Super-Cannes

One of J. G. Ballard’s most recent works, it picks up on the same themes as Cocaine Nights, and has often been called a companion piece to that book.

A paperback edition was issued in New York by Picador USA in 2002 with ISBN 0312306091.

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 psychiatrist, 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 paediatrician. At first glance Eden-Olympia seems the ideal workers paradise, but beneath its glittering, glass-wall surface, all is not well. For if things are running smoothly, then why are all the residents – these well-established businessmen, doctors, architects, and producers – all suffering heavily from stress and insomnia? And why did Jane’s predecessor, the well-liked and apparently quite sane David Greenwood, go to work one day, with an assault-rifle strapped over his shoulders, murdering several of his friends and co-workers, before he put the rifle to his own head?

Quickly bored with life in Eden-Olympia (“the kind of adolescent society, where you define yourself by the kind of trainers you wear”), Paul decides to investigate the events that led to Greenwood’s death, and begins walking in his footsteps. He soon discovers that just beneath the calm, well-mannered surface of his new home, lays an underworld of crime, deviant sex, and drugs, which seems to be prospering and growing. And all the residents at Eden-Olympia seems not only to be aware of this, but to encourage and welcome this underworld, as it provides them with a means to relate to something else that their jobs, and – by entering that world – to let go of the social restraints and etiquettes that defines their lives.

Paul discovers that Eden-Olympia’s resident psychiatrist, Wilder Penrose, is eagerly encouraging his patients (and there are many of them) to indulge themselves in activities involving sex and violence, as a (successful) cure for their symptoms of stress. Says Penrose: “Psychopathy is its own most potent cure, and always has been. At times, it grasps entire nations in its grip and sends them through vast therapeutic spasms. No drug in the world is that powerful.”

Ballard toys with the idea that our two most primal human urges – sex and violence – are an absolute necessity for us to function, and that removing these things from our society, as seems a long time goal of Western civilization, will ultimately leave us unhappy and unable to relate to the world we live in. Or as Penrose puts it: “Eden-Olympia is an Eden without a snake.” His strange encouragements are his own attempt to put the snake back into the Garden, by becoming that snake himself.

Eden-Olympia therefore becomes a metaphor for a society obsessed with material objects, careers and brand-names; a world it seems, in which madness has become the only means by which we can still remain human. The denouement of the book makes this blatantly clear. Though intended as a surprise, long-time readers of Ballard’s fiction will probably see it coming from a mile away, though this will not upset the theme and atmosphere of the rest of the book.