By Peter Handel
English novelist and short-story author J.G. Ballard (1930–2009) left behind a body of work that encompasses a range of motifs, his vast imagination reflected in the variety of genres he wrote in, from science fiction to semi-autobiographical novels such as Empire of the Sun
(based in part on his childhood experiences, and made into a film by Steven Spielberg), and distinctly edgy and unnerving works such as Crash, about “the psychosexuality of car-crash enthusiasts.”He also wrote several books deconstructing contemporary Western life and the alienation that permeates it. Running Wild, a novella published in the UK in 1988, and in the United States a year later, is a concise, barely 100-page illustration of that concept, which, in Ballard’s singular hand, is at once a searing critique of upper-class family life and a rich comedic parody.
Set in the upper-crust, gated suburban London estate of Pangbourne Village, Running Wild is a first-person recounting of a mass murder at the estate, as told by one Dr. Richard Greville, deputy psychiatric adviser to London’s Metropolitan Police.
Greville opens his account of the killings—all of the casualties being parents, most of them successful professionals—with the puzzling question of why such kind, caring residents were so ruthlessly (and creatively) slaughtered, and who could have done it? The investigation has the authorities stymied, because all 13 of the victims’ children who lived at Pangbourne have disappeared without a trace. “[T]hey’ve vanished through some window of time and space,” Greville observes, quoting the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office on the matter of these unbelievable circumstances. “Not a ransom demand, or even a simple threat to kill them ...”
It’s not a spoiler to mention right off, that only one explanation, an explanation that eludes the authorities—so deluded by their own biases—can be plausible. It was the children who rid themselves of their apparently despised parents. (The cover of the UK edition—shown below—makes this clear, with Janet Woolley’s evocative illustration of the youths, all of whom are holding weapons.)
Greville, recounting the theories of police, runs down a lengthy inventory of what else might have happened—who could have accomplished such mass carnage. Some of those hypotheses are borderline hilarious: perpetrators might have been “Soviet Spetnaz commandoes,” or “an experimental nerve-gas projectile fallen from an RAF or USAF military aircraft”; perhaps “the murdered residents and their children were, unknown to themselves, deep-cover agents of a foreign power.” But why stop there? It could have been “terrorists,” “thrill killers,” “organized crime.” The list goes on.
Ballard is seldom without a satirical sense of humor or embrace of the absurd. For example, consider the name of his gated community, “Pangbourne.” Pang is a “sharp feeling of pain,” or “a sudden sharp feeling of emotional distress.” Bourne, while defined as “a boundary or goal or destination,” may simply be a play on words for “born.”
It’s only Greville and a single policeman, Sergeant Payne, who see that forest for the trees.
Ballard clearly takes delight in describing the manner(s) of death discovered by the police. One victim, for instance, is Roger Garfield, the wealthy parent of a now-missing 16-year-old son, whose body is captured in his car by a police video of the scene—“a merchant banker in his mid-fifties ... sits in the rear seat, head leaning against the off-side stereo speaker as if to catch some fleeting grace note. He is a large-chested man with a well-lunched midriff and strong legs that have spent agonizing hours on an exercise cycle. He has been shot twice through the chest with a small-caliber handgun. Almost as surprising, he is wearing no trousers, and blood-stained footprints emerging from the house indicate that he was shot while dressing after his morning shower. He somehow managed to walk downstairs and take refuge in his car. Perhaps his clouding mind still assumed that he would be driven to his office in the City of London.”
Other death scenes show that “husbands and wives were shot down across their still-warm beds, stabbed in shower stalls, electrocuted in their baths or crushed against their garage doors by their own cars. In a period generally agreed to be no more than twenty minutes, some thirty-two people were savagely but efficiently done to death.”
But, but: As the lucky “domestic servants” who had that particular day off testified, “the murder victims were enlightened and loving parents, who shared liberal and humane values which they displayed almost to a fault. The children attended exclusive private days schools near Reading [a London suburb], and their successful academic records reveal a complete absence of stress in their home lives. The parents (all of whom, untypically, for their professional class, seem to have objected to boarding schools) devoted long hours to their offspring, even to the extent of sacrificing their own social lives.”
Ballard continues to pick at this seemingly attractive scab of a life, and the jokes, as they are, come with rapid frequency. Pangbourne Village is variously described as a place where happiness is practically compulsory, where “social engineering is built into the estate’s design,” and as “a warm, friendly, junior Alcatraz.” (!)
As Greville and Sergeant Payne peruse the bedroom of 17-year-old Jeremy Maxted, Greville finds a stack of Playboy and Penthouse magazines in the youth’s dresser drawer. “Playboy, Sergeant—the first crack in the façade?” Payne replies, “I wouldn’t say so, sir. … If you want to find the real porn, have a look underneath.” At which point Greville “lifted out the top three magazines. Below them were a dozen copies of various gun and rifle publications, Guns and Ammo, Commando Small Arms, The Rifleman, and Combat Weapons of the Waffen SS. I flipped through them, noticing that the pages were carefully marked, with appreciative comments written in the margins. Mail-order coupons were missing from many of the pages.” Adds Greville: “The real porn? I agree.”
Eventually, one child, an 8-year-old girl, Marion Miller, is discovered hiding “in a skip loaded with overnight mail on Platform 7 at Waterloo Railway Station.” But she’s of no help—“[she] was unable to give her name. Exhausted by her ordeal, Marion was sunk in a state of immobility, now and then emitting a strange hissing noise as if she were imitating a pet cat.”
Greville’s want to interview Marion is thwarted by the Home Office. “I requested permission to see the child,” he tells us, “and attached a brief report of my visit to Pangbourne, in which I described certain curious features, such as the
mutilated copy of Piaget’s classic text on the rearing of children.” So much for expert advice on the stages of development!(Left) Author J.G. Ballard.
Although the “authorities” will forever remain unconvinced that the children did away with their parents, Greville eventually figures it out. As he and Sergeant Payne have a conversation about the “mystery,” Payne (who refers to the rest of the missing Pangbourne children as “a Baader-Meinhof for the day after tomorrow”) says, “But one last question. I agree the children killed their parents, and that they carefully planned it together. But why? There was no evidence of sexual abuse, no corporal punishment getting out of control. The parents never raised a hand against the children. If there was some kind of tyranny here it must have been one of real hate and cruelty. We haven’t found anything remotely like that.”
Retorts Greville, “And we never will. The Pangbourne children weren’t rebelling against hate and cruelty. The absolute opposite, Sergeant. What they were rebelling against was a despotism of kindness. They killed to free themselves from a tyranny of love and care.”
In an interview dating back to 1971, many years prior to his writing this novella, the ever-prescient Ballard stated: “Violence is probably going to play the same role in the ’70s and ’80s that sex played in the ’50s and ’60s. ... [O]ne’s more and more alienated from any kind of direct response to experience.”
Running Wild packs the same existential punch today that it surely did when it was originally published more than three decades ago. A remarkable “forgotten book.”
