Super-Cannes

From Publishers Weekly The connoisseur of the bizarre (Cocaine Nights, The Atrocity Exhibition, etc.) turns his attentions to the globalized corporate elite in his 26th book. Crippled aviator Paul Sinclair ("I counted the titanium claws that held the kneecap together") accompanies his young wife, Jane, to her new posting at a luxurious corporate park on the French Riviera. A manicured paradise of multinational conglomerate HQs and their executives' villas, Eden-Olympia (which the author has modeled on the current business parks of Antibes-les-Pins and Sophia-Antipolis) is managed by a seductive yet sinister psychiatrist named Wilder Penrose, who ensconces the Sinclairs in the house of a former local doctor named Greenwood, who one day went on a suicidal murder spree, leaving 10 dead. In short Ballardesque order, the Sinclairs become estranged from one another: Jane falls into heroin-fueled m‚nages with the Belgian couple next door; Paul takes up tranquilizers and trysts with an Eden-Olympia vamp. Paul becomes obsessed with unraveling the mystery of the massacre, coming almost to identify with Greenwood. His efforts eventually reveal the horrifying true nature of Eden-Olympia, where the most bestial drives of corporate executives are harnessed in Brownshirt-style "therapy sessions" to create optimum working efficiency. Paul's collision course with the psychopathic Penrose is a new twist on Ballard's weird neo-romanticism, whereby our self-defining "latent psychopathy" is put to use to save society rather than to revel in hedonistic defiance of it (… la Crash). Ballard actually seems to have penned a story with a clear-cut hero (if the reader overlooks Paul's drug use and pedophiliac urges) and villain ("I don't want to start a race war or not yet"), with the fate of civilization in the balance. This novel, for all the author's trademark grotesqueries, may be Ballard's most commercially viable yet. Author tour. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal In a slightly surreal fantasia that is still too close for comfort, Ballard (Empire of the Sun) has seen the future and it is not fun. Eden-Olympia on France's C?te d'Azur is a multinational business park where families live in cloistered comfort and happily work, work, work. A snake has intruded in Eden, however; a young doctor has run amok and shot several people to death before being killed himself. A waiflike British doctor named Jane Sinclair has agreed to take his place and heads to Eden-Olympia with Paul, her much older husband. Paul, who narrates the proceedings, investigates the doctor's death and soon realizes that, with blessings from on high, the park's corporate overachievers have learned to relieve stress by indulging in various forms of increasingly ugly antisocial behavior. Ballard quickly and effectively makes the point that corporatism has crushed our souls, then spends an awful lot of time reaching the conclusion, when all the evil machinations at Eden-Olympia come out. Some readers will get tired of waiting and will find it hard to believe that Paul and Jane didn't duck out sooner. Those who persevere, however, will find the final pages persuasive and gripping. For larger fiction collections. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. In the hills above Cannes, a European elite has gathered in the business-park Eden-Olympia, a closed society that offers its privileged residents luxury homes, private doctors, private security forces, their own psychiatrists, and other conveniences required by the modern businessman. The book's protagonist, Paul, quits his job as an editor and moves to Eden-Olympia with his wife Jane when she is offered a job there as a pediatrician. At first glance, Eden-Olympia seems the ideal workers' paradise, but beneath its glittering, glass-wall surface, all is not well. "A disturbing mystery awaits Paul and Jane Sinclair when they arrive in Eden-Olympia, a high-tech business park in the hills above Cannes. Jane is to work as a doctor for those who live in this ultra-modern workers' paradise. But what caused her predecessor to go on a shooting spree that made headlines around the world? As Paul investigates, he begins to uncover a thriving subculture of crime that is spiralling out of control."--The publisher Paul And His Wife Jane Move To France So That She Can Take Up A Post As Doctor To The New Community Of Eden-olympia. According To Its Resident Psychologist, The Community Is A Place Where One Is Absolutely Free To Board The Escalator Of Possibility. And, Jane Does Just That. J.g. Ballard. Super-Cannes follows where our executive super-capitalist dreams utopia must lead and shows us how we might yet escape that dark and violent cul-de-sac. Ballard is the author of Empire of the Sun, Crash and his most recent bestseller, Cocaine Nights THE FIRST PERSON I met at Eden-Olympia was a psychiatrist, and in many ways it seems only too apt that my guide to this 'intelligent' city in the hills above Cannes should have been a specialist in mental disorders. A high-tech business park on the Mediterranean coast is the setting for a crime of the most disturbing kind: spree killings. 'The first essential novel of the 21st century' The Independent