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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
very unpleasant, but required reading,
By
This review is from: Running Wild (Paperback)
J.G.Ballard has a knack for digging into some really nasty subjects, and this book is no exception. The quasi-documentary style creates a truly unpleasant mood throughout the book, and makes it all too credible. Ballard's view of ultra-suburbanism is quite probably the grimmest ever to be published in print, and makes for very scary reading, espscially in the light of student shootouts in American schools or similar incidents reported in the news. Nevertheless, it is necessary to take this book seriously. It raises some extremely important questions about what sort of values adult society presents to its children.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It takes a village...,
By A Customer
This review is from: Running Wild (Paperback)
Amidst the sterile routines of suburban England, Ballard tells a short fable about the loving your children too much. The post-mortem objective style of the massacre's investigator adds to the unsettling tone of this novel. Like Ballard's other works (I've read Crash, War Fever, and the Atrocity Exhibition) he explores the subterranean barbarities latent in our denatured, desensitized urban landscape. This novel is hardly one to advocate nurturing our future generations, since the blank-eyed authoritarianism of suburban child nurturing is blamed for the pscychopathic massacre. Loving a child, doesn't mean that the child is free. And the children, suffocated by parental love, suburbia, and technocracy has two routes: suicide (like 'The Virgin Suicides') or murder. Ballard shows that children are far from innocent: little bundles of joy who are ticking time bombs with artificial smiles and revenge fantasies. A must read for parents and high schoolers everywhere.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The key to his later works.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Running Wild (Paperback)
This book is where you should start off to understand Ballard's later fiction (CRASH, ATROCITY EXHIBITION, HIGH RISE, or anything after the early 1970's). This novella reveals Ballards signature pessimism and facination for the technological landscape: its inherent role in the systematization and categorizing of human behaviour. In RUNNING WILD, Ballard shows the devastating effect when our primal urges rears its ugly head after buried for too long. The novella is set in a self-contained living complex (much like HIGH RISE) where tragedy is struck. Like Freud, Ballard accepts the tragic, barbaric reality of humankind and continually asserts (which he does in his latest, COCAINE NIGHTS) that the primal nature of man will subvert, or altogether revolt against any "civilized" attempt to change it. This novel is depressing and revealing. Read it. It won't take long to finish it and it also won't be long before you become a Ballard fanatic.
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