J.G. Ballard - Super-Cannes

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Super-Cannes – a Sunday Times bestseller in hardback – was the winner of the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Eurasian region.
'Sublime: an elegant, elaborate trap of a novel, which reads as a companion piece to Cocaine Nights but takes ideas from that novel and runs further. The first essential novel of the 21st century.'
– Nicholas Royle, Independent
'Possibly his greatest book. Super-Cannes is both a novel of ideas and a compelling thriller that will keep you turning the pages to the shocking denouement. Only Ballard could have produced it.'
– Simon Hinde, Sunday Express
'In this tautly paced thriller he brilliantly details how man's darker side derails a vast experiment in living, and shows the dangers of a near-future in which going mad is the only way of staying sane.'
– Charlotte Mosley, Daily Mail
'Vintage Ballard, a gripping blend of stylised thriller and fantastic imaginings.'
– Alex Clark, Guardian
'Ballard at his best. Truly superb: the best book he has written. The story achieves the optimum balance of perfectly wrought lucid thriller-writing with formidable and pervasive intelligence.'
– Edward Docx, Daily Express
'Like watching a slow-motion action replay of a spectacular collision, you can't take your eyes away from Super-Cannes.'
– Mike Pattenden, The Times
'Super-Cannes is one of those novels whose last 100 pages you turn over faster and faster, wanting hundreds more: One peels this novel like an onion. Halfway through, I thought I could see the denouement. Three-quarters of the way through, something quite different seemed to be looming up. I have to say that the ending eluded and amazed me. As Ballard always amazes.'
– John Sutherland, Sunday Times
'Ballard's extraordinary new novel reads like a survival manual for the new century: There is a peculiar Englishness that manifests itself in exploration of the exotic, and J. G. Ballard is the most exotic author of all. Super-Cannes is a gleaming, tooled-up taste of tomorrow, beguiling, subversive and so appropriate to the mood of the new century that it feels like a survival handbook; it might just save your life.'
– Christopher Fowler, Independent on Sunday
'A magical hybrid that belongs to no known genre, a masterpiece of the surrealist imagination, Super-Cannes is another triumph by Britain 's most uncompromisingly contemporary novelist.'
John Gray, New Statesman
'J. G. Ballard is the Dr Moreau of British fiction, creator of controlled environments and out-of-control dystopias: More than any other writer Ballard understands the transformation technology may effect on human desire. This is his most potent statement yet of the outcome of that transformation, an elegant nightmare with all the internal coherence of an Escher engraving or a Calvino fable: Ballard unravels the secrets of his post-industrial Elysium with panache, leading us into a society which is both an exaggerated parable for our times and a chill piece of futurology: compelling.'
– Tim Adams, Observer
'With this sharply focused novel, Ballard takes a long sniper's look at the mirror-walled corporate dream, and then shatters it.'
– Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph
'Ballard remains that very rare thing, an original. He is undoubtedly the most exciting of contemporary novelists.
His genius lies in the mood he creates and his often dazzlingly surreal images. Super-Cannes possesses a relentless energy and an atmosphere of calculated corruption: the chilling narrative succeeds as an apocalyptic comment on modern society's inhuman dance of death.'
– Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
'Tainted idylls have always been J. G. Ballard's fictional speciality. With Super-Cannes, he dreams up one of his most memorable. Electrifyingly vivid prose and a storyline alive with shocks power a novel that casts lurid light on an exclusive Riviera enclave of the technological ©lite.'
– Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
'For those who know his work, the familiar pleasures are all present: fecund ideas, the disquieting poetry of his imagery and a strong spine of narrative. For first-timers, the ride begins here. Much writing is touted as essential; little, however, can claim any such distillation of its times. Ballard's is the real thing.'
– Gareth Evans, Time Out
'A dark and incendiary thriller, doing to the gated community and business park what Bram Stoker did for the Transylvanian castle.'
– S. B. Kelly, Scotland on Sunday
'He continues to produce the most trenchant and effective critique of the era and remains the most important contemporary British writer.' Will Self, Independent 'The storyline of intrigue and manipulation sees Ballard's devious imagination on tiptop form. Pacy, intelligent and accessible – one of his most enjoyable books ever, a pageturner that is also a novel of ideas.'
– David Profumo, Literary Review
'One of our strangest and most brilliant novelists. A new novel from Ballard is a literary event to make the heart jolt with uneasy expectation. Super-Cannes, super-saturated with Ballard iconography, is one of the first novels to gaze unflinchingly at the new millennium.'
– Catherine Lockerbie, Scotsman
'Super-Cannes is prime Ballard – weighty, potent and extraordinary.'
– John Preston, Evening Standard
'Ballard just gets hipper and hipper.'
– Guardian

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Helicopters circled the Palm Beach headland, waiting to land at the heliport, like paramilitary gunships about to strafe the beachside crowds. Their white-suited passengers, faces masked by huge shades, stared down with the gaze of gangster generals in a Central American republic surveying a popular uprising. An armada of yachts and motor cruisers strained at their anchors two hundred yards from the beach, so heavily freighted with bodyguards and television equipment that they seemed to raise the sea.

Yet a short walk from the Croisette, as I had seen while driving down the Rue d'Antibes, the Cannes Film Festival might not have existed. Elderly ladies in silk suits and pearls strolled in their unhurried way past the patisseries or exchanged gossip in the salons de thé. Toy poodles soiled their favourite pavements, and tourists scanned the estate agents' displays of new apartment complexes, ready to invest their savings in a prefabricated dream of the sun.

The film festival measured a mile in length, from the Martinez to the Vieux Port, where sales executives tucked into their platters of fruits de mer, but was only fifty yards deep. For a fortnight the Croisette and its grand hotels willingly became a facade, the largest stage set in the world. Without realizing it, the crowds under the palm trees were extras recruited to play their traditional roles. As they cheered and hooted, they were far more confident than the film actors on display, who seemed ill at ease when they stepped from their limos, like celebrity criminals ferried to a mass trial by jury at the Palais, a full-scale cultural Nuremberg furnished with film clips of the atrocities they had helped to commit.

A limousine with Eden-Olympia pennants paused in the stalled traffic outside the Blue Bar. Hoping to catch sight of Jane, I stood up at my table. With Simone and Alain Delage, she was attending a seven-o'clock reception for a Franco-German film financed by one of the business park's merchant banks. After the premiere they would move on to a fireworks party at the Villa Grimaldi and watch the Cannes night turn into a second day.

As the limousine crept forward, a chorus of fists drumming on its roof, I saw the fleshy figure of Pascal Zander lounging across the rear seat. Three young women, as blankly self-conscious as starlets, sat beside him, together trying to light his cigar. They waved like novice queens at the crowd, aware that they had crossed the threshold where celebrity and the illusion of celebrity at last fused for a few exhilarating hours.

A Chinese man carrying a camcorder strode through the spectators, searching for a target of opportunity. Followed by a Scandinavian woman with a clipboard, he took a short cut through the Blue Bar and brushed my shoulder, almost knocking me from my feet. I sat down clumsily, wincing over my inflamed knee. As Zander's limousine pulled away, I thought again how odd it was that I had to visit the Cannes Film Festival, and be assaulted by tourists, in the hope of meeting my wife.

In the months since Jane's panic attempt to leave Eden-Olympia I had seen less and less of her. We shared the same swimming pool, breakfast room and garage, but our lives were drawing away from each other. Jane had committed herself for good to the business park. Long hours of work, a diamorphine night and weekends with Simone Delage made up her world. I was still uneasy over the syrettes in her dressing table, but she had found professional success at Eden-Olympia. She had been profiled in the London medical press, and was completing the diagnostic tests that would soon link every employee in Eden-Olympia and Sophia-Antipolis.

At the same time, the most advanced system of preventive medicine in Europe had been unable to cure my knee injury. The rogue infection had flared up again, a hospital-bred bacterium that resisted antibiotics, rest and physiotherapy. This old barometer of my discontents was forecasting stormy weather. Taking pity on me as I limped around the house in the small hours, Jane made up a solution of muscle relaxant and painkiller. She taught me how to inject myself, and the modest doses were the only effective relief that any of the clinic's highly paid physicians had offered.

The helicopters clattered above the beach, cameras filming from open doorways. A small riot had started outside the Carlton.

According to an American couple at the next table, a leading Hollywood star had promised to emerge from the front entrance, only to discover that a rival studio's production was advertised on a huge billboard above his head. He had turned back into the hotel and slipped out through a rear exit, leaving a rattled publicity woman to make his apologies. Even as she shouted through her megaphone a dozen hands were rocking a TV location van. A Cannes policeman sprawled across the windscreen like a stuntman, shouting to the hotel's security team as the crowd cheered him on.

Exhausted by the noise, I left the table to a middle-aged German tourist, who managed the feat of sitting in my chair before I could rise fully to my feet. I wiped my hands on his shoulder and limped to the toilets at the rear of the bar. I locked myself into a cubicle, and took the leather hypodermic wallet from my jacket. Leaning against the washbasin, I lifted my injured leg onto the lavatory lid and rolled my trouser to the knee. The surgical scars had faded, but the pain still nagged, a cry for help that sounded steadily from beneath the floorboards of my mind.

I broke the seal on the unlabelled phial and drew three ccs into the hypodermic. Avoiding the cluster of old puncture points, I injected the pale solution into the fold of smooth skin on the inner surface of my knee. I counted to twenty as the subcutaneous shot brought its slow but deep relief, pushing the pain further from me, like furniture moved to the far corners of a stage.

Letting my leg fall to the floor, I shouted through the door at an impatient woman rattling the lock. She stepped into another cubicle, and I sat across the washstand, my back to the mirror, letting the tap water run across my hands. As my chest warmed, I thought of Jane, dazzling as any film star in her minuscule black frock, the fur stole around her shoulders, walking into the Palais des Festivals with Alain and Simone Delage.

I, meanwhile, was stuck in a lavatory on the Croisette, like any junkie after a fix, and with scarcely a greater grip on reality. At Easter my cousin Charles had flown down to visit us, and we amicably agreed that I would give up the pretence of helping to edit the firm's publications. He enjoyed his stay, impressed by Jane's newfound role as international career physician, but puzzled by my transformation into a suntanned but distracted consort, forever listening to the ghosts in the garden. I told him nothing about the secret life of Eden-Olympia.

Meanwhile, my investigation into the Greenwood murders had stalled. Between myself and the truth stood an amiable bully with badly bitten fingernails. Although Wilder Penrose enjoyed my company, and generously allowed me to beat him at chess, I knew that he saw me as another of his experimental animals, to be stroked through the bars as I was fattened for yet another maze.

Trying to lead him on, I listened to him enlarge on his psychopathic credo. He had recruited a dozen more bowling clubs, and I hoped that he would soon overreach himself and drive his demented apocalypse into the buffers. He pressed me to join one of the therapy groups, and I finally gave in, intending to take careful notes of the victims and their injuries.

In the rear seats of cars stolen for the evening, I watched as the photographer – a financial analyst with a Japanese bank – recorded the ratissages on his camcorder. An empty mansion on Cap d'Antibes owned by an Egyptian property tycoon was broken into and thoroughly trashed. Another bowling team, made up of senior managers at Elf-Maritime, carried out a spectacular act of piracy in the Golfe-Juan marina, seizing a motor yacht owned by a family of Omani Arabs. They sailed the gaudy vessel to the Îles de Lérins, where it was beached and set alight. From the terrace of the Villa Grimaldi we watched the flames rise into the night. As sleek in their wetsuits as a chorus line of James Bonds, the corporate perpetrators raised their malt-whisky tumblers and toasted the cause of therapeutic psychopathy.

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