Našao sam.
BALLARD J.G.
Pokolj / J.G. Ballard ; preveo Mario Suško . - Zagreb : Znanje, 1992 . - 85 str. ; 20 cm . - (biblioteka mod.oml.literature : Hit junior. kolo 8, 46)
Prijevod djela: Rinning wild.
Nisam znao za ovu novelu-roman
'Running Wild', by J.G. Ballard. Flamingo, 1997.
ISBN 0-00-654819-9 £4.99
Reviewed by Giles Hugo
ARE you suffering from cult-fatigue? Aum Supreme Truthers plotting to gas to death thousands of Tokyo citizens before the Hondas and Toyotas have had time to do the job; members of the order of the Solar Temple doing synchronised inter-continental suicides with fiery finales - Lloyd Webber should be working on the musical; and fundamentalists of the Muslim Left and Christian Right plotting to bomb Middle Amerika back to the Stone Age. Sorry geeks, the Weathermen tried that back in the Stoned Age with singular lack of success.
And now we have Trekkies with terminal attitude sacrificing their gonads and their lives to the bent ideas of leaders who immersed themselves in Star Trek drek 'to get to know what it would be like living in space'. I feel great sorrow for astronomers Hale and Bopp - it seems tragic that their dual discovery should, post Easter 1997, be stigmatised as - inadvertently, of course - the harbinger of the Heaven's Gate suicide drama, in which 39 mortals decided to 'leave their containers' prematurely.
Be warned - if cultists pick up on your latest book, CD, fitness video, e-mail, or comet, it could be worse than Demidenkoitis [being plagiarised by blonde Sheilas pretending Baltism in the name of dubious politics, serious cash and notoriety]. Perhaps even now some sharp litigation shark is sussing out whether the relatives of the Heaven's Gaters could sue the Trekkie industry for giving their late-lamented unrealistic expectations.
'Beam me up, Dotty. Say, nuttin' happened - and why has everything turned purple and black? Gee, maybe Mom was right, I am allergic to apple sauce'
Seriously, I just want to alert all you conspiracy theorists, nut-watchers, cult-collectors and otherwise curious 'normal' folk to a causation conspiracy theory that seems to have escaped most commentators on the Heaven's Gate weirdos. In the same vein as Charles Manson claiming that the Beatles' Helter Skelter had helped to inspire his brutal 'race war/end of the world as we know it' scenario that was supposed to follow the Tate-La Bianca murders, we now have the 'Neil Young inadvertently inspired the Heaven's Gate Migration' hypothesis. Perhaps the San Diego police investigators should check out whether the Heaven's Gate leaders had ever listened to Neil Young's 1970 album After the Gold Rush. Grok the lyrics on the title track: 'Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s'
'...Well I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships flying
in the yellow haze of the sun,
There were children crying and colours flying all around the chosen ones,
All in a dream, all in a dream, the loading had begun,
Flying nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun....'
Hearing Neil Young's words now gives me a certain chill - just the sort of weird subliminal 'justification' that might surface two decades later in the thoughts of some Acid-and-God-damaged post-'60s goo-roue, who convinces his credulous followers that their problems will be solved by leaving their earthly containers and joining aliens of a 'higher order' slip-streaming a comet that only passes by every 4000 years. Believe me, those kind of ideas were as current in the brain-damaged '70s as they appear to be today on certain Web sites and in the minds of some termination-oriented 'searchers for truth'. As Ed Sanders, a former member of The Fugs and author of The Family, a study of the Manson menage of mayhem, would put it: Weirdness was! Unfortunately weirdness still is - and undoubtedly shall be.
Cults manage to make people do things they normally would avoid or even abhor - they create a suspension of disbelief that allows followers to think and act in extreme and violent ways, but often only at the direction of the cult masters.
Ballard's Running Wild is a fictional study of curious cult-like mayhem . On a summer's day in 1988 tragedy strikes Pangbourne Village, an exclusive English housing estate which has guards, dogs, fences and video surveillance cameras shielding the privacy and security of the wealthy residents and their children. However, in what police estimate is just 30 minutes, all the adult residents of the estate, plus their security guards, chauffeurs, housekeepers and other servants are murdered - 32 in all - and all 13 children disappear, presumed kidnapped.
The tale is extracted from 'the Forensic Diaries of Dr Richard Greville, Deputy Psychiatric Adviser, Metropolitan Police'. Greville is called in to take on the investigation when all others have failed to explain either the killings or the disappearance of the children, for whom there has been no ransom demand of any kind. The means used to dispatch the 39 Pangbourne Massacre victims are mysteriously varied and suitably grotesque: gunshots from close range, stabbing, one couple crushed against the garage doors by their own car, electrocuted by hairdrier in the bath, strangled by nooses in a bamboo and wire cage resembling a large box kite, drugged and smothered with a pillow, and shot by crossbow bolt.
A lone assassin? Terrorists or drug lords hitting the wrong target? A band of thrill-killer psychopaths? A secret military exercise or intelligene operation gone tragically wrong? The IRS getting overly vindictive? Aliens? Nothing adds up until Marion Miller, 8, the youngest of the missing children, is found at a railway station, traumatised, 'sunk in a state of immobility, now and then emitting a strange hissing noise'.
After observing a film of her in hospital, Dr Greville and Police Sergeant Payne start piecing together a strange but compelling hypothesis - the children were not kidnapped, rather they escaped, after killing their own parents. The children had the means and opportunity to kill the other inhabitants of Pangbourne, but why, what was the motivation? There is no apparent reason why the children should turn violent against their primary carers. None of the parents was known to be involved in cults and none of the children was thought to have suffered physical or sexual abuse.
Indeed, Dr Greville has already noted: '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 lives.'
Dr Greville's rationalisation for the massacre is extreme: each child was persuaded to kill their own parents in order to enable them to escape the claustrophobic paradise of the Pangbourne estate: 'The children were making a last stand against their parents. The Pangbourne Massacre was a desperate rebellion, from the children's viewpoint, an act of mass tyrannicide. Each one had to take responsibility for the death of his own parents, whatever the cost.'
According to the good doctor, 'The Pangbourne children weren't rebelling against hate and cruelty. The absolute opposite, Sergeant. What they were rebelling against was a despotism of kindness. They killed to free themselves from a tyranny of love and care.'
While sifting through evidence to try to back this theory, he has his doubts: 'I found it difficult to accept the strange logic at work - that the more the children were loved and cherished, the more they were driven into a desperate search for escape.'
However he is later able to reassure himself that the parenticide thesis is correct with the following kind of tabloidish psychobabble: '...They were choking on the non-stop diet of love and understanding being forced down their throats at Pangbourne Village. This was an idea of childhood invented by adults. The children were desperate for the roughage of real emotions, for parents who now and then disapproved of them, became annoyed and impatient, or even failed to understand them. They needed parents who weren't interested in everything they did, who weren't afraid to be irritated or bored by them, and didn't try to rule every minute of their lives with the wisdom of Solomon.'
In the children's hobbies and creative pursuits he finds what he assumes is evidence of pointers to inner rage and desires to escape. Two of the girls had written alternative histories of Pangbourne in the 19th century, Jane Austenish family sagas in which the well-bred daughters prostitute themselves to the bent desires of their families - Yet it is clearly not the pornographic details that appeal most strongly to Gail and Annabel - these are sketched in perfunctorily - but rather the powerful emotions which their sexual passion elicits. What comes through most vividly is the sense that through these sexual activities the over-civilised inhabitants of Pangbourne can make their escape into a more brutal and more real world.'
Perhaps, but hardly a motive for slaughtering 32 people including your own parents.
Another child produces The Pangbourne Pang, a desktop-published tabloid specialising in boring news - 'Eggs boil in three minutes... Staircase leads to second floor.' One of the boys records Radio Free Pangbourne cassettes which consist of 'random sounds, mostly his own breathing, interspersed with long patches of silence'.
Again, this kind of Goonish absurdism hardly justifies or illuminates organised murderous mayhem against one's nearest kin and their domestic and security employees. Mass killers have never, as far as I know, cited the likes of Spike Milligan or John Cleese as their inspiration for violence.
But there is more - for Payne and Greyville the 'smoking gun' is two versions of a videotape shot and assembled by the children. The one version 'at first sight appeared to be a matter-of-fact documentary of daily life at Pangbourne' a light-hearted parody, before the event, of the BBC-TV documentary which was to be made about Pangbourne Village in the late summer of 1988. There is a certain gently leg-pulling at the parents' expense. The alternative version carries the same sound-track but includes '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... It's practically a detailed blueprint for the killings - shooting, car crashes, electrocutions...'
All copies of the 'black' version of the video were destroyed before the massacre, '...but a single cassette was found in the Maxted's bedroom safe. One wonders what these fashionable psychiatrists made of it. Seeing the film, I had the strong sense, not for the first time of young minds willing themselves into madness as a way of finding freedom.'
Believing that Marion Miller, the youngest of the missing children, and hence - in the weird psychologic of the Dr Greyville - 'perhaps the least freaked by her parents' cloying kindness, perhaps the least estranged from them, may have escape her comrades in a desperate attempt to return to her childhood paradise, they decide to show her an edited version of the video - sans the violent additions. They hope it may trigger memories and penetrate her silence.
However, as the doctor and a nurse are setting up a video showing, the hospital is raided by gun-toting intruders wearing white gowns and face masks, who shoot up the police guards and abduct Marion. The raiders are, in fact, two of the Pangbourne children, a boy and a girl come to claim their own before disappearing back into their mysterious collective heart of adolescent darkness.
In his bid to explain this threatening aberration, the doctor theorises: '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.'
He believes that, like the Manson gang, Mark Chapman, Lee Harvey Oswald and Nazi death-camp guards, the children exhibited a kind of schizophrenic detachment from reality. However, unlike these other 20th century bogey men - and bogey women - the children had no choice, 'Unable to express their emotions or respond to those of the people around them, suffocated under a mantle of praise and encouragement, they were trapped for ever within a perfect universe. In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.'
He is so convinced of the elegance of his complex equation of abusively claustrophobic kindness leading to murderous madness that he doesn't ask why the children did not simply choose to run away and disappear among the homeless millions of Thatcher's grey and unpleasant land.
Ballard takes one more spin of the wheel to conclude his fantasy - five years after the massacre there is an unsuccessful terrorist attack on a former prime minister, now known as 'Mother England', in which one of the raiders would seem to be Marion Miller, now apparently politicised and inflamed to direct her anger at another parental figure - Big Bad Maggie.
This shift in the focus of rage is interesting, but Ballard doesn't even try to explain it. After all, nobody could accuse the Iron Lady of ever attempting to smother anyone with unconditional kindness. In keeping with his 'kill the givers of unconditional care and love' hypothesis, it would be more logical for the kids to target the likes of Mother Teresa or even Bob Geldof.
In some previous speculative fantasies about violent juvenile rebellion, the motivations for slaughter has been very clearly constructed and explored. In William Golding's Lord of the Flies it is simply a case of power corrupting the leadership. In John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos the children are actually spawned by an alien life form in human mothers as a means of invading the human race from within. In Norman Lindsay's 1968 film If... the rebellious schoolboys are reacting against a corrupt and decadent system that purports to embrace the best elements of tradition and modern education. In William Burroughs' The Wild Boys, the divisions are generational and sexual, the gay pre-punk warriors use alternative technologies to torment and defy conventional forces of the Korporate Kontrol Konspiracy.
By comparison, Ballard's speculations about the potentially mind-warping effects of TLC are simply ludicrous.
However, Ballard had better beware - if Running Wild was filmed or adapted as a Cultsta Rap song, it might end up being cited in defence of some glue and caffeine-crazed teenager who claimed his murderous rampage against the parents of the world - including his own - was sparked by ideas in Ballard's improable tale. But it would be a truly desperate defence attorney who would stoop to such a ploy, because Ballard's fictional explanation of cultish mayhem is, for me, quite unconvincing. Only a glue and caffeine-crazed teenager would believe it. So, beam me up to Hale-Bopp, Dotty, I'm doing lunch with Elvis and Jim Morrison at High Noon in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Reviewer: Giles Hugo.
