āā¦Cheap holidays, over-priced housing, educations that no longer buy securityā¦
ā¦[The middle classes] are the new proletariat, like factory workers a hundred years agoā¦
ā¦Anyone earning less than Ā£300,000 a year scarcely counts. Youāre just a prole in a three-button suitā¦ā
These lines from J.G. Ballardās 2003 novel Millennium People were thought-provoking, yet not wholly convincing 21 years ago. They have, however, become more and more plausible with the passing of time. In a development whose causes and significance have been obscured by the reign of identity politics, the middle classes have been struggling to resist downward mobility and proletarianisation. Itās felt especially by the young as graduates have found themselves saddled with increasingly oppressive debt burdens while education and housing costs are soaring. Meanwhile, offshoring and automation have meant that middle-income jobs have become scarcer ā resulting in something referred to online as āthe overproduction of elitesā. Itās a trend in which, according to a 2019 OECD report, āthe middle class looks increasingly like a boat in rocky watersā.
None of this would have surprised Ballard. Right from the beginning of his career in the mid-Fifties, he was a close observer of the bourgeoisie: āsocietyās keel and anchorā. His typical protagonist is a doctor, psychiatrist, architect or TV producer ā a comfortably middle-class professional. Ballard was among the first to note and analyse a significant change to middle-class life: the flight to the suburbs; the rise of an intensely moralistic illiberalism among some middle-class youth; the importance of home video, the camcorder and later the internet to the isolated suburban lifestyle; the bunkering of the upper middle class in gated communities.
By the early 2000s, Ballard was seeing evidence of increased disgruntlement and straitened circumstances among sections of the middle class ā portents which he examined in Millennium People, his tale of a middle-class uprising in Englandās capital. With a strong dose of black comedy, it represented a welcome return to the London terrain heād mapped so evocatively in the Seventies. But the more realistic, āsociologicalā fiction of his late period was more concerned with āwhat is just about to happen in a given communityā, and ātrying to find the unconscious logic that runs below the surfaceā. As he put it: āthereās something odd going on [in society], and I explore that by writing a novel.ā
There are certainly odd goings-on at Millennium Peopleās fictional estate of Chelsea Marina. What began as a dispute over rising maintenance fees has developed into something bigger and stranger. Now scores of residents, professionals of every stamp, are joining the rebellion ā going on marches, disrupting events (an Earlās Court cat show is ruined) and refusing to pay their bills. They seem to be protesting the ongoing impoverishment ā both material and spiritual ā of bourgeois life.
Into the estate, the police infiltrate psychologist David Markham: a deep-cover spy, so deep heās unaware of his assignment. Markham has personal reasons for investigating the rebellion. Clues point to a connection between an unclaimed bombing at Heathrow, which killed his ex-wife Laura, and the middle-income insurgents of the Marina.
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