Reviews for Super-Cannes

The average rating for Super-Cannes based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-05-06 00:00:00 Jose Paggaria 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.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-03-01 00:00:00 John Como Very much a companion piece to Cocaine Nights, by taking some of the main themes from that and transferring them from the Costa del Sol to the French Riviera, expanding on them, resulting in a richer, deeper, and generally better novel all round. On the surface we have an intelligent satirical thriller with a whodunnit scenario, but it was the sinister underbelly - the darker revelations - that really got to me the most. The protagonist Paul Sinclair could have been plucked straight out of Cocaine Nights - someone cut off from modern life, standing on the side lines waiting to unravel its core, whilst trying to find the answers to his own alienation. And like Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes has, in the psychiatrist Wilder Penrose, a side character who really steals the show. Penrose's Eden-Olympia is one huge monster - a wealthy hi-tech business park sitting in the hills looking over the French Riviera - home to the workaholics and new elites who have life just the way they want it. Here, being sucked up in the world of work has left any social life down the sink hole, as the executives hidden away in their glass-fronted buildings are only ever seen getting in and out of fancy chauffeur-driven cars. But behind the corporate megalomania, there is trouble in paradise - linked to the killings of Dr. Greenwood who gunned down a handful of people for no apparent reason. Sinclair uncovers a network of crime - a serious programme of violence designed by Penrose to counteract the stress of work - from sex games (it was uncomfortable reading in places once child sex abuse is exposed), attacks on Arab pimps and Senegalese merchants, to robbery, vandalism, and ultimately murder - while his young paediatrician wife Jane (Greenwood's replacement) feels less of a wife, by getting hooked on recreational drugs and starting an affair with a neighbours wife. Sinclair, with the help of Frances Baring, an Eden-Olympia employee and former lover of Greenwood, sets out to expose all the wrongs within this French Silicon Valley. On the one hand Sinclair is appalled by what he comes across, and yet, he somehow finds admiration and justification for the ruthlessness behind the businessmen's therapeutic criminal activity. In the long run, I don't think this will become as memorable as High-Rise - my favourite so far - but still, it was a really engrossing read, very accessible, and right up there with his best fiction. 4.7/5