An Englishman drives into a new town and can’t see the warning signs. Richard Pearson is visiting Surrey to close down his late father’s home and settle his affairs and, everywhere he looks, the flag of St George is flying “from suburban gardens and filling stations and branch post offices”. How nice, he thinks, how festive. Soon he learns the truth. So runs the opening not of a recent piece of journalism, but a novel by JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, which despite being almost 20 years old anticipates today’s Britain with eerie precision.
Does it, Aditya? Does it really? Let’s read on, eh?
Amid this yawning suburbia, Pearson starts to come awake. One evening, he sees an old Volvo up in flames, and an angry mob about to storm a “shabby house”. Inside, he supposes, must be “a released murderer or a paedophile exposed by the local vigilantes”. But no. Out come Muslim women, who have been praying in a makeshift mosque and who must rely on a police line against violence from their own neighbours.
And yet, you seem not to realise that, far from being some Nostradamus-like predictive text, it’s rather got things the wrong way round about exactly whose places of worship are under threat, and who is bearing the brunt of the terror.
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