research park. Those two hot-selling thrillers were set in, respectively, a Spanish resort community and a leafy French office campus. In both, a clueless visitor tries to unravel a shocking crime, eventually discovering that the stress and boredom of these ostensible Edens have driven their denizens to violent excess. Ballard has seen the enemy and he is us, at our worst. As a slightly less pessimistic British writer, Martin Amis, has observed: "Ballard is quite unlike anyone else. Indeed, he seems to address a different — a disused — part of the reader's brain."

Kingdom Come addresses the shopping lobe. Richard Pearson, a newly jobless advertising executive, visits the Brooklands Metro-Centre, an enclosed shopping mall of gigantic proportions — 20 supermarkets, 30 pharmacies, two hotels — along the M25 motorway near London's Heathrow airport. Two weeks earlier his father, a retired airline pilot, was killed there along with other shoppers when a deranged gunman opened fire. But Pearson soon finds out that the shooting wasn't so random, and that the mall provides far more than loyalty cards and a climate-controlled shopping environment.

The Metro-Centre has its own sports stadium, its own soccer, rugby and ice hockey teams. Armies of their supporters wearing St. George's crosses — England's national flag — surge from mall to match to trashing immigrant neighborhoods. "Whenever sport plays a big part in people's lives," says an overworked doctor in the local casualty ward, "you can be sure they're bored witless and just waiting to break up the furniture."