Negative Positive
Title: Club class? More like cruise control...
Review: Not a bad story, with the usual Ballardian ideas. But that is the problem: J.G. Ballard is getting lazy. Okay, so exposing the tedium, the superficiality, the pointlessness of bourgeouis life is the point of his writing (isn't it?)... but Ballard's books are getting more and more similar. This is just Vermillion Sands but less fantastic, Running Wild running on empty (and much less economical and experimental in form). All Ballard's characters, from The Drowned World to Cocaine Nights, are like millenial parodies of people out of a Noel Cowerd play - 'how frightfully dreadful, and pass me another cocktail, darling...'. Ballard is probably right ot say that unfortunately this homogenous, leisured, airport lounge, gated-communities culture is the future in a globalized, Americanized world, but surely there are different ways of approching it than to write the same thing, in the same way, over and over again?
Is the review positive or negative? 