A ficção de Ballard não é estranha às psicopatias induzidas pela arquitectura modernista. Induzida talvez não seja o termo correcto. Talvez, despertas, na suprema ironia do rebentar de surtos de violência irracional por entre a geometria simbólica do triunfo da racionalidade fria trazido pelo modernismo. Tem sido assim desde o clássico High Rise, e com o passar dos anos o autor introduz lógicas pervertidas de psicologia que racionalizam o irracional. Caso de Running Wild, sobre as depredações cometidas por crianças que sublimavam na violência a bondade de uma educação conforme os mais avançados pressupostos psicopedaógicos. Tendências que colidem neste implacável Super-Cannes, que ainda se revela de uma presciência arrepiante no que toca aos excessos das classes plutocratas. Tendências visíveis desde sempre, sabemos, mas particularmente evidenciadas nestes tempos contemporâneos de crise sucessiva, esmagamento de direitos sociais tidos como financeiramente incomportáveis e disparo das desigualdades de rendimento para níveis estratosféricos. Hoje, mais do que nunca, a realidade em que os plutocratas vivem está desfasada da dos restantes habitantes planetários. Sintomas que Ballard detectou e perverteu com o seu estilo muito espcial neste romance de 2000 que nalguns aspectos soa tanto a 2015.Descobrimos o paraíso tecnocrático de um parque-modelo de negócios à beira do Mediterrâneo. Arquitecturas limpas recortadas sobre os profundos azuis, espaços interiores sóbrios e anónimos servidos por vivendas prazenteiras e espaçosos parques de estacionamento interiores. Espaços propícios para a nova aristocracia empresarial e as suas legiões de servos em fatos de três peças, com o clima aprazível de Cannes a recompensar o empenho contínuo no profissionalismo. O nosso guia é um aviador de asas danificadas, piloto que está a convalescer de um acidente que o impede de voltar a voar e acompanha a jovem esposa ao parque de negócios de Eden-Olympia, jovem médica recém-recrutada para preencher a vaga deixada por um antecessor que, num assomo de loucura que irá obcecar o aviador preso ao chão, assassinou colegas e amigos do centro de negócios antes de ser abatido pelos seguranças privados.Através desta obsessão, e dos comportamentos bizarros dos pequeno-burgueses com evidentes psicopatias sublimadas que povoam as salas de reunião e gabinetes de trabalho, descobrimos o segredo por detrás da bonomia empresarial. Uma psicopatologia induzida pelo psicólogo do parque para curar maleitas e neuroses que estimula os analistas financeiros, burocratas empresariais e decisores negociais a sublimar as suas neuroses e frustações com erupções de violência sobre minorias. Espancamentos aleatórios nos bairros árabes, violações sistemáticas das prostitutas das zonas pouco recomendáveis à beira do mediterrâneo, jogos amadores às voltas com pedofilia e tráfico de drogas, todo um catálogo de perversões violentas devidamente registadas em câmaras de vídeo pensado como terapia para manter elevados os níveis de energia e motivação dos corporate drones que prosperam na utopia racionalista financeira do parque empresarial. Jogos perigosos aos quais as autoridades fecham os olhos. Perante a prosperidade financeira, as vidas e o bem estar dos mais desfavorecidos tornam-se moeda de troca para garantir a continuidade do sucesso do parque empresarial. É esta presciência sobre o gosto predatório de classes superiores que ganham energia exercendo violência directa sobre os seus inferiores que torna Super-Cannes arrepiante. Não que haja por aí muitas ratissages (limpezas étnicas de bairros degradados) onde advogados e economistas invadam casas de imigrantes para espancamentos aleatórios. As armas predatórias são mais insidiosas e passam por todo um sistema cada vez mais desumano que perverte a sociedade em nome de uma ideologia amarfanhada que mal disfarça compor-se de ganância de lucro a qualquer custo, indiferente aos problemas sociais, éticos, económicos e ambientais que gera. Algures no livro Ballard fala-nos de executivos hiper-produtivos, domadores de uma realidade e dependentes da violência para se manterem no auge das capacidades. Fiel ao seu futurismo surreal, Ballard centra-se nos paraísos europeus onde o alto modernismo arquitectónico legou legiões de monólitos de cimento armado sob o azul profundo do céu como gigantescas antas cerimoniais para um novo milénio. Tal como mais tarde William Gibson, Ballard foi daqueles escritores de ficção científica que percebeu que a melhor forma de extrapolar o futuro para melhor compreender os desafios contemporâneos está no aproximar temporal. Do imaginar de futuros longínquos transferiu-se para a modernidade próxima, o futuro ao virar da esquina, os próximos minutos que são ao mesmo tempo estranhos e familiares. Especulações que extrapolam tendências do presente que, por vezes, se revelam de arrepiante presciência.
A wonderful novel, oozing with millenarian angst and chock-full of Ballard’s favourite icons, played from his deck like tarot cards – the Grounded Pilot, the Closed Community, the Unhinged Doctor, the Sexy Car-Crash – with the theme, as always, having to do with the dark poles of eros and thanatos lurking just beneath the veneer of human society.The plot involves Paul Sinclair, a former airman recovering from a plane crash, who accompanies his young wife Jane to an ultramodern business park on the French Riviera, where she is to work as an on-site physician. Paul gets drawn into uncovering the mystery surrounding Jane’s predecessor, who went on a killing spree and murdered ten people before being killed himself.At first the place seems paradisiacal, full of rich happy people like something from the 30s – ‘a vanished world of Cole Porter and beach pyjamas, morphine lesbians and the swagger portraits of Tamara de Lempicka’. But something is very wrong at the Eden-Olympia complex: in each tiny, everyday detail there is an undercurrent of cheap sex, casual violence, sickness. (It is very Lynchian in that sense: god I wish Lynch would film this.) ‘Over the swimming pools and manicured lawns seemed to hover a dream of violence,’ we are told at one point; but often the hints are more subtle and unnerving. Innocuous body parts become creepy and upsetting as Ballard describes them:My exposed big toes unsettled her, flexing priapically among the unswept leaves.I love this sentence so much. It makes me laugh at how ridiculous it is, while also making me shudder because it works. There is more lurking menace when Paul and Jane arrive at their new home:The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.—Actually let me just stop there for a second so we can appreciate that admirable sentence. Doing a lot of work, isn’t it! Direct but efficient. Ballard goes on:Reflections from its disturbed surface seemed to bruise the smooth walls of the house. The light drummed against Jane’s sunglasses, giving her the edgy and vulnerable look of a studio visitor who had strayed into the wrong film set.The reference to the movie business is an example of Ballard’s tendency to choose his similes and metaphors from the realms of modern technology and celebrity culture. The world of Super-Cannes is not natural but, rather, mediated or scientific, even medical: a flag flutters ‘like the trace of a fibrillating heart’, the sea is ‘smooth enough to xerox’, every hair on a fur stole is ‘as vibrant as an electron track in a cloud chamber’, crowds of tourists clump around the shop-fronts ‘like platelets blocking an artery’.This is only the third or fourth Ballard novel I’ve read, but I’ve never enjoyed his cold, efficient prose style more than I did here. Some writers explore themes; Ballard dissects them, using a scalpel. Like his main influence, William Burroughs, and his main disciple, Will Self, Ballard sees social problems as a matter of pathology: sexual perversion for him is about psychosexual dysfunction; casual violence is about clinical psychopathy. This medicalisation can make for an eerie worldview, but it gives you some descriptive passages you wouldn’t get from any other writer. And for once, I genuinely cared about the characters here – I was really rooting for Paul and Jane to get out in one piece.As well as being a mystery story, this is a stonking novel-of-ideas, and the main idea is this: if the modern world is making us all less sociable and more atomised, what might the psychological consequences be? Because the madness and violence at Eden-Olympia are intimately tied to the erosion of community that Ballard sees around him:People find all the togetherness they need in the airport boarding lounge and the department-store lift. They pay lip service to community values but prefer to be alone.Or again: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.I’m not sure I entirely accept Ballard’s thesis, or his speculation that ‘meaningless violence may be the true poetry of the new millennium’; but then I don’t think he does either – it’s thrown out there as a way of working with the issues. Watching him at work, scalpel in hand, is disturbing, thought-provoking, and enormously enjoyable.
What do You think about Super-Cannes (2002)?
Magnifico.Qui c'è tutto il Ballard che conta, il più acuto indagatore delle nuove forme di mala-società (passatemi il termine). Ci si ritrovano le idee che hanno reso riconoscibile e unica la sua disturbante narrativa e, in nuce, quelle poi approfondite in Regno a venire, l'ultimo suo romanzo. Il dottor Wilder Penrose è un personaggio memorabile. La sua idea di preservare la salute e l'efficienza lavorativa della élite neo-borghese di Super-Cannes attraverso trattamenti terapeutici basati su programmati sfoghi di psicopatologia è terrificante.E credo, in fin dei conti, sostanzialmente corretta.
—pierlapo quimby
Many reviewers sneer at this book because they think the author repeated himself and said it better in his previous novels. Since I haven't read them, I enjoyed this one very much.Super-Cannes is a literary Art novel. The plot is an imaginary, and dark, exploration about rewarding merit-based achievements with opportunities to unleash racism and class cruelty. I think this is a terribly flawed story; however, I keep see-sawing between three or four stars. I think 4 stars will be where I'll settle, but I wish I could select three and a half stars. The writing is stellar, even if the plot is far-fetched, and the storyline is a strong kick in the head. Our hero, a title which I hesitate to use for this morally challenged man, Paul Sinclair, a publisher of aviation journals, and his wife, Dr. Jane Sinclair, a pediatrician/scientist, move to a business park called Eden-Olympia (subtle, eh?), near Cannes in France. Eden-Olympia is a gated community of extremely well-educated professional workers, each primary (and I mean primary!) adult and sometimes a spouse are employed by multinational companies whose offices are throughout the park alongside luxurious houses for the workers, given as part of the free premiums to which invited business elites are entitled. These intellectually gifted elites have a work ethic which matches their business acumen - it is a common to find them hard at work 24/7, finally stopping only when their libidos demand attention. Paul is crippled, symbolically and in actual fact, having crashed his airplane. His flying wings have been taken away because the accident was determined to have been due to his negligence. His knees were severely injured as well. He can walk, but an infection has set in and Paul is in constant pain. He doesn't seem to be healing. He hangs out at the pool resting his legs or takes long walks, while Jane works at what she considers her dream job, doing the research she has always wanted. She is in her 20's and he is much much older. There are a lot of jokes regarding how Paul robbed the cradle. They are also newlyweds, having met in the hospital during Paul's recovery. Now they are here in Super-Cannes, so called because of the implicit power and money residing within their walls. She signs a 6-month contract, then another, as Paul begins to use his time to investigate a former friend's death. By amazing coincidence, they live in the same house their friend, Dr. David Greenwood, had lived in before he apparently went insane and on a killing rampage, murdered 7 people. Paul begins to see and hear disquieting things which make him suspicious of the official report of his friend's murders, especially because the security men are definitely unsavory in their deportment. There are cameras everywhere, so there must be recordings, but they've never been seen, having disappeared. Then he finds bullet shells where he shouldn't have, and he catches people in lies. There is a definite coverup going on, but why? Worse, when he comes home after wandering about, talking to people and seeing some terrible policing incidents, he finds Jane stupefied with injected drugs and having had sex with a neighbor's wife. Upon waking her, she is cheerful and happy, so he says and does nothing. Part of Paul's reticence to become upset is he has shameful secrets of his own, (view spoiler)[one being he loved beating up people in traditional hazing incidents when he was in the RAF and two, he is aware he became excited when prowling around a bad part of town where young girls were being prostituted by Russian gangsters, (hide spoiler)]
—aPriL does feral sometimes
A business complex in Cannes is gradually overtaken by a psychopathic philosophy, threatening a Third World War. As in all JG Ballard novels, the narrator’s perversities are explored, the veneer of wealth and success is lifted, and an underworld of crime and sickness unleashed.This is Ballard’s longest novel and doesn’t benefit from its chunkiness. In fact, the detective novel plot and overabundant description make this a less successful work from the master of short-form fiction. It also doesn’t help that this novel is a retread of Cocaine Nights, moved from London to France (and featuring few actual French people).For diehard Ballardians only.
—MJ Nicholls
