Millennium People

This posthumous novel by master of edgy fiction Ballard is as intriguing as it is perplexing. Opening with a lethal bombing at Heathrow Airport, the plot proceeds in an evolution of increasing violence verging on farce, as a middle-class revolt unfolds in the Chelsea Marina housing complex in London. Led by a likable pediatrician who turns out to be more evil than genius, well-to-do people are leaving their jobs, burning their cars, torching their foreclosed houses, and bombing public landmarks in a reaction against meaningless bourgeois culture. The tale is narrated by psychologist David Markham, who joins the protestors in an effort to get to the bottom of things after discovering that his ex-wife was among the victims in the initial Heathrow bombing. This work echoes the themes of Ballard's more controversial Crash but in a much less visceral way. However, though the sex may be secondary and the violence abstract, there is the same sense of subversive risk and the same focus on accidental wounds and their psychological effects. VERDICT Important Briticisms may be lost on American readers, but no library should pass on this last quirky take on the problems of the new century from one of the great virtuosos of 20th-century fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 1/10/11.]—Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos P.L., CA