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by Adam Phillips

‘I don’t think I’m allowed to forget Heart of Darkness. If the phone rings, it’ll probably be Joseph Conrad, saying, “Mr Ballard, you stole it all from me.”’

J. G. Ballard, The Hardcore 8, 1992

In an interview given in 1988, the year Running Wild was published, Ballard said that despite the variousness of his books he was still mostly thought of as a science-fiction writer:

The reason is, of course, that I take a hard, cruel look at the everyday reality around me in Western Europe and the United States, and I see science and technology playing an enormous part in creating the landscape of our lives and imaginations … As a writer I’ve always had complete faith in my own obsessions. It seems to me that the obsessional approach to life is very much the way in which the twentieth century conducts its business.

He is called a science-fiction writer because he takes ‘a hard, cruel look at the everyday reality’ around him. And he sees science and technology ‘creating’ our internal and external worlds. What makes a writer of science fiction – or, indeed, a writer, like Ballard, of utopias and dystopias, of satires and farces – is a certain way of looking at ordinary contemporary life. And it may seem cruel because it exposes what the everyday tries to conceal, and it is hard because it is unyieldingly unenchanted, and undistracted by what it sees.

One of Ballard’s obsessions was just how dystopian utopias always are, as the twentieth century made abundantly clear. Ballard’s heroes and heroines often have the idealistic monomania of Conrad’s Mr Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. They are people who want something so much that they forget all the other things they might want. And, indeed, all the things other people might want. It is the incredible cruelty people are capable of in realising their dreams and ambitions that haunts Ballard’s extraordinary fictions. Ballard’s look is cruel because of the cruelty he sees in everyday contemporary life. What he describes in Running Wild is the hard cruelty of parents being unduly kind and understanding to their children, parenting being one of the commoner ways people attempt to realise their dreams and ambitions. And how this particular hard cruelty – what Ballard calls ‘the regime of kindness and care which was launched with the best of intentions’ – gave birth to its ‘children of revenge’ (it gives nothing away – because Running Wild is determinedly not that kind of mystery story – to say at the outset that this is a book about a group of children who kill their parents). The phrase, as always with Ballard, whose verbal subtlety is often preternatural, is ambiguous. It makes us wonder what kind of revenge the parents in this terrifying novel may have been taking by treating their children with this particular kindness and care that is itself a regime? And why it might be that the children want to take their revenge? Why has revenge become the issue? If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, what kind of intentions should we have?

Regimes are one of Ballard’s preoccupations, as they are for everyone (the retrospective question is always, what did I consent to, and what did I have to submit to, as a child, that I didn’t actually agree with?). Ballard grew up in Shanghai during the Second World War, spending nearly three years, as a young boy, in an internment camp. ‘Anyone who has experienced a war first-hand’, Ballard said, ‘knows that it completely overturns every conventional idea of what makes up day-to-day reality. You never feel quite the same again. It’s like walking away from a plane crash.’ There is always an eerie sense in Ballard’s fiction of disasters waiting to happen, ironically because his characters are usually living in the aftermath of a disaster that has already happened. Ballard’s characters live in a world of after-effects, of a foreboding that somehow connects the past with the future (once you have been in a plane crash you half expect the next plane to crash). And Ballard’s account cannot help but make us wonder what it is like to experience a (world) war, that we experience at second- or third-hand. What the effect might be on us of the wars that came before us, and of the contemporary wars that we live through in the media, the technology that Ballard believes has also changed everything?

The children in Running Wild – children of the 1980s, but compared in various parts of the novel with, among others, the Baader-Meinhof Group, the Viet Cong and the children of the House of Atreus – are trying to walk away from the plane crash that was the extraordinary wealth and comfort that some people acquired in Thatcher’s England, so soon after the previous plane crash of two devastating world wars. The parents of these children are types we have become all too familiar with – merchant bankers, stockbrokers, private doctors, entertainers, psychiatrists, media executives, company directors; all referred to in this book as ‘the miscreant super-rich’ (‘miscreant’ meaning also a heretic, an infidel, and so asking us to ask what the rich should be true to, or believe in?). They live in gated communities, which are themselves a sign of threat, however undefined (a contradiction that Ballard would write about with such percipience in Super-Cannes). Surveillance – what the narrator calls, in a memorable phrase, ‘surveillance of the heart’ – security and order are everywhere, continual, casual reminders of disarray and danger in the offing (the ‘community’ in Running Wild is described as ‘a warm, friendly, junior Alcatraz’). It is not merely, as Ballard both hints and insists, with his strange mixture of vision and bafflement, that the ways we protect ourselves sustain our dread; that our efforts to forget about our vulnerability make it more daunting. It is that we provoke the nightmares we fear, as if to get them over with. Or as if there is something implacably self-destructive about the way we live now.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Ballard’s work, apparently straight-faced, as concerning ‘Eros, Thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies’. So much the better. The Life Instinct, the Death Instinct, and Technology. What seems finally to prompt the children to ‘massacre’ their parents is the significant fact that a BBC2 documentary is about to be made about their perfect community. The children use the technology they have to coordinate their attack. Propaganda and terrorism: the terrorists using the weapons of their oppressors. All this is a familiar story by now, but not quite so familiar by then. ‘Madness as a way of finding freedom’, the narrator suggests. Freedom, then, is still a value. But the children seem to use their new-found freedom, as it turns out – and Ballard leaves this just about uncertain – for further terrorist acts. They make an assassination attempt on Margaret Thatcher, who is never named but referred to as a ‘former prime minister’, now sometimes known as ‘the mother of her nation’ or ‘Mother England’. Another parent who knows best, another person who knows how we should live.

The parents in the appropriately chosen Pangbourne Village – all the names in Running Wild are there to be noted, not least Reading and the Reading police, about whom we read so much in this book – look after their children with assiduous love and care, and the children murder them all. This is at once some kind of joke, because Ballard is, like Swift, a kind of comic writer – the narrator clearly relishes the irony, so to speak, of it all – and some kind of prophetic warning (we don’t always know when Ballard is being arch because he so determinedly avoids being portentous: Ballard’s seriousness always has a strange lightness). It is always important in Ballard’s novels that we never quite know where the narrator stands; we know more about his suspicions than about what, if anything, he could be said to believe in. And this is what makes Ballard’s writing, and particularly perhaps Running Wild, so timely. Because Ballard is writing in the ruins left by those people who knew, and know, all too exactly what they believed and where they stood, the fascists, the communists, the born-again capitalists, whom he pointedly refers to, in shorthand, as ‘the way in which the twentieth century conducts its business’; the business that ran – and is still running – wild.

It is, of course, not news that the solutions to the problems of the twentieth century – ‘the way in which the twentieth century conducts its business’ – have indeed run wild. What is news, in Running Wild, is the way in which solutions can be so much worse than the problems they are attempting to solve. And how the official explanations, and the solutions to which they lead, all too easily sound like more of the problem. And in this sense Running Wild is a spoof detective novel; the hero who solves the crime, in the tradition of Poe’s Dupin and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, is an unofficial detective, a ‘dangerous maverick’. He solves the crime with the kind of understanding we are led to believe a policeman or an everyday detective could never have. Indeed who did what to whom in this novel seems clear, though quite why it was done is not. The crime seems to be virtually solved very early on, and the book ends with the kind of comprehensive explanation we are familiar with from Poe and Conan Doyle (Running Wild is calculatedly not a whodunit, but asks instead the less simply blaming question, for what good reasons would anyone do such a thing? It is a mystery to be thought about, not merely a problem to be solved). The only difference is that in this case the complete explanation is given in the context of a novel that is above all suspicious of the Great Explainers (the Nazis, Margaret Mead, Margaret Thatcher, Piaget, psychiatry and antipsychiatry, Stalin’s Russia, not to mention Animal Farm and Citizen Kane, among others, are all referred to or alluded to, in this deliberately and excessively allusive book, for a good reason, and for good reasons). The parents of the murderous children were also great explainers and understanders of and to their children.

So if Running Wild is also, as it were, a (faux-)child-rearing manual, its counsel is peculiarly unsettling. If you are not willing to leave your children alone and guard their privacy, and to offer them your very conditional love, they will take their revenge. When rebellion is discouraged, (violent) revolution is encouraged. When all needs are supposedly met, more monstrous needs will emerge. The children ‘murdered the parents and other adults who stood in their way’ because they were never willing to properly stand in the way. These children, the psychiatrist-narrator is clear, wanted something realer than love, care and understanding. ‘What they were rebelling against was a despotism of kindness. They killed to free themselves from a tyranny of love and care.’ There are things that might matter more than the things we think matter most. Utopias are the folly of the omniscient, tyrannical promises that create the very thing they fear. Tyrannies might be the real problem, and they can take many forms – kindness and cruelty, understanding and determined ignorance, explanation and prejudice. Vice is virtue running wild.

So Running Wild, like all Ballard’s fiction, is never trite, but it satirises the tyranny of the trite (it isn’t saying, ‘learn to say no to your children’, or, ‘we need strong fathers’; it says, ‘be careful of how you wish’). Running Wild is obsessed by explanations because it is obsessed by our wish to believe, and how wild it makes us. And it is obsessed by how we go about believing our wishes. ‘A lot of my fiction is cautionary,’ Ballard has said, ‘it deals with possible end points or trends.’ Running Wild is one of Ballard’s very best cautionary tales, a virtual documentary of the trends and end points we are now having to live with.

London, 2014