Back to Reviews By Title - M

Millennium People, J.G. Ballard
Harper Perennial
Reviewed by John Whelan (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

In J.G. Ballard's troubled brave new world the English middle classes have had enough. Enough of being locked into sky-high mortgages, of forking out huge school fees, of being overlooked for promotion and, damn it all, never being able to find anywhere to park.

How's this for a description of the whole event? "An entire social class is peeling the velvet off the bars and tasting the steel." Get the idea?

It finally dawns on them, amid the chatter of countless dinner parties up and down the length and breadth of the country, that they are now the new oppressed, the new underclass. They feel as downtrodden as any of the Third World poor but unlike them they are able and willing to join the class struggle. These folks are "... tired of being used. And don't like the kind of people they've become ... they hate their lives and are doing something about it."

Revolution follows. London burns. Violent clashes with police, civil disobedience and demonstrations against the establishment. Shopping malls, banks, DIY centres, cinemas, video stores all become targets for their anger.

Bookshops, museums and art galleries are attacked as being exploiters of the middle class. We watch in fascination as doctors, solicitors and architects march together and storm the BBC. Inside the gated communities of the capital the residents have upturned their Volvos, manned the barricades and filled Perrier bottles with petrol to throw at the police.

This is Anarchy in the UK as you've never seen it before. The professional classes in suburbia, with their smart gardens, their labradors and Land Cruisers sitting in the driveway, have gone berserk. Ringleaders urge them towards a violent uprising "... to set people free from all this culture and education ... they're just ways of trapping the middle class and making them docile."

In the middle of all this, the main character tries to find out why his ex-wife was killed by a bomb at Heathrow.

Millennium People is a darkly satirical, hardnosed take on life in 21st Century Britain. A brilliant, unsettling and brutal novel that challenges the status quo and gets you thinking.