J G Ballard’s new novel is as the title implies a psychopathic tour-de-force, in which the author’s genius for suspense, powerful atmospherics and evocation of place is displayed with consummate skill.

For the past thirty years Ballard has remained the most original voice in English fiction, always eschewing the easy stage-props of his contemporaries, and creating a landscape which is uniquely his own. Running Wild is no exception to his futuristic oeuvre. The sleepy little housing estate known as Pangbourne Village is a depersonalised, television-monitored enclave exclusively for the rich. ‘Secure behind their high walls and surveillance cameras, these estates in effect constitute a chain of closed communities whose lifelines run directly along the M4 to the offices and consulting rooms, restaurants and private clinics of central London.’

The book takes the form of extracts from the Forensic Diaries of Dr Richard Greville, Deputy Psychiatric Adviser, Metropolitan Police, who is called to investigate the Pangbourne Massacre in which thirty-two adults are inexplicably murdered, and the thirteen children resident on the estate appear to have been abducted.

It is the bizarre methods of killing which attract Richard Greville’s attention. A crossbow has been used to despatch one of the security guards, a lethal bamboo mantrap constitutes another device, a couple have been run over in their own garage, others shot, electrocuted or stifled. Amongst the theories initially entertained as clues to the massacre are the possibilities that a Soviet Spetnaz commando unit has been erroneously parachuted into the estate, or that an experimental nerve-gas projectile has fallen from a military aircraft into the area and deranged a number of local inhabitants, or in true Ballardian terms that ‘the parents were murdered by visitors from outer space seeking young human specimens’, or again ‘by creatures from a parallel universe who strayed by accident into our continuum.’

Richard Greville sets about reconstructing the conditions under which the massacre may have taken place; when Marion Miller, the first of the missing children, is discovered in a state of catatonic seizure, able only to communicate by a cryptic sign of motioning with her left hand while raising the right one to her head, then Greville ingeniously sets about establishing a possible case.

Tension builds with the discovery of clues. The children’s insulated, unreal lives had led them to devise a system of internal computer-codes. They relay a curious home video about the estate which is interspersed with atrocity footage. Rifle magazines are discovered in one of the drawers together with explicit sexual diaries. Everything suggests that they revolted against a suffocating insularity, even their bedrooms were kept under strict screen surveillance by their parents. Greville works from the theory that ‘What they were rebelling against was a despotism of kindness. They killed to free themselves from a tyranny of love and care.’ Marion Miller’s gesture is seen to be that of electrocuting her father by throwing a whirring hairdryer into the bath, while brushing the fringe from her eyes with her right hand. The recreation is unforgettable: ‘I stepped back and tossed the hairdryer into the bath. There was a violent hiss, and a muffled flash that jolted the sides of the bath, lighting up the mirrors around us. Scalded water spat across Payne and myself, spraying fine drops across the ceiling.’

There are brilliant high points in Running Wild, not the least of which is the shoot-out in the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital when Marion is retrieved by ‘two small figures in white gowns and face-masks,’ who murder with the unreasoning deliberation of psychopaths. And when Richard Greville comes to reconstruct the massacre detail by detail, accounting for each child’s part in the tyrannicide, and demonstrates the meticulous planning which has gone into the killings, so that not a single adult is left alive on Pangbourne Estate – a theory rejected by the police – one is back with the solitary figure characteristic of all Ballard’s books, whose vision supports a universe.

Ballard has always taken uncompromising risks, and his psychological exploration of murder conducted by children is every bit as terrifying as the mental landscapes of Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition. No one has been prepared to go so far and push the frontiers of consciousness to their limits. Whatever Ballard creates is stamped with his individual genius; no one writes as well, and in fifty years when most of his straitjacketed contemporaries will have been consigned to oblivion, a new generation will be reading Ballard as the novelist of the immediate present.