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3.36 AVERAGE
3.36 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
dark
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
If what you want from a book is 180 pages of overly-clinical and tedious descriptions of car crashes and perverse sex acts, then this is for you.
I think it sets the record for the most references to vaginal mucus in the first 20 pages.
It's not the depravity that bothers me. Look at my top 20 favourite novels and you'll find Burgess, Welsh, Banks, Orwell, Palahniuk and Huxley. I'm not easily offended and I have no issues reading about vaginal mucus as long as it adds something valuable to the novel.
But peel back the layers of shock value in Crash and all you're left with is a paper-thin plot and flat, underdeveloped characters. It's not art. It's pointless. And before people clamour that it's a novel about a psychopath, and that's why it's written in this way, I refer you to American Psycho, Filth and We Need to Talk About Kevin. No excuse to not make it engaging.
No thank you.
I think it sets the record for the most references to vaginal mucus in the first 20 pages.
It's not the depravity that bothers me. Look at my top 20 favourite novels and you'll find Burgess, Welsh, Banks, Orwell, Palahniuk and Huxley. I'm not easily offended and I have no issues reading about vaginal mucus as long as it adds something valuable to the novel.
But peel back the layers of shock value in Crash and all you're left with is a paper-thin plot and flat, underdeveloped characters. It's not art. It's pointless. And before people clamour that it's a novel about a psychopath, and that's why it's written in this way, I refer you to American Psycho, Filth and We Need to Talk About Kevin. No excuse to not make it engaging.
No thank you.
J.G. Ballard’s Crash stoked controversy when it was published in 1973. Some praised the book’s uncompromising, surreal style, while others derided it as a crass celebration of sadism. Crash remains polarizing today, a slick 120 Days of Sodom for the automobile age.
The novel is narrated by a fictional version of Ballard, who develops a sexual fetish for car crashes after being involved in a head-on collision. For Ballard, the technologies of the car – the grille, the dashboard, the gear stick – resemble contours of the human body. He sees the merging of metal and flesh in a car crash as the ultimate erotic act, a zenith of pleasure reached only through extraordinary violence. The fetishism of technology and cruelty, the book seems to suggest, is a disturbing product of our image-driven, consumerist society. (Zadie Smith, writing in the Guardian, said Crash describes the convergence of “our horror of death and love of spectacle.”)
If you enjoy subversive, experimental sci-fi, be sure to check out Ballard’s work – you are in for a ride. -Anthony C.
The novel is narrated by a fictional version of Ballard, who develops a sexual fetish for car crashes after being involved in a head-on collision. For Ballard, the technologies of the car – the grille, the dashboard, the gear stick – resemble contours of the human body. He sees the merging of metal and flesh in a car crash as the ultimate erotic act, a zenith of pleasure reached only through extraordinary violence. The fetishism of technology and cruelty, the book seems to suggest, is a disturbing product of our image-driven, consumerist society. (Zadie Smith, writing in the Guardian, said Crash describes the convergence of “our horror of death and love of spectacle.”)
If you enjoy subversive, experimental sci-fi, be sure to check out Ballard’s work – you are in for a ride. -Anthony C.
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Self harm, Sexual content, Sexual violence
Moderate: Suicide, Suicide attempt
Minor: Pedophilia
The best part of Crash was the "Introduction to the French Edition" that's included at the start and isn't in all of the copies. In it, Ballard makes a compelling case for the importance of science-fiction and writing about the future, and a solid argument for why he thought to combine sex and car crashes. Unfortunately, that's the only time in 200-ish pages that he had me convinced.
Ballard's tale of people who get aroused by car crashes and mutilated bodies has aged poorly. In the '70s, it was still predicting the future, and the subject matter was probably still shocking. But in a time when we've seen technology and sex combine in myriad ways, and books like 50 Shades of Grey are being read by middle-aged women on the beach (not that I find that shocking, either, but I'm sure they would've in the '70s), it doesn't feel stunning, or for that matter, correct.
Ballard was right about the isolating effect technology has had on sex, and computers, like the cars in Crash, do serve as a vessel. But the computer itself isn't the fantasy. The computer simply connects the fantasies. One could make the argument that the early days of computer technology did play a more direct role in sexual fantasies in that before things like webcams, you were typing, and the act of typing and describing sex was the turn-on (well, and the rubbing one out part). Now computers have webcams, and you can find free porn in a wealth of places, and the computer doesn't have the same role, per se, in the sex, beyond being a device for communicating or the means of delivery.
Frankly, though, I expected the connection between the crashes and the sex to be stronger. He's trying to convince the reader that the car crashes are what turns these people on, but when you look at it closely, it's the injuries and just having sex in cars that seems to do it for them. They look at photos of surgical and medical textbooks and it seems to give them a similar thrill. The attempts to blend the two was tenuous at best. I kept expecting them to fuck each other with parts of the car, or to start beating each other bloody during sex, or to drive while having sex, or to get in car crashes and then bang in the wreckage, and none of that ever happened. Granted, maybe that's the point - that faced with all of this, the mind just conjures up ways that it could be more explicit.
It seems like he was reaching for that kind of point, but it didn't fully come through. Ballard writes in this dry, repetitive, clinical style that makes the book boring. Trying to make the sensational and horrific boring could very well be the point, except that works against the other point that he's trying to make, which is that technology will become a significant part of our sex lives - I mean, wouldn't you want your readers to be turned on? That, to me, would've been more horrifying - to experience the same sexual drive and thrill as the characters do from all this carnage. Instead, the language isolates the reader and deadens them to the whole experience. The boring-ification of sex and car crashes doesn't say much about the merging of sex and technology so much as it says something about the way media and news are produced and presented right now.
I don't regret reading it, but I can't say I enjoyed the experience or would want to subject myself to it again.
Ballard's tale of people who get aroused by car crashes and mutilated bodies has aged poorly. In the '70s, it was still predicting the future, and the subject matter was probably still shocking. But in a time when we've seen technology and sex combine in myriad ways, and books like 50 Shades of Grey are being read by middle-aged women on the beach (not that I find that shocking, either, but I'm sure they would've in the '70s), it doesn't feel stunning, or for that matter, correct.
Ballard was right about the isolating effect technology has had on sex, and computers, like the cars in Crash, do serve as a vessel. But the computer itself isn't the fantasy. The computer simply connects the fantasies. One could make the argument that the early days of computer technology did play a more direct role in sexual fantasies in that before things like webcams, you were typing, and the act of typing and describing sex was the turn-on (well, and the rubbing one out part). Now computers have webcams, and you can find free porn in a wealth of places, and the computer doesn't have the same role, per se, in the sex, beyond being a device for communicating or the means of delivery.
Frankly, though, I expected the connection between the crashes and the sex to be stronger. He's trying to convince the reader that the car crashes are what turns these people on, but when you look at it closely, it's the injuries and just having sex in cars that seems to do it for them. They look at photos of surgical and medical textbooks and it seems to give them a similar thrill. The attempts to blend the two was tenuous at best. I kept expecting them to fuck each other with parts of the car, or to start beating each other bloody during sex, or to drive while having sex, or to get in car crashes and then bang in the wreckage, and none of that ever happened. Granted, maybe that's the point - that faced with all of this, the mind just conjures up ways that it could be more explicit.
It seems like he was reaching for that kind of point, but it didn't fully come through. Ballard writes in this dry, repetitive, clinical style that makes the book boring. Trying to make the sensational and horrific boring could very well be the point, except that works against the other point that he's trying to make, which is that technology will become a significant part of our sex lives - I mean, wouldn't you want your readers to be turned on? That, to me, would've been more horrifying - to experience the same sexual drive and thrill as the characters do from all this carnage. Instead, the language isolates the reader and deadens them to the whole experience. The boring-ification of sex and car crashes doesn't say much about the merging of sex and technology so much as it says something about the way media and news are produced and presented right now.
I don't regret reading it, but I can't say I enjoyed the experience or would want to subject myself to it again.