A killing spree in the South of France

SUPER-CANNES by JG Ballard (Flamingo, 16.99)

ONE of the many peculiarities of JG Ballard's new novel is how closely it resembles his last one, Cocaine Nights.

Similar setting, similar plot and more-or-less identical theme.

However, whereas Cocaine Nights started brilliantly, but became bogged down in endless plot convolutions, Super-Cannes is a much more sustained, more cohesive novel in which Ballard shows himself - among other things - to be a hugely accomplished thriller writer.

Paul Sinclair, the middle-aged editor of an aviation magazine, and his young wife, Jane, go to the South of France where she has a new job as the resident doctor at a high-tech business park called Eden- Olympia. Here the bosses and employees of various multinational companies work, rest and play in an apparently idyllic and efficient community. But beneath the glitzy exterior of Eden-Olympia, all is not well.

Jane's predecessor, a mild-mannered English doctor, has gone on a killing spree, murdering 10 people, then turned his gun on himself.

While Jane throws herself without misgivings into this corporate paradise, her husband mooches about in the sunshine and starts to play the detective.

Soon he discovers that the official explanation for the murders does not ring true. What Paul finds appalls him - although it's unlikely to come as a great surprise to those with more than a passing acquaintance with Ballard's work.

To make themselves more efficient and less torpid, the executives of Eden-Olympia have been engaging in carefully choreographed acts of violence, roaming around in gangs and beating up luckless North African workers. A bit of ritualised bloodletting and soon everyone is back up to peak performance levels. As one of the Eden-Olympia fatcats puts it, "There's a remarkable need for punitive violence hidden away in the senior executive mind."

Not only that, they're also engaging in some very kinky sex - often with the children of their victims. Shocked though he is by all these sinister attractions, Paul finds that he is by no means immune to them. Soon he is falling, if not succumbing, for the charms of a Russian schoolgirl.

Meanwhile, his wife Jane is having a lesbian affair with their next-door neighbour, as well as swiftly turning into a heroin addict.

A rundown of the plot makes it sound perilously close to Grand Guignol. But Ballard loves to go that bit further out than anyone else; to nose around the outer limits of human behaviour and to rub up against the inconceivable.

What ought to be daft becomes instead extremely disquieting. His is a world in which anything has become possible. In this twisted scheme of things, it comes to seem quite logical that the one upright citizen in Eden-Olympia should be a mass murderer. Morality has disappeared, so has sanity, and all that's left is a kind of institutionalised madness.

Reading Ballard is like viewing the world through a completely new set of lenses. Sex, in particular, has never seemed more strange and more dangerouslycharged. Certainly no one else could come up with a sentence like, "She ... weighed my testicles like a stockwoman with an elderly breeding bull."? Super-Cannes is prime Ballard - weighty, potent and extraordinary.

Copyright 2000
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