Millennium People

Violent rebellion comes to London's middle classes in the extraordinary new novel from the author of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes. When a bomb goes off at Heathrow it looks like just another random act of violence to psychologist David Markham. But then he discovers that his ex-wife Laura is among the victims. Acting on police suspicions, he starts to investigate London's fringe protest movements, falling in with a shadowy group based in the comfortable Thameside estate of Chelsea Marina. Led by a charismatic doctor, the group aims to rouse the docile middle classes to anger and violence, to free them from both the self-imposed burdens of civic responsibility and the trappings of a consumer society -- private schools, foreign nannies, health insurance and overpriced housing. Markham, seeking the truth behind Laura's death, is swept up in a campaign that spirals rapidly out of control. Every certainty in his life is questioned as the cornerstones of middle England become targets and growing panic grips the capital!

ISBN 0006551610   DEWEY edition DC22 ISBN13 9780006551614 (What's this?)   Pages 320 Publisher HarperCollins Publishers   Weight (grammes) 225 Imprint HarperPerennial   Published in London Format Paperback   Height (mm) 197 Publication date 07 Jun 2004   Width (mm) 130 Library of Congress PR6052.A46   Academic level General DEWEY 823.914

'Wonderfully warped, blackly comic! written with Ballard's customary panache, its potent mix of sex, violence and radicalism will keep his fans happy. Millennium People is at once deadly serious and slightly ridiculous -- and somehow all the more unsettling for it.' Economist 'Much of the fun of Millennium People -- and it is one of the most amusing novels I've read in a long time -- comes from watching as the world finally catches up with Ballard and Ballard, wryly, reacts.' Guardian 'Terrifying and strangely haunting! A riveting work from a writer of rare imaginative largesse, a bearer of bad tidings, unforgettably told.' Daily Telegraph 'Another disturbing and extraordinary vision exploring the nature of violence and pleasure.' Bookseller 'Ballard's flowing prose exerts its usual hypnotic spell and there are many darkly beautiful moments.' Andrew Martin, Daily Express 'Ballard, acutely fierce as ever, detonates a bomb under Middle England in his continuing attempt to shock the middle classes out of complacency and into violent struggle.' Esquire 'Very weird stuff! This is a tidy and thoroughly English sort of revolution, with the perpetrators considerately ordering skips beforehand. Ballard is a natural surrealist; his is a world where the unthinkable is commonplace and rationality chucked in the towel long ago. However deranged Millennium People might appear, Ballard's phrasing is as sure as ever. He writes wonderfully well about London. His characterisation is as vivid as it is strange. An extremely unsettling novel. Reading it is like having all the planks that underpin your life removed one by one and being forced to confront the brutality and emptiness that lies below.' John Preston, The Scotsman 'The strongest presence must be the sprawling, sinister, banal and electrifying metropolis that is Ballard's London. He has created a compelling city rooted in acute observation and extraordinary imagination. He is in a league of his own! who else could come up with "long-term car park of the soul"?' Sam Phipps, Herald

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