But if I’d been more savvy about how the media operates I wouldn’t have been surprised. The film Empire of the Sun had been a huge success. A publishing emporium does not care if your writing mercilessly probes the 20th century landscape of fame, media distortion, mass hysteria, shopping malls and emasculated lives. Even the most dim-witted of the publisher’s advertising executives could see the irony of a recommendation from the Daily Mail being displayed proudly on the front cover. Yet they still put it there.

Long-time fans of Ballard will let themselves be carried along by the neutral voice of the narrator, waiting for those moments when the text turns a corner into the bizarre and visionary. A Ballard character is a mechanism of drives and cogitations which reveals itself in cryptic sentences just a couple of times over the course of a novel. They are not plausible characters – but then the Michal Ryan’s and Theodore Kaczynski’s of this world are not plausible either. And it is these kinds of people that Ballard is probing.

Millenium People follows the narrator, David Markham, as he investigates the apparently motiveless bombing at Heathrow airport which killed his first wife. He is led into a world of middle-class rebellion and motive-less violence. Many of the ideas are similar to those explored in Running Wild – and if you can get your hands on that tiny gem of a novella then read it. I much prefer its minimalist style and micro-precise pacing. This latest novel seems to make too many concessions to the mass market in toning down the abstract prose, stretching out to 290 pages length, and keeping the plot skipping along with rather too many coincidental meetings.

Don’t bother reading the blurbs. They will only make you disappointed with the novel. Try to pretend it’s something you picked up at a jumble sale, a work by an obscure author who served a short sentence for possession of cocaine.