A high-tech business park on the Mediterranean coast is the setting
for crime of the most disturbing kind in this extraordinary new
bestseller from the writer widely regarded as Britain's No 1 living
novelist – author of Cocaine Nights.
Paul Sinclair and his bright
young wife Jane drive down to the south of France in his vintage Jaguar
so that she can take up a post as doctor to the new community of
Eden-Olympia, just above Cannes. Multinational companies and their
sharpest executives have converged on this high-tech business park,
tempted by its location and facilities, by its efficiency and its
security, and by something far more disquieting. According to its
resident psychologist, Wilder Penrose, the community is "a huge
experiment in how to hothouse the future... an ideas laboratory for the
new millennium". In such a place, he claims, one is absolutely free to "board the escalator of possibility". Jane does just that. But Paul
hesitates before boarding, pausing to look around. He finds what
he sees mystifying and unsettling; when he learns that he and his wife
have been housed in a villa whose previous occupant had been driven to
massacre notable executives on a horrific shooting spree, he begins to
look under the surface. For all the dawn-to-dusk hard work, for all its
productivity and profits, Eden-Olympia is the venue for games of the
most serious sort. So Paul joins in...
On one level Super-Cannes is a
romantic fable of a husband's search for a lost wife. But far larger
issues are involved that go to the heart of a new kind of social
pathology. J.G. Ballard, Britain's most consistently daring and
surprising novelist, has again brought his powers of discovery and
dissent, curiosity and wit, to a tale as pacey, gripping and
illuminating as his previous bestseller, Cocaine Nights.
