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Loading... Millennium People (original 2003; edition 2004)by J. G. Ballard
Work InformationMillennium People by J. G. Ballard (2003)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Middle class rebelling against what it created. Molotov cocktails made with Perrier bottle and regimental ties, "Bonfire of the Volovos", the book picks up on the most endangered sector of society trying to free itself from the world it worked for and created...or could it just be something meaningless. ( ) This is the seventh book I've read this month for my J.G. Ballard binge and I've decided it's going to be my last because I'm building up a residue of a theme, from these novels, that links them, and that is amplified with each next novel; a theme that might be condensed as "How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world." As with every other Ballard novel I've read this month, Ballard's prose here is unique and flabbergasting (if that's a word). Nearly every sentence he writes is a condensed, nearly psychedelic rendering of a nihilistic and yet somehow excruciatingly beautiful worldview. A bitter poetry that makes no apologies. I feel like I've been flayed. A good example of the author's work. A lightly imagined other world peopled by thinnishly sketched characters. But the key thing is the underlying idea. Ballard was great at putting forward challenging ideas place in a world that was almost familiar. Here the revolt of the middle classes. The idea of revolutionary politics in an setting that is not just unlikely but inconceivable, except in the mind of a clever writer. Some very interesting ideas about the so-called middle class but overall, this reads like it is crying for someone to make into a tacky Hollywood film with cardboard cut-out characters and lots of explosions. I kept with it to the end in a hope the might be some solid observations about life in London and angry urban professionals but no, that was too much to ask.
C'est du Ballard très politique, psychiquement moins dérangeant que Crash ou La Foire aux atrocités, facile d'accès, presque trop.
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML: The explosive J. G. Ballard renaissance, which began with the 2009 publication of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard, now continues with his first novel to be published in America in a full decade. Millennium People tells the story of David Markham, a psychologist who is searching for the truth behind a bomb that exploded on a Heathrow baggage carousel, killing his ex-wife. Infiltrating a shadowy protest group responsible for her death, David finds himself succumbing to the charismatic charms of the group's leader, who hopes to foment a violent rebellion against the government by his fanatical adherents, the spiritually and financially impoverished members of Britain's white middle class. It reveals a shockingly plausible and extremely unsettling vision of society in collapse. .No library descriptions found. |
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