Super-Cannes. Ali Smith
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protagonist and his wife have single-syllable-resonance names rather like children just arrived in this heaven/hell from a ‘How To Read’ infant primer. Penrose himself bears the name of one of the few truly revolutionary British surrealist artists of the twentieth century. But even here Ballard wants something beyond expectations. He wants a wilder Penrose, something even more surreal than surrealism itself, and maybe also a wilder kind of pen, to rise to the challenge of this newfound mystery territory (not forgetting all the attendant sexual punning too).
It looks, on the surface, like naturalism. It’s not long before it’s become much richer and stranger, a prose that reads as part clinical, part ritualised. But even as it’s all being spelled out to us, in a prose so seemingly utilitarian that it hides nothing, and even with our rather lame protagonist, a pawn ‘primed with fresh information’ so holy-fool-like that he blurts out the truth every time he gets closer to the mystery, something begins to form that’s well beyond the genred notions of murder mystery, something mysteriously uncategorisable (well, as anything other than Ballardian). Meanwhile Super-Cannes acts as fictive parody, even self-parody, with as many warnings and Scooby-Doo clues and red herrings as the average Agatha Christie.
Its warning is both melodrama and truly urgent. ‘Read this … you may be in danger.’ Its revelation is the dilettante, distracting nature of the usual kinds and mechanics of fiction. ‘Satisfied that I had virtually solved the mystery, I took a rose from the vase on the hall table and slipped it through my buttonhole,’ Paul says, like an idiot, on only page 50 in a novel which, while pointing out the inescapability of role, anatomises all role play and performance in a determination to get closer to what acting and action really are. Such solvings, such performances of control act as distractions from a frank reality which, as Ballard is at pains in his foreword to point out, is the root source of this thriller that writes itself, foresteps its own footprints, lets us know repeatedly, ritualistically, fetishistically, like a dripfeed, that we’re only being told so much, then unwinds like an increasingly wild and fevered nightmare in a prose so spareseeming and at the same time so near parody that the baroqueness of the truth, and its simultaneous mundanity, aren’t so much revealed as simply apparent, if we just look.
It’s a display of narrative’s irrelevant yet crucial effect on its readers in the face of the open secret, the lack of mystery at the heart of this novel, where Penrose, in Ballard’s brilliant anatomising of psychopathy, simply legitimises every possible taboo and crime in the name of entertainment – or maybe even just the dispelling of boredom.
In this, Super-Cannes performs, critiques, then effortlessly outsteps expectations of the novel form. Angela Carter, who recognised Ballard as one of the writers ‘the times shine through … so that we think they see more clearly than we do, whereas in reality they are making us see more clearly’, quotes him in an essay she wrote in the Orwell year, 1984: ‘I wanted a revolutionary fiction; I wanted the recognition of the whole domain of the unconscious, something British naturalistic fiction never attempted. I wanted a fiction of the imagination which would tell us the truth about ourselves.’
Will Paul escape? What will happen, in the novel’s vicious circling? ‘High up here in Super-Cannes, nothing matters.’ Its revelations aren’t revelations – deep down we knew them all along – and they’re coruscating, blasting, and very everyday. Its long-view version of the human story blows the fictions out of the water. It both rips up and pays homage to the library. It tells no lies. It transforms the act of fiction. What a great novel.
Cambridge, 2014
Quotes are from Extreme Metaphors, and Shaking a Leg: Angela Carter’s Collected Journalism and Writings
1 Visitors to the Dream Palace
THE FIRST PERSON I met at Eden-Olympia was a psychiatrist, and in many ways it seems only too apt that my guide to this ‘intelligent’ city in the hills above Cannes should have been a specialist in mental disorders. I realize now that a kind of waiting madness, like a state of undeclared war, haunted the office buildings of the business park. For most of us, Dr Wilder Penrose was our amiable Prospero, the psychopomp who steered our darkest dreams towards the daylight. I remember his eager smile when we greeted each other, and the evasive eyes that warned me away from his outstretched hand. Only when I learned to admire this flawed and dangerous man was I able to think of killing him.
Rather than fly from London to Nice, a journey as brief as a plastic-tray lunch, Jane and I decided to drive to the Côte d’Azur and steal a few last days of freedom before we committed ourselves to Eden-Olympia and the disciplines of the Euro-corporate lifestyle. Jane was still unsure about her six-month secondment to the business park’s private clinic. Her predecessor, a young English doctor named David Greenwood, had met a tragic and still unexplained death after running amok with a rifle. By chance, Jane had known Greenwood when they worked together at Guy’s Hospital, and I often thought of the boyishly handsome doctor who could rouse an entire women’s ward with a single smile.
Memories of Greenwood were waiting for us at Boulogne as the Jaguar left the cross-Channel ferry and rolled its wheels across the quayside. Going into a tabac for a packet of Gitanes – illicit cigarettes had kept both of us sane during my months in hospital – Jane bought a copy of Paris Match and found Greenwood’s face on the cover, under a headline that referred to the unsolved mystery. As she sat alone on the Jaguar’s bonnet, staring at the graphic photographs of murder victims and the grainy maps of the death route, I realized that my spunky but insecure young wife needed to put a few more miles between herself and Eden-Olympia.
Rather than overheat either Jane’s imagination or the Jaguar’s elderly engine, I decided to avoid the Autoroute du Soleil and take the RN7. We bypassed Paris on the Périphérique, and spent our first evening at a venerable hotel in the forest near Fontainebleau, spelling out the attractions of Eden-Olympia to each other and trying not to notice the antique hunting rifle on the dining-room mantelpiece.
The next day we crossed the olive line, following the long, cicada miles that my mother and father had motored when they first took me to the Mediterranean as a boy. Surprisingly, many of the old landmarks were still there, the family restaurants and literate bookshops, and the light airfields with their casually parked planes that had first made me decide to become a pilot.
Trying to distract Jane, I talked far too much. During the few months of our marriage I had told my doctor-bride almost nothing about myself, and the drive became a mobile autobiography that unwound my earlier life along with the kilometres of dust, insects and sun. My parents had been dead for two decades, but I wanted Jane to meet them, my hard-drinking, womanizing father, a provincial-circuit barrister, and my lonely, daydreaming mother, always getting over yet another doomed affair.
At a hotel in Hauterives, south of Lyons, Jane and I sat in the same high-ceilinged breakfast room, unchanged after thirty-five years, where the stags’ heads still gazed over shelves stocked with the least enticing alcohol I had ever seen. My parents, after their usual bickering breakfast of croissants and coffee helped down by slugs of cognac, had dragged me off to the dream palace of the Facteur Cheval, a magical edifice conjured out of pebbles the old postman collected on his rounds. Working tirelessly for thirty years, he created an heroic doll’s house that expressed his simple but dignified dreams of the earthly paradise. My mother tipsily climbed the miniature stairs, listening to my father declaim the postman’s naive verses in his resonant baritone. All I could think of, with a ten-year-old’s curiosity about my parents’ sex-lives, was what had passed between them during the night. Now, as I embraced Jane on the parapets of the dream palace, I realized that I would never know.
Cheval might have survived, but the France of the 1960s, with its Routier lunches, anti-CRS slogans and the Citroën DS, had been largely replaced by a new France of high-speed