You may know that I have another, non-political blog, mostly on topics like science fiction, book collecting, movies, etc. But every now and then a piece comes along that could fit on either blog, such as this Andrew Fox piece on J. G. Ballard’s works and the London riots.
Having been interned as a child in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in World War II (the source of Empire of the Sun), Ballard has always been interested in what happens when you strip the veneer of civilization away. Much of Fox’s piece concerns Ballard’s later novels, which I have not read, “all of which feature middle class professionals either diving into or being pulled into revolutionary, nihilistic violence due to ennui, boredom, or a cancerlike consumerism which has replaced religion and patriotism at the center of their psyche.” (Though I have a number of Ballard first editions, I’m still catching up on the reading them, having just finished The Crystal World earlier this year.) Ballard’s penultimate novel, Millennium People, evidently features “middle class professionals in suburban London instigating terrorism and revolution in an effort to shock a sense of meaning back into their lives.” Which does tie rather neatly into the London riots of the last week…
Also, I must have missed this Theodore Dalrymple piece on Ballard.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)