Crash

In the modern age the car has become a symbol of freedom and status and the sexiness of a graceful automobile holds a powerful attraction to many. At the same time, the car crash is a voyer's delight that satisfies a primitive instinctive enjoyment gained from the destruction and deformation of smooth metal surfaces and soft human tissue. Ballard sees all of this and implies a perverse extension in which this voyerism has become sexual. In doing so he makes a powerful statement about the role of technology in reshaping human lives. While others have complained about this, for me the book's repetative focusing on car parts, car crash injuries and sexual acts matches the compulsive nature of sexual obsessions that can be satisfied temporarily but will continue to return again and again. In this way the book's torrid and relentless flow of ideas and visions is consistent with the foundation of it's plot. The book reads rapidly and yet it is increadilbly dense with amazingly poetic phrases and sentences. In this way the book adds ever increacing weight to its central ideas. Overall, this work is still as fresh in concept today as it must have been when it was first published. Like many of Ballard's books, Crash is a self-contained masterpeice that does not seek to be understood or praised by its readers - it can hold its place among the worlds greatest literature with ease.

I've been a fan of J.G. Ballard's ever since I read The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere, both dramatic and imposing mood pieces about the end of the world. Ballard's prose has a heavy, sensual languidness to it suited to these dark themes, some of which derives from his unhurried rhythm and pacing. In fact, his prose seems to have an almost oxymoronic, somnolent muscularity and strength--a quality that certain Buddhist statues, which are said to represent "the spirit of strength in repose"--are also said to possess, interestingly enough. (I suspect Ballard himself would be amused by such a recondite association). And as another reviewer here remarked, perhaps his prose is something of an acquired taste.But getting back to the book, this story about a strange and disturbing subculture that has evolved a sexual obsession and fetish for crashing automobiles is no doubt one of the more bizarre ideas for a novel ever created. The members even go so far as to create and re-enact fatal "classic" car crashes from the past--such as the one that killed James Dean or Jane Mansfield. Its theme also reminded me of the recent movie, the Fight Club, in its idea of a repressed and narcissistic culture of violence that lies just beneath the surface of our otherwise highly polished, technologically advanced society. Since I also saw the movie, I thought I would comment on it here. I didn't think I was going to like the book or the film originally, even though I'm a fan of Ballard's, but I found I actually liked it a lot despite my initial misgivings. Partly, this was because I happened to hear an interview on the radio where Ballard discussed how he got the idea for the book, and which helped to explain it at least somewhat. Well, maybe. It's still pretty weird. Anyway, I'll recount the story here for those who missed the interview. It was on National Public Radio.Ballard said he got the idea from passing a fatal traffic accident where a beautiful women had been killed, and you could see everything from the road as you drove by. The woman's body had ended up mostly nude on the rear deck of the passenger compartment, and he said people were driving by gawking at the scene and rubbernecking, and he suddenly got the idea that the whole thing was very erotic for them despite the obviously tragic circumstances and the woman's untimely death. At that point the link between eroticism, car crashes, and death was made, and he was off and running with his bizzare new story idea.I thought Spader, Koteas, Unger, and Hunter were excellent in their roles, and that also helped to make an otherwise implausible film more realistic. Of course, it's a David Cronenberg film, so what was I expecting? Well, I was probably expecting lots of weird sex and violence--such as the scene in his Naked Lunch, based on the Burroughs book, where the guy is getting anally raped by an 8-foot high half-human, half-centipede creature (Ballard, take note). Well, I like his movies usually, but

A number of on-line reviewers seem mistaken -- or at least I disagree with them about -- certain key points regarding this masterful novel. First, I have read several times that Crash is the story of the dehumanization of a group of individuals who explore their sexual fetish for car crashes. This is not the book I thought I read. The world of Crash is cruelly objectified; it is a dehumanized world already -- and the background information we are given portrays Ballard and his wife as living jaded, exhausted essentially middle class existences amidst steely urban wonders that no longer fascinate them and a plethora of luxury toys that no longer entice. The narrator's relationship with his wife is habitual, like all his relationships. Their world has stolen their ability to humanly relate to one another. After the narrator's car crash, his developing obsession with the sensuality of crashes eroticizes his dead world.The narrator and the other crashers may degrade themselves, but they do it to break through the tedium of the mechanical world into something more satisfying. The story is bleak, but by the end of the novel, Ballard, his wife and friends have achieved a kind of twisted familial relationship; perverse, by ordinary standards, but more rather than less intimate than what they had before. I also can't say I am sympathetic to skeptics regarding the book's style, and am curious as to what books they regard as well-written. If Crash isn't exquisitely wrought, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, please show me the book that is. The glory of the novel is its poetry, really prose poetry. This can make for difficulty -- but the condensed language of poetry is more beautiful for its initial strangeness, and anyone who enjoys modern poetry should appreciate this book. Ballard resembles Edgar Allen Poe, another prose poet whose work exploits fantastical conceits. The language is driving, insistent, clinically complex and usually grammatical, occasionally veering off into pure surrealist invention. People who write fiction themselves should similarly appreciate how difficult a trick Ballard has "pulled off" for a novelist. The analogy at the core of Crash -- the eroticism of car crashes, the prurient interest of the technological -- is so bizarre and ingenious that the successful realization of the metaphor lifts the book above the level of cleverness and into the stratospheres. Usually stories developed from initial conceits too fantastical are precious at best. The more moon-mad and improbable the fancy, the more arduous the literary task. Ballard has not written a thin, minimalist exercise, but a full blooded novel. Richly atmospheric prose can often stop the forward progress of a plot. Crash is prose poetry and a successful novelistic entertainment, featuring plot, characterization, and action. The novel pivots around two scenes, both remarkable for their distorted beauty. The scene between Ballard's wife and the couple's friend,

...but certainly his most unforgettable. I've read this book several times, and it is still just as disturbing, if not more disturbing, each time I read it. There aren't many books you can say that about. Some of his other books may be better--"Day of Creation," "The Crystal World," and "Unlimited Dream Company" are all marvelous fantasies, written in that same fluid, dreamlike style. But they won't haunt your nightmares like "Crash" will. I think what affected me the most, more than the cold, clinical, but still erotic sex scenes or the terrible brutality of Vaughan's deliberately engineered crashes, was simply the unflinching look at the nature of obsession. Ballard (and it's so much more disturbing, somehow feeling that the author is, or may be, the narrator) shows how we can become fixated, whether on sex, death, violence, another person, whatever, to the point that nothing else in the world matters--and there is nothing particularly unusual about this! He is perfectly matter-of-fact, unalarmed about his growing obsession. This is simply the way people's minds work, he seems to be telling us. People aren't rational. They're controlled by their obsessions, some of which are more benign than others (Vaughan's would have to be among the least benign). What's most frightening about this is that we realize how true this insight is--I think that's Ballard's greatest achievement, something that he returns to again and again in other works. (I think especially of the two rival scientists carrying on their petty, personal war as the jungle around them turns to glass in "The Crystal World.") As much as I have been moved and impressed by this book, I haven't the least interest in seeing the Cronenberg movie--I don't see how a film could hope to do justice to the perfect beauty and horror of this little nightmare.

Apparently, quite a few readers might find a reading of Baudrillard's essay on this novel necessary to fully grasp what Ballard is talking about here. This is an existential exploration of life at the end of the 20th century, and how humanity finds meaning (rightly or wrongly) in it's technology. It's a highly complex read, and not for everyone. One should realize that the sexuality described in the novel is not intended to be erotic, or for that matter "bad", or "destructive", or "dangerous"; it's transcendent. The brilliance of the work lies in Ballard's ability, like Burgess in _A Clockwork Orange_, to subvert the reader's feelings toward the subject matter, so that in the end one begins to actually understand -- even sympathize with -- the characters' behavior.Ballard's prose here is, well... classic Ballard: languid, fever-dream language, which would act as a suitable substitute for LSD. He has one of the most unique "voices" I've ever come across, and is certainly an acquired taste, in relation to other, more mainstream (i.e., mostly unimportant) SF authors. Take a bite, though, and you may find yourself addicted._Crash_ is the literary equivilent of a brick to the head. I loved it.