8. Running Wild

By J.G. Ballard

The top of my armoire is where I keep the books to be reviewed.  The books are held up by agate bookends and surface area is limited, so it’s an occasional struggle to keep it from expanding too much.  For some reason, Running Wild has been sitting there since 2021 (it’s now March 2024), probably cuz it’s a slim little novella.  Whenever I see it, I’d say to myself, I should really write a quick review so I can shelve it away. But at some point, I’d forgotten what the story was about!  I had to look up a synopsis and flip through some pages to jolt my memory.

 

Another memory lapse:  I also thought this book belonged to Olman but it doesn’t seem like he's read it (no results for Running Wild after searching his blog).  Did I find this book then? If so, where did I find this neat little 1989 Arrow paperback edition? Olman confirmed he hadn’t read this book before and what’s more, he’s interested.  So as soon as I post this review, this book will migrate to his on-deck shelf!

 

Running Wild is told from the perspective of a forensic psychiatrist called upon by Scotland Yard to investigate the mass murder of dozens of residents of a wealthy, gated community called Pangbourne Village.   Twenty parents had been executed, along with twelve staff, including au pairs, tutors, gardeners and security guards.  But the biggest mystery of all was that the thirteen children of these families, whether dead or alive, were nowhere to be found.

 

A nice, detailed review can be found here: https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/03/07/running-wild-j-g-ballard/

 

Once the mystery was solved, the forensic psychiatrist then speculated what could have triggered the children to commit such horrific crimes and recreated the chronicle of events that led to the killing spree.  Ballard, in the late 1980's, had written a cautionary tale on how extreme helicopter parenting can create emotionless psychopathic murderers! 

By a grim paradox, the instrument of the parents' deaths was the devoted and caring regime which they had instituted at Pangbourne Village. The children had been brainwashed, by the unlimited tolerance and understanding that had erased all freedom and all trace of emotion--for emotion was never needed at Pangbourne, by either parents or children.

Denied any self-expression, and with even the most wayward impulse defused by the parents' infinite patience, the children were trapped within an endless round of praiseworthy activities—for nowhere were praise and encouragement lavished more generously than at Pangbourne Village, whether earned or not. Altogether, the children existed in a state closely akin to sensory deprivation. Far from hating their parents when they killed them, the Pangbourne children probably saw them as nothing more than the last bars to be removed before they could reach out to the light…

The same schizophrenic detachment from reality can be seen in the members of the Manson gang, in Mark Chapman and Lee Harvey Oswald, and in the guards at the Nazi death camps. One has no sympathy for Manson and the others--an element of choice existed for them all--but the Pangbourne children had no such choice. Unable to express their own emotions or respond to those of the people around them, suffocated under a mantle of praise and encouragement, they were trapped forever within a perfect universe. In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.

 

Re-reading this passage, I realize why it was hard for me to remember what Running Wild was about.  Usually, an emotional connection to the characters helps me to remember how I felt about a book. Ballard’s fiction tends to be emotionally distant, and since Running Wild was written in the style of an investigative report format from the POV of a doctor, it made sense that I didn’t really remember the details of this book.