All posts tagged The Pangbourne Pang

Running Wild by J.G. Ballard (1988)

‘Well done, Jeremy!’

This is a very short book, a macabre and gruesome little shocker which is barely a novella, really just a long short story, just about stretching to 106 pages in the big-print Flamingo paperback version. It took me just an hour and a half to read it.

It’s a first-person narrative told by a doctor (if I had a pound for every Ballard protagonist who is a doctor), in this instance, Dr Richard Greville, Deputy Psychiatric Adviser for the Metropolitan Police.

Greville has been called to help investigate a murder. Well, not so much a murder as a massacre. Early on the morning of 25 June 1988, all the adult inhabitants of a luxury, gated community for upper-middle-class professionals, named Pangbourne Village, were murdered in a variety of gruesome ways.

Some were electrocuted in their bath, or on their exercise bicycle, many were shot, some were stabbed to death, a couple were crushed against their garage by their own Porsche, some were shot with crossbow bolts. The phone cables to the outside world had been cut and all the cables from the estate’s numerous CCTV cameras to the central Security lodge had also been severed, and the security guard asphyxiated in a complicated kite-cum-tourniquet device developed by the Viet Cong in Vietnam.

Ten families lives in the community, each in a perfect, luxury home, many with indoor gyms and swimming pools and tennis courts in the grounds. All twenty of the parents were executed, along with twelve staff, including au pairs, tutors, gardeners and the two security guards.

And the thirteen children whose parents were murdered? Have disappeared. Vanished without trace.

The media go wild and there’s an explosion of theories as to what happened, from a random terrorist attack, to a mass suicide on the lines of the Jonestown Massacre, maybe an attack by Russian Special Forces at key managers of vital British infrastructure… all the way to the lunatic fringe who claim the parents were murdered and the children abducted by aliens. There’s always a few…

Greville sets about investigating the massacre systematically, and so does Ballard. The text is presented in a very neat format, divided into clear, precise sections chronicling events and developments, as Greville investigates – reviews a police video of the crime scene, reviews the history of the gated community, reads profiles of its residents, reviews all the theories, then visits the scene, where he is shown round by Sergeant Payne of Reading Police CID, has a breakthrough, tests his theory, and comes to his conclusions.

Structure

These are the titles (and sub-sections) of the (short) chapters:

  • The police video
  • Pangbourne Village
  • The Residents
  • The Murdered Staff
  • The Missing Children
  • The Massacre: Various Theories
    • Lone assassin
    • Thrill killer
    • A misdirected military exercise
    • The political dimension: Foreign powers
    • International Terrorism
    • Organised Crime
    • The Parents as Killers
    • The Domestic Staff
    • Bizarre Theories:
      • Soviet Spetznaz commandos attack the wrong location
      • Experimental nerve gas bomb falls on the estate by accident and drives the inhabitants mad
      • The parents were brainwashed foreign agents who, when their work was done, were triggered to murder each other
      • The parents were murdered by aliens from outer space who took the children as specimens
      • The parents were murdered by their own children
  • A Visit to Pangbourne: August 29, 1988
  • The Psychiatrists’ Home
  • Marion Miller, the First ‘Hostage’
  • The Television Film
  • Return to Pangbourne Village: October 17, 1988
  • The Pangbourne Massacre: The Evidence
  • The Pangbourne Children
  • The Great Ormond Street Kidnapping
  • The Pangbourne Massacre: The Murderers Identified
  • A Tentative Explanation
  • The Trigger
  • June 25, 1988 – The Reconstruction
  • Disappearance of the Children
  • POSTSCRIPT, DECEMBER 8, 1993

Spoiler alert

The kids did it. The thirteen children formed a tight-knit conspiracy, laid intricate plans, and then murdered their parents, house by house, over an intense half hour period starting at 8.15am.

they stated with the murder of Mrs Miller on her exercise bicycle, followed swiftly by the murder of Mr Miller, who is sitting in his bath when his 8-year-old daughter Marion plugs a hairdryer into a nearby power socket and drops it into the bath. While Miller’s body is spasming in electric shock, his son, Robin, stabs him to death with a kitchen knife.

The Miller children then signal to the children in the house opposite, who proceed to murder their parents, and so on in a domino effect throughout the estate, with the security guards taken out separately, and then all the ancillary staff – au pairs, tutors etc – cold-bloodedly shot dead.

These events are actually described twice – once at the start, when Dr Griffiths watches the police video of the crime scene which shows all the dead bodies splayed around their houses – and once near the end, when the narrator walks us through his detailed, grisly and disgusting reconstruction of the massacre.

I had begun to suspect it was the kids by page 10. When I read the long list of possible theories, the last one – that the kids did it – leaped out at me. Greville suddenly realises the kids did it on page 50 i.e. exactly half way through the book.

So there is an element of suspense for the first 40 or 50 pages, but that isn’t really the point: the point of the book is investigating the reason Why.

It’s because the children were pampered to within an inch of their lives and eventually rebelled in order to find some freedom.

Their parents sent them to posh private schools, but not boarding schools, day schools, so that the kids returned home every evening, and so that every aspect of their lives could be monitored and enthusiastically supported by this parents.

Their parents told them what to read, what they should watch on TV, and organised drama societies and chess clubs in which they supported and encouraged their children all the time.

In the seventeen-year-old Jeremy Maxted’s room Griffiths and Payne discover that the boy’s computer is wired up so that his parents can send him loving, encouraging messages at any time of day or night, especially about his favourite hobby, swimming.

Payne pressed the computer keyboard, tapping out a simple code. The screen lit up with a message dated May 17, 1988:
_47 lengths today!_
There was a pause, and then:
_Well done, Jeremy!

The members of staff who weren’t on shift on the fateful day and so missed the massacre, all testify that:

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 day schools near Reading, 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. They joined the children in various activities at the recreation club, organised discotheques and bridge contests in which they took full part, and in the best sense were guiding their sons and daughters toward fulfilled and happy lives…

And that is the point. As a psychiatrist, Griffiths speculates that the children were smothered – cribbed, cabined and confined by their own parents, with no possibility of escape anywhere from the utter smothering of every single instinctive or spontaneous feeling, thought or emotion.

This emerges powerfully during Griffith’s second visit to the village, when Sergeant Payne shows him evidence which sheds more light on the children. They all kept secret diaries or journals but it went beyond that. There was a newsletter – The Pangbourne Pang – just for the estate’s thirteen children, which, when you looked carefully at it, revealed an almost screaming level of boredom and frustration. Two of the girls, Gail and Annabel Reade, kept elaborate secret journals which described Jane Austen-style fine ladies and gentlemen, only with a lot pf pornography thrown in. Jeremy Maxted had a porn stash in his cupboard (what healthy 17-year-old boy doesn’t) but Sergeant Payne shows Griffiths that this was just a conventional cover. Hidden deeper was a collection of magazines about guns and weapons – they were Jeremy’s real pornography. But exhibit A is

the curious home video, filmed by Amanda Lymington and Jasper Ogilvy, which at first sight appeared to be a matter-of-fact documentary of daily life at Pangbourne Village. Some seventeen minutes long, it was made with the happy cooperation of the parents, and adopts the style of a real-estate developer’s promotional video. With its glossy colour and tableau-like settings, it depicts the parents sitting in their drawing rooms, having dinner, parking their cars. The commentary is warm and affectionate… There is a certain gentle leg-pulling at the parents’ expense – the camera lingers on Mrs. Sterling as she mistimes a swallow dive, and on Mr. Garfield as he drops his cocktail shaker. Extracts of the film were shown to the parents and often screened for the benefit of visitors.

However, the final version that secretly circulated among the children was very different. This carried the identical jovial sound track, but Jasper and Amanda had added some twenty-five seconds of footage, culled from TV news documentaries, of car crashes, electric chairs and concentration-camp mass graves. Scattered at random among the scenes of their parents, this atrocity footage transformed the film into a work of eerie and threatening prophecy…

There you have it. All the time they took part in the happy affectionate life of the community, the children were going mad with frustration. But it was much more than that and towards the end of the short text Griffiths attempts a deeper psychological explanation:

My own view is that far from being an event of huge significance for the children, the murder of their parents was a matter of comparative unimportance. I believe that the actual murders were no more than a final postscript to a process of withdrawal from the external world that had begun many months beforehand, if not years.

As with the Hungerford killer, Michael Ryan, or the numerous American examples of crazed gunmen opening fire on passersby, the identity of the victims probably had no special significance for them. More than this, I would argue that for such killings to take place at all, the deaths of their victims must be without any meaning.

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.

I remember the experiments in sensory deprivation that I attended at the School of Aviation Medicine at RAF Farnborough, and the great dangers to the laboratory staff presented by these deeply desensitized volunteers. The attempt to help them from their soundproof immersion tanks could be fraught with risk. On numerous occasions the volunteers had injured themselves and even attempted to strangle the laboratory staff while under the impression that they were warding off stray equipment that had intruded into their zero world.

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.

The cradle of terrorism

Is that it? No. There’s a Postscript written five years later. Griffiths had speculated towards the end of the initial text that fanaticism of the type necessary to bond these thirteen individuals in the worst crime known to humanity won’t just fade away. They have become fanatics, and fanatics obsessed with overthrowing authority figures, leading him to make a melodramatic statement to the much more phlegmatic Sergeant Payne.

‘The Pangbourne children are a Baader-Meinhof gang for the day after tomorrow.’

And so it is that, in this postscript, Griffiths shares with us the news that five years after the Pangbourne Massacre an assassination attempt was made on a certain woman Prime Minister who had retired to a luxury house in Dulwich (he must mean Mrs Thatcher although, possibly for legal reasons, he refrains from mentioning her). An armoured truck was driven at high speed through the gates of the house and there followed a massive explosion which rocked the neighbourhood. The ex-PM was miraculously unharmed, the blast was put down to a gas mains explosion, and the lady herself was photographed by the press handing out cups of tea to police and firemen.

But one of the ex-PM’s bodyguards gives a description of one of the attackers which matches perfectly with the appearance and strange mannerisms of Marion Miller, the only one of the children who was ever found and identified after the massacre and who was kidnapped by some of the other children in a daring armed raid on Great Ormond Street Hospital, which is described in detail in the middle chapters of the book.

Anyway, this incident is added so as to reinforce Griffith’s point that an excess of smothering love desensitises children and risks turning them into emotionless zombies. Children need risk, and risk involves failure, it involves disobeying parents and being told off, and learning to cope with it. It means being introduced to all the ups and downs of adult life. Which these pampered, over-loved children never had.

Comments

On the back of the paperback edition there’s a quote from a laudatory review by novelist Jonathan Coe, who writes:

As a malevolent gesture in the direction of facts which we prefer to ignore, it provides a salutary chill.

Many blurb writers and reviewers are given to describing Ballard as a ‘prophet’ (maybe because they don’t know how else to categorise him) but I bridle at this description, I don’t really think he is ‘prophetic’. What struck me about Running Wild was:

  1. how old-fashioned the book seemed
  2. how inaccurate its social analysis is

1. Old fashioned

By ‘old-fashioned’ I simply mean that many of the phrases, and the entire concept of the text being notes from a doctor’s diary about a world-famous ‘case’, come straight from the pen of Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories. Here’s the opening of Running Wild:

So much has been written about the Pangbourne Massacre, as it is now known in the popular press throughout the world, that I find it difficult to see this tragic event with a clear eye. In the past two months there have been so many television programs about the thirty-two murdered residents of this exclusive estate to the west of London, and so much speculation about the abduction of their thirteen children, that there scarcely seems room for even a single fresh hypothesis.

Compare and contrast with the opening of a typical Sherlock Holmes case:

The Lord St. Simon marriage, and its curious termination, have long ceased to be a subject of interest in those exalted circles in which the unfortunate bridegroom moves. Fresh scandals have eclipsed it, and their more piquant details have drawn the gossips away from this four-year-old drama.

It is the same lofty, confident, educated, man-of-the-world tone, and it is the same fundamental structure: a well-balanced, educated professional taking us for a foray into the dark underbelly of society, as Dr Watson does in so many of the 60 Sherlock Holmes short stories.

Prophetic

1. I don’t deny that there’s a lot about Ballard’s contemporary ‘urban disaster’ novels (Crash, Concrete Island, High Rise and this one) which feel urgent and relevant because they describe a highly urbanised environment, dominated by concrete flyovers and council high rises, which people many people now live in. It’s a worldview which is easy to subscribe to if you’re a troubled teenager, or an over-thoughtful student, or an academic paid to write papers and books about urban alienation, and yet…

When you look really closely, Ballard’s view is not really that ‘prophetic’, and on several levels.

At its simplest, there may well have been a steady increase in the number of gated communities for the rich all over the industrialised world over the past thirty or so years but, far from providing a cradle for psychotic terrorist, children brought up as the pampered children of the rich… seem to enjoy it. Is Ivanka Trump a psychotic murderer? No. The children of the rich turn out, by and large, to be living a fabulous, jet-setting, luxury yacht and Manhattan apartment kind of life, thank you very much.

I’m not aware of the kind of massacre Ballard describes having happened anywhere in the world. It is a science fiction fantasy and exaggeration, for moralising or propaganda effect.

2. At a more grass roots level, Is the trouble with British society in 2020 that there are too many pampered children of the rich growing up in stiflingly loving families? Not really. Yesterday there was an article in the Guardian about the growing problem of child hunger and malnutrition, about the number of children who are now reliant on food banks and the larger number who are just above that level, but are still not getting enough food.

3. The book ends with the dramatic suggestion that it is from the children of the pampered middle-classes that the most ferocious terrorist groups emerge, and Ballard cites the well-known case of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, all of whom came from secure middle-class homes. But it seems to me that he is once again, writing about the past and not the future. The wave of middle-class terrorists who rocked Western Europe in the 1970s (the Angry Brigade, the Red Brigade, ETA, the Baader-Meinhof etc) had died off by the 1980s (although the independence movements of ETA and the IRA continued their bombing and shooting campaigns), but European middle-class terrorism had, for the most part, run its course.

What the world was trembling on the brink of was a new type of Islamist terrorism. Many people forget that the 9/11 airplane attacks on the World Trade Centre weren’t the first time the buildings had been attacked.

The 1993 World Trade Center bombing was a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, carried out on February 26, 1993, when a truck bomb detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The 1,336 lb (606 kg) urea nitrate–hydrogen gas enhanced device was intended to send the North Tower (Tower 1) crashing into the South Tower (Tower 2), bringing both towers down and killing thousands of people. It failed to do so but killed six people and injured over one thousand. The attack was planned by a group of terrorists including Ramzi Yousef, Mahmud Abouhalima, Mohammad Salameh, Nidal A. Ayyad, Abdul Rahman Yasin, and Ahmed Ajaj. They received financing from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

To be blunt, the ‘psychotic’ element of Running Wild, the details of the cold-blooded mass killing feels sort of modern, but the format – the Sherlock Holmes-style casebook format – and above all the location and personnel – nice, middle-class professionals who are merchant bankers and TV producers – felt very dated. I live not far from Streatham High Street where two weeks ago a young Muslim man took a knife from his back pack and started stabbing all the passersby he could get to, before being shot dead by the police. British prisons are hotbeds of Islamic radicalisation. Every week Islamist murderers or plotters are released back into the community to resume their murderous activities, while at the same time, unprecedented numbers of British children need food aid just to get the basic nutrition they require to grow.

So in my opinion, Ballard isn’t ‘prophetic’ of any aspect of our contemporary situation. The reverse: his anxieties about the gated communities of the rich and the desensitising impact of cable TV seem distinctly quaint and old fashioned. I think the claim that he is ‘prophetic’ can only be made and sustained by humanities academics who, in this as in so many other areas of society, culture and politics, have been shown to be wildly out of touch with the actual reality of the society they live in.

Credit

Running Wild by J.G. Ballard was published by Hutchinson in 1988. References are to the 1997 Flamingo paperback edition.

Related links

Reviews of other Ballard books

Novels

Short story collections

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Posted by Simon on March 7, 2020

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