Customer Reviews

Running Wild

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This short, clinical, unflinching novella about the violent end of a gated community is a perfect introduction to the priceless talents of J. G. Ballard. Adopting the persona of a forensic psychiatrist investigating the mass murder of the occupants of a London residential estate, Ballard explores the dangers inherent in even the most privileged manifestations of social control - the fabricated society is an attempt to lock danger out, but its regime of repression is more likely to lock danger in. You'll solve the mystery of what happened in Pangbourne Village within the first ten pages, but that isn't the point. It's not whodunit that matters, but why. Ballard's epigrammatic summary, when it comes, is slightly trite and hardly does justice to what's come before it: a chilling work of distilled intensity. It isn't the best exploration of Ballard's searing sociological vision, but it's a delicious appetizer. Readers who enjoy this will probably find "High Rise" to their taste, too.

Although this book is short, it still has a great story that's haunting and very disturbing. Just from what's on the back you get an idea about what happens, yet as Ballard explains it, it doesn't matter WHAT happened it matters WHY it happened. This book also acts as a chilling prophecy of how western society will become. I read this after I read "Crash", by Ballard, but both books are very different and it's hard to believe that they're both by the same author. It won't take long to read, but it'll be something you'll remember.

Not my favorite J.G. Ballard work, but still quite good. The good is that it is exremely well written and well crafted. The bad is that I found the whole premise and story to be a bit obvious and predictable. Then again I am a freak, so maybe others will find it as shocking as it is intended to be.

It is particularly relevant to American society today, given the current fashion for incessant coddling of children and shielding them from all manner of imagined horrors, whether by media bashing politicians or million moron mom marches.

Read it and weep. We are already there.

I have actually never read anything by Ballard, and picked this book up on a whim. I can honestly say I am so glad that I did. Although technically an easy read, this book is one you could read several times and still never completely capture. I will definitely pick up more books by Ballard in the future.

Ballard's novella is a shocking, documentary-like piece which tells the tale of a series of bizarre murders and a mysterious kidnapping. Tapping in to the psyche of the twentieth century with consummate ease, Ballard's talent for unsettling the reader without patronizing them is unsurpassed.

I purchased this novel because I was attracted to the description of its plot, which is an investigation of a tragic, inexplicable mass murder of the highly successful parents of children living in an elite, high-tech secured community within a prosperous British suburb.

However, at the same time, I experienced an ample amount of dread over how the subject matter would be presented by the author, the late J. G. Ballard. On one hand, he's written some highly unusual, lushly imagined and intensely visionary science-fiction (The Crystal World, Vermillion Sands), but, on the other hand, he's also written stories that are quite shocking in their subject matter and exposition, such as his infamous novel, "Crash", which was also made into a ragingly controversial film. Some of Ballard's stuff I simply cannot stomach; it's too clinical, too violent, too bizarre and disturbing in the most heart-stopping, head-spinning way imaginable. I can't decide if it's sickening, or terrifying -- or perhaps both.

But "Running Wild" is wonderfully different in a startling and emotionally unexpected way. In writing this novel, Mr. Ballard revealed himself as a family man who was profoundly concerned about the quality of life, mind, and spirit of children and young adults living in the unpredictable 21st century. This brief, fast-moving novel, smartly presented as a police procedural, cannot fail to be interesting in the most urgent way to any adult who is alarmed and therefore concerned about the social, educational and spiritual tribulations that young(er) people find themselves grappling with as they try to find their identity in this fast-paced, criminally capitalistic, consumer-crazed and technologically insulated society that we live in.

As an aside, I find it interesting in a sad, sad way that no plans to film this story have been announced. Instead, Hollywood shoves down our throats the bloodiest movie spectacles featuring of every kind of cruelly sadistic, gratuitously violent act that humans are capable of perpetrating against each other, but only to "entertain" us. And yet, it won't touch with a ten-foot pole such a probing, alert, and astoundingly insightful work of literature such as "Running Wild" that lets us in on what we may be doing wrong with our kids to cause them to increasingly lash out so violently at others.

But then, what else would you expect in a morally confused country like ours (America) where the "law" can be used to arrest and prosecute mothers who breast-feed their own children in public, and even worse, call it "indecent exposure", while at the same time allowing the production and sale of pornography that fetishizes images of women's breasts strictly for the purpose of arousing sexual excitement? I sure wonder what Mr. Ballard would have to say about that...

Just as he was able to foreshadow the Regan presidency in the late 60s, Ballard's finger on the cosmic pulse brings us "Running Wild." Although a British writer, much of what Ballard synthesizes seems to flourish more lividly in the US. This story of teens seemingly smothered with caring who rebel against the planned community they live in is yet another eerie prediction of the present, set in Britian in the story, yet it seems to be actually happening right now in the US. A cool, who-and-how-dunnit, I read this book at a quick pace, following the Scotland Yard investigator as he builds his unorthodox theories of what happened. More accessible that some of his global disaster novels, this is a good book for those new to Ballard, and a great addition to the collection for fans.