Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

A car’s width from the hard shoulder, anything is possible. Siebel could be an illusion. A photo-realist hoarding. We walk towards the central tower, the bottle-glass Panopticon. And then we’re inside — with no memory of having passed through an automatic door. The building has no inside. There is more space as you approach the great ledge of the control desk than when you stand in the car park, looking in. The air is better, the temperature gentler. Light dazzles from every surface.

Unlike Bishopsgate in the City, or Canary Wharf, no one challenges your right to wander. The women at the desk are charming; young (but not too young), elegant (but not intimidating). They smile. They know nothing. You are welcome to see whatever you want to see, but there is no content. Glass lifts rise and fall like water features. Strollers drift from level to level, doing nothing; nodding, avoiding conversation, argument, the testosterone urgency of the market. What Siebel are peddling is: absence of attitude. Zero attrition. No cutting edge. The right decision — which is no decision.

Road-ragged pedestrians, such as Renchi and I, are welcome because we do not register . As far as the women at the desk are concerned, we do not appear on the screen. We come from another universe and very soon we’ll go back to it.

Can we make an appointment to inspect this marvellous place? Of course. But not now, not here; another tomorrow. What does Siebel produce? Who can say? Siebel is . A shimmering mirage. A virtual oasis on the edge of a collapsing motorway system. Siebel sibilates. A near anagram of e-libels.

I pick up a brochure. Fatter, glossier, more anodyne than an in-flight magazine. The atrium is the least resistant hotel lobby in the world. The ultimate waiting room. Blue-grey magazines can be carried, but not read. We settle ourselves in a set of criminally comfortable armchairs; leather too soft to wear, so tender it feels as if it’s still alive.

Siebel, The Magazine has a man in a suit on the cover. He’s not smiling, or frowning. He wears a beard that isn’t a beard; it’s a quotation from a film nobody can put their finger on. ‘Customer satisfaction,’ says the brochure. ‘Seamless integration.’ ‘Comprehensive upgrade.’ Of what ? I want to scream. ‘Solutions provider.’ Siebel has solutions for questions that have not yet been asked, will never be asked.

A Sino-American businessman holds a tiny screen in his hand: ‘You’re always connected and always available. Some call it a revolution; others call it evolution.’ Language is de-fanged, homogenised. Yellow E-tab faces leer at you. Ecstasy without frenzy. Satisfaction, whether you want it or not. ‘The Siebel eRoadmap to Successful eBusiness.’

I’ve had enough. I’m with Georges Perec, whose novel La Disparition was written without the letter e . The commonest letter in the pack is an untrustworthy creature. A nark, a grass. They use it to crack codes. Too much tail, too much wiggle. A high-pitched sound. A petulant fly in an afternoon bedroom.

If we believe in the Siebel world, we might as well give up the walk now. But there’s another option: I decide to visit J.G. Ballard at Shepperton. How does he feel about predicting, and thereby confirming, the psychogeography of Heathrow’s retail/recreation fallout zone?

It was a day when the weather was so warm, the view from the slow train (M3 across golf paddocks and ‘refuse transfer stations’) so seductive, that any sane North European would begin to think the unthinkable: climate change. This greenery with its huddles of loud-leisure golfers, traffic breezing westward, is future desert. The Drought . Ballard isn’t dealing in metaphors, he means it. The wise men (poets, social scientists, demagogues, Diggers, anti-psychiatrists) gathered at the Roundhouse in Camden Town in 1967, for the epochal ‘Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation’, all talked about one thing: Gregory Bateson’s riff on melting polar ice-caps, carbon dioxide emissions, the squandering of fossil fuels. Bateson wasn’t messianic. He didn’t rant and rage like Stokely Carmichael. He didn’t hide, junk sick, behind dark glasses, muttering apocalypse and revenge (like Emmett Grogan). He was very reasonable, steady voiced; the dark humour of an implacable logic.

So we accelerated our road building programme in the white hot technology of Old Labour. We put a necklace around London, from the Exxon/Mobile (Esso) storage tanks at Purfleet to the jumbo-park of Heathrow. We burnt the city’s waste at Enfield, then fed the compacted dust back into new motorways.

Out in Shepperton, Ballard was as calm, as rational as Bateson. They were both Cambridge men who had lived abroad. Ballard was a copywriter for the Book of Revelations, the final dissolution. He skimmed technical journals, adapted their vocabulary. He was on friendly terms with scientists like Chris Evans. From such apparently innocent documents as the Siebel brochure, he factored the terminology for a sinister poetic. That’s where the virus was located, in the blandest of all forms, the puff, the free-sheet, the trade launch. The Motor Show at Earl’s Court, as Ballard recognised, would prove to be a more subversive gathering than the coming together of counter-cultural magi in Camden Town. William Burroughs, a major influence on Ballard, had been saying it for years: read the financial reports from IBM, cut them against a travel book by Graham Greene, a rhapsodic paragraph of Conrad, a snapshot from Tangier.

Burroughs took a dozen lifetimes to grow into his face, that prescient skull. A dozen lifetimes to arrive at the red cabin in Lawrence, Kansas. Ballard made it to Shepperton in the 1960s. The Drowned World . This was never an exile. You can only achieve exilic status when you’d prefer to be somewhere else, when you acknowledge the power of the centre. For Ballard the transit out of West London was a spin to the colonies, the desert resorts of his fiction, not a banishment. The metropolis, so far as he is concerned, can sink into the swamp. The buildings are old and dirty and uninteresting and the furniture is dull. Ballard, at twenty-one, was an enthusiastic visitor to the Festival of Britain. The Skylon. The conjunction with the river. Those Swedish chairs!

Ballard’s fiction, reprising and reworking its own templates, is not prophetic in a way that would be recognised by H.G. Wells or George Griffith. The tone is matter of fact. Seemingly extraordinary or perverse episodes can be traced back to images in art books, cuttings from magazines, nightcap television: trade journalism and copywriting with their hypnotic present-tense blandishments, when you microwave them, turn feral. Let out the demons. Ballard doesn’t use a PC, he hammers away on a trusted portable. These are some of the books in his library (1984), as logged by interviewers from RE/SEARCH. The Warren Commission Report. Céline: A Biography by Patrick McCarthy. Stanley Spencer catalogue from the Royal Academy. White Women by Helmut Newton. The Soft Machine by William Burroughs. Mountbatten by Richard Hough. ‘I don’t have much to do with those literary people,’ Ballard told me.

I was delighted to learn that Ballard, who previewed the target towers of Canary Wharf in High-Rise (1975), had come to town to check out the Millennium Dome. His account of the excursion dealt, for the most part, with the journey. East London is a mystery to him. He’s read about it, but he has no desire to sample it first hand, other than through the window of a car. The Dome was nothing. He’d conjured up just this kind of hucksterist tent show (carny booths, empty car parks, toxic mutations, cyber-sell) in his early fiction. The Dome, as a concept, lagged years behind the Festival of Britain. The Dome was a marquee from a Regency pleasure park, Ranelagh or Vauxhall, visited by offcuts from a novel by William Thackeray.