Super-Cannes (Ldp Litterature)

by J. G. Ballard

A high-tech business park on the Mediterranean coast is the setting for crime of the most disturbing kind in this extraordinary new bestseller from the writer widely regarded as Britain’s No 1 living novelist – author of Cocaine Nights.

Paul Sinclair and his bright young wife Jane drive down to the south of France in his vintage Jaguar so that she can take up a post as doctor to the new community of Eden-Olympia, just above Cannes.

Multinational companies and their sharpest executives have converged on this high-tech business park, tempted by its location and facilities, by its efficiency and its security, and by something far more disquieting. According to its resident psychologist, Wilder Penrose, the community is ‘a huge experiment in how to hothouse the future…an ideas laboratory for the new millennium’. In such a place, he claims, one is absolutely free to ‘board the escalator of possibility’. Jane does just that. But Paul hesitates before boarding, pausing to look around.

He finds what he sees mystifying and unsettling; when he learns that he and his wife have been housed in a villa whose previous occupant had been driven to massacre notable executives on a horrific shooting spree, he begins to look under the surface. For all the dawn-to-dusk hard work, for all its productivity and profits, Eden-Olympia is the venue for games of the most serious sort. So Paul joins in…

On one level ‘Super-Cannes’ is a romantic fable of a husband’s search for a lost wife. But far larger issues are involved that go to the heart of a new kind of social pathology. J.G. Ballard, Britain’s most consistently daring and surprising novelist, has again brought his powers of discovery and dissent, curiosity and wit, to a tale as pacey, gripping and illuminating as his previous bestseller, ‘Cocaine Nights’.

• ISBN10: 0002258471
• ISBN13: 9780002258470
• Publish Date: 4 September 2000
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 4 October 2004
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: Flamingo
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 400
• Language: English
• URL: http://harpercollins.co.uk

Reviews

[Cameron Trost]

Super-Cannes is in many ways a sequel to Cocaine Nights, or indeed a revisiting. We have the element of mystery, in this case, why the previous resident doctor went on a shooting spree, gunning down his colleagues in Eden-Olympia, the multinational business park used by Ballard to represent the soulless shoppingcentrisation of the future. What dark secret is kept by these work-obsessed technocrats, whose world is controlled, comfortable, highly ritualised, and apparently absent of insanity? As our protagonist, Paul Sinclair, the injured pilot married to the park's new doctor, Jane, unravels the truth, he starts finding himself identifying with the late Doctor Greenwood.

This novel includes some of Ballard's finest lines, a few of which I've included below. It's not all gold, of course, and as is often the case in Ballard's novels, the brilliant concept sometimes gets lost in repetitive observations and description that distract from the plot. For me, the first third of Super-Cannes was gripping and displayed plenty of excellent prose. The questions raised and points made were then rehashed too much in the middle, but the action picked up towards the end, with scenes reminiscent of Crash, and the inevitable ending brought the session of psychoanalysis to a close.

The following excerpts show you some of the entertaining prose to be found in this book. Best not take it all too seriously though; after all, neither Hitler nor Pol Pot walked out of a desert. All the same, plenty of food for thought.

"Madness – that’s all they have. After working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, going mad is their only way of staying sane."

"The twentieth century ended with its dreams in ruins. The notion of the community as a voluntary association of enlightened citizens has died forever. We realize how suffocatingly humane we've become, dedicated to moderation and the middle way. The suburbanization of the soul has overrun our planet like the plague."

"Thousands of people live and work here without making a single decision about right and wrong. The moral order is engineered into their lives along with the speed limits and the security systems."

"Representative democracy had been replaced by the surveillance camera and the private police force."

"Their moral perception of evil was so eroded that it failed to warn them of danger. Places like Eden-Olympia are fertile ground for any messiah with a grudge. The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks."