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Rating: «All that glitters is not gold.»
(Popular proverb)
"Super-Cannes" is a 2000 novel, the third-to-last book left to us by English writer James Graham Ballard before his death in 2009. It recounts the adventures of Paul Sinclair, husband of a young doctor who is called to Cannes to replace a doctor who a few months earlier went mad and murdered ten people. Just like the character of James Stewart in "Rear Window," Paul cannot move much because he has just had knee surgery, and he decides to spend his idle days investigating the massacre committed by Dr. David Greenwood. Paul and his wife Jane have moved to the extremely wealthy, clean, beautiful, elegant, modern, and technologically advanced district of Eden-Olympia, where they are like a new Adam and Eve joining a small population of equally wealthy, clean, beautiful, elegant, modern, and technologically advanced people—a seemingly perfect, happy place where it seems impossible that a man could have committed such a mad act. Paul cannot explain how this is possible and investigates the event, reconstructing the phases of what happened and trying to give reason to the madness.
This novel by Ballard, like all of Ballard's novels, has two levels of reading. The first is purely literary, and here the book miserably fails: the author cannot develop a story in a minimally credible and interesting way, making it worse with even less believable and interesting characters. That minimal initial mystery element (a man kills ten people: why?) is almost irritatingly nullified by the fact that our protagonist doesn't find any evidence or clues leading him to the truth, but simply goes to the widows, friends, and acquaintances of the deceased who tell him everything: the pathos is absolutely zero. Those few details that our hero doesn't procure himself later come directly to him, as the deus ex machina who took the first step that led the man to commit the massacre voluntarily approaches the protagonist (in the sense of coming forth) and tells him everything: pathos below zero. It also turns out that at the root of it all is the aberrant thinking of a character: even this person tells everything with joy and without omission to Paul, who doesn't even need to ask questions since he goes on a long monologue of pages and pages. To make matters worse, there is an nonexistent rhythm and imbalance in the parts of the story. That said, however, "Super-Cannes" is not a bad book, and is actually a recommended read because it triumphs in the second level of reading: the sociological one. The various little figures moving in the book are just paper cutouts with rough character development operating within the real, authentic, powerful and only character of the book: the residential area of Eden-Olympia, the setting of the novel. This urban typology, which in sociology takes the name "residential enclave," is a living form increasingly spreading in the wealthy areas of the world's rich countries: these are residential areas equipped with all services and closed off practically hermetically from the outside world, thus representing happy islands within more complex realities (Beverly Hills, or those well-off neighborhoods with villas seen in American TV shows, are examples of enclaves). These areas, economically thriving and dominated by a super-security regime and often surrounded by a high wall (both real and metaphorical), seem like utopias but are total dystopias, micro-worlds so perfect that if there's no way to vent one's stress, one ends up sinking into deviance and violence. This is what happens to our characters: the world they find themselves in is so perfect it becomes unbearable, so unbearable that it drives them to deviance. Julia Roberts' character in "My Best Friend's Wedding" would say you can't live on crème brûlée alone; sometimes you need to eat jelly. From this point of view, "Super-Cannes" is a great novel where all the defects of contemporary society come to light, and foremost among them is the need to satisfy one's base animal instincts, once suppressed by morality, religion, and other values, but which the current market regime glorifies (consider, for example, reality shows, the scandal stone of any critique of modernity). It may not be as beautiful as a Flaubert novel, but "Super-Cannes" presents itself as such a summa of all the issues of post-modernity and the capitalist world of abundance that began with Fordism and was exported across the Earth after the USA's victory post-World War II (a world governed by a single, gigantic monovalue: money) that it absolutely deserves to be read.
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