Hyperreality and Consumer Society: J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come

Abstract

Over the course of a literary career spanning over four decades, J.G. Ballard established himself as an important British contemporary writer. In his final novel, Kingdom Come (2006), Ballard again expresses his disdain for the contemporary world, spinning a bleak story detailing the consumer society of a London suburb through the eyes of an unemployed account executive. Ballard provides a mystery embedded within the personal plot of the narrator who, faced with the murder of an estranged father, searches to find his killer and shed light upon his father’s obscure life. Nevertheless the novel proves to be more than a race towards these revelations. Using the protagonist’s entry and eventual settling into a London suburb to provide the reader with what often seems to be a sadistically self- conscious awareness of consumer society, Ballard explores the extremes of a consumerist culture through the lens of simulation theory. This article attempts to examine these extremes using Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation and consumer society to propose that the heights of consumerist craze reached in Kingdom Come are a result of the dominance of hyperreality over reality.