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3.36 AVERAGE
3.36 AVERAGE
I first read this book in 1975 when I was 14 and it had a profound effect on me, and on my brother, who read it about the same time. In fact I was at my brother’s house on Christmas Day when I noticed that he had three different editions of the book and I asked him to lend me one. By 1975 I had read several of Ballard’s earlier sci-fi novels and short story collections and I really liked them. He was my favourite writer and – best of all – none of my friends were reading him. It was as though only my brother and I understood the message. In the edition of Crash that my brother lent me, Ballard explains that message in a brief introduction. What made him different from a lot of the science fiction that was being produced in the 1950s and 1960s – like Star Trek and Isaac Asimov and the Dune series – was that Ballard’s writing was not set in the far future or in distant star systems; it was set pretty much in the here and now. It wasn’t exactly reality but it was a reality close enough to our own experience so that it seemed all too real. It was as if what Ballard wrote could easily happen tomorrow. And Ballard was also prescient. An example is his first novel – and still one of my favourites – The Drowned World set on a superheated Earth where the ice caps have melted. London is tropical and largely under water and civilisation has broken down. Another Eco disaster is foretold in The Drought. Another in The Wind from Nowhere. Social breakdown also occurs in a weird block of flats in High Rise.
These novels were all brilliant for me but Crash took me to another place. In 1975 my brother and I were car mad and both of us wanted big American cars when we grew up – a longing that my brother has since satisfied, while the only American cars I have ever driven were hire cars when I was in the US. At that time I dreamt of owning a Lincoln Continental, albeit a later model than the one driven by the sinister Vaughan in the novel. He drives an early 1960s model like the one in which President Kennedy was assassinated. The novel begins with the unforgettable line: “Vaughan died yesterday in his last car crash.” Immediately I knew what this novel was about things that fascinated and terrified me: cars, traffic jams, car accidents, pain, violence and the options of death or disability. At that point I knew a family whose daughter had been killed in a car crash and I thought it must be a terrible way to go. Frightening. However, when you read this novel you’re immersed in a world where ordinary, sensible people – advertising executives, doctors and social workers – find cars and watching cars crashing and being in crashed cars a massive turn on.
This applies to women as well as men, and although the narrator and Vaughan are male and front and centre in this tale, Ballard is ahead of his time in his portrayal of women. For example, not only does the narrator’s wife, Catherine, have a good job in the airline industry; she is having flying lessons and developing a business providing air tours. She also has multiple lovers and tells her husband all about them.
Early in the novel Ballard is involved in a collision with another car. That car has two occupants, the passenger Dr Helen Remington, and her husband who is driving. The husband ends up dead on the bonnet of the narrator’s car. The narrator is badly injured and spends several weeks in hospital. While he is in the hospital he bumps into Helen, who is also being treated there. At first she ignores him but later they have a torrid affair, in his new car, which is exactly the same model as the car he was driving when he killed her husband.
It is while the narrator is in hospital that he first sees Vaughan. The latter is hanging around Helen Remington and the narrator assumes that he must be her doctor. Later he realises that he has seen Vaughan on TV as some kind of documentary film maker. Later still he realises that Vaughan has been shadowing him since the accident. We learn that Vaughan’s hobby – or obsession – is tuning into police and ambulance radio channels waiting for news of car crashes. He then rushes to the scene of the accident and muscles in taking photos of dead and dying drivers and passengers – and also of bent and twisted cars, vans and lorries. At one point he shows the narrator his dark room where he has hundreds of photos of crash victims. He also collects text books of plastic surgery and fantasises about injuries – especially genital wounds. They’re what really get him going.
The narrator runs a company that makes TV commercials and he and his partner are trying to get the actress Elizabeth Taylor – who is in London working on a film – to star in a commercial they are making for Ford. When Vaughan finds out about this he is delighted. He latches onto the narrator because his major fantasy turns out to be orchestrating a car crash in which he and Elizabeth Taylor are both killed. Despite the narrator’s initial misgivings he falls under Vaughan’s spell and the two of them spend an indefinite time – perhaps the best part of a year – driving around London Airport taking photos of car crash victims and having sordid encounters with sex workers who resemble Elizabeth Taylor on the back seat of Vaughan’s Lincoln Continental.
I’ll say no more about the plot. What I offer instead are a couple of quotations from Ballard’s inimitable prose:
In Chapter 17 he is writing about an enormous traffic jam in west London: “The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this motionless pause.”
A few pages further on, the narrator, his wife Catherine and Vaughan – along with thousands of other spectators – have been watching the aftermath of a serious car accident in which at least one person has been killed. When the show is over the crowds begin to disperse. The narrator notes two couples who have clearly been turned on by what they’ve just seen: “This pervasive sexuality filled the air, as if we were members of a congregation leaving after a sermon urging us to celebrate our sexualities with friends and strangers, and were driving into the night to imitate the bloody eucharist we had observed with the most unlikely partners.”
As I said, I first read this novel nearly fifty years ago and I know I read it several more times in the 1970s and early 1980s but this must be the first time I’ve read it for at least forty years. Despite that, so much of it is familiar. For me, this unique novel has lines as memorable as Shakespeare. Ballard died in 2009 but I wonder what he would make of the times we’re living in now. Musk Trump. AI. Putin. In many ways he predicted the whole shebang and that’s what makes him worth reading again and again.
These novels were all brilliant for me but Crash took me to another place. In 1975 my brother and I were car mad and both of us wanted big American cars when we grew up – a longing that my brother has since satisfied, while the only American cars I have ever driven were hire cars when I was in the US. At that time I dreamt of owning a Lincoln Continental, albeit a later model than the one driven by the sinister Vaughan in the novel. He drives an early 1960s model like the one in which President Kennedy was assassinated. The novel begins with the unforgettable line: “Vaughan died yesterday in his last car crash.” Immediately I knew what this novel was about things that fascinated and terrified me: cars, traffic jams, car accidents, pain, violence and the options of death or disability. At that point I knew a family whose daughter had been killed in a car crash and I thought it must be a terrible way to go. Frightening. However, when you read this novel you’re immersed in a world where ordinary, sensible people – advertising executives, doctors and social workers – find cars and watching cars crashing and being in crashed cars a massive turn on.
This applies to women as well as men, and although the narrator and Vaughan are male and front and centre in this tale, Ballard is ahead of his time in his portrayal of women. For example, not only does the narrator’s wife, Catherine, have a good job in the airline industry; she is having flying lessons and developing a business providing air tours. She also has multiple lovers and tells her husband all about them.
Early in the novel Ballard is involved in a collision with another car. That car has two occupants, the passenger Dr Helen Remington, and her husband who is driving. The husband ends up dead on the bonnet of the narrator’s car. The narrator is badly injured and spends several weeks in hospital. While he is in the hospital he bumps into Helen, who is also being treated there. At first she ignores him but later they have a torrid affair, in his new car, which is exactly the same model as the car he was driving when he killed her husband.
It is while the narrator is in hospital that he first sees Vaughan. The latter is hanging around Helen Remington and the narrator assumes that he must be her doctor. Later he realises that he has seen Vaughan on TV as some kind of documentary film maker. Later still he realises that Vaughan has been shadowing him since the accident. We learn that Vaughan’s hobby – or obsession – is tuning into police and ambulance radio channels waiting for news of car crashes. He then rushes to the scene of the accident and muscles in taking photos of dead and dying drivers and passengers – and also of bent and twisted cars, vans and lorries. At one point he shows the narrator his dark room where he has hundreds of photos of crash victims. He also collects text books of plastic surgery and fantasises about injuries – especially genital wounds. They’re what really get him going.
The narrator runs a company that makes TV commercials and he and his partner are trying to get the actress Elizabeth Taylor – who is in London working on a film – to star in a commercial they are making for Ford. When Vaughan finds out about this he is delighted. He latches onto the narrator because his major fantasy turns out to be orchestrating a car crash in which he and Elizabeth Taylor are both killed. Despite the narrator’s initial misgivings he falls under Vaughan’s spell and the two of them spend an indefinite time – perhaps the best part of a year – driving around London Airport taking photos of car crash victims and having sordid encounters with sex workers who resemble Elizabeth Taylor on the back seat of Vaughan’s Lincoln Continental.
I’ll say no more about the plot. What I offer instead are a couple of quotations from Ballard’s inimitable prose:
In Chapter 17 he is writing about an enormous traffic jam in west London: “The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this motionless pause.”
A few pages further on, the narrator, his wife Catherine and Vaughan – along with thousands of other spectators – have been watching the aftermath of a serious car accident in which at least one person has been killed. When the show is over the crowds begin to disperse. The narrator notes two couples who have clearly been turned on by what they’ve just seen: “This pervasive sexuality filled the air, as if we were members of a congregation leaving after a sermon urging us to celebrate our sexualities with friends and strangers, and were driving into the night to imitate the bloody eucharist we had observed with the most unlikely partners.”
As I said, I first read this novel nearly fifty years ago and I know I read it several more times in the 1970s and early 1980s but this must be the first time I’ve read it for at least forty years. Despite that, so much of it is familiar. For me, this unique novel has lines as memorable as Shakespeare. Ballard died in 2009 but I wonder what he would make of the times we’re living in now. Musk Trump. AI. Putin. In many ways he predicted the whole shebang and that’s what makes him worth reading again and again.
“THE WORLD WAS beginning to flower into wounds. ”
It's a complex but worthwhile book. i'm glad to have read it but it was a varied reading experience - sometimes titillating, sometimes boring, sometimes completely engrossing - often gross. This is the intention, and the writing reflects that kind of mechanised alienation that subsumes these characters and their world but I am glad I don't have to read the words 'sex act', 'pubis' or 'woman doctor' for a while. Loved the film, it's a really good adaption now i've read the book.
There's something DH in this for me that's very interesting - the car crash as encounter, meeting the (mechanical) other and in doing so moving beyond human discursive frames.
“The impact of the second collision between my body and the interior compartment of the car was defined in these wounds, like the contours of a woman’s body remembered in the responding pressure of one’s own skin for a few hours after a sexual act.”
It's a complex but worthwhile book. i'm glad to have read it but it was a varied reading experience - sometimes titillating, sometimes boring, sometimes completely engrossing - often gross. This is the intention, and the writing reflects that kind of mechanised alienation that subsumes these characters and their world but I am glad I don't have to read the words 'sex act', 'pubis' or 'woman doctor' for a while. Loved the film, it's a really good adaption now i've read the book.
There's something DH in this for me that's very interesting - the car crash as encounter, meeting the (mechanical) other and in doing so moving beyond human discursive frames.
“The impact of the second collision between my body and the interior compartment of the car was defined in these wounds, like the contours of a woman’s body remembered in the responding pressure of one’s own skin for a few hours after a sexual act.”
adventurous
challenging
dark
tense
medium-paced
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
It starts off as a very medical erotic novel and ends as such. But by the time you finish it, it's impossible to ignore how the words "chromium", "fender", "vinyl" and "speedometer" elicit the same feeling as "vagina", "anus" and "penis".
I like to think a great work of fiction is the one that challenges my preconceived notions of life and people and of good and bad and has me teetering between disgust and enjoyment. This one hit the mark.
And I also think while the book did have its boring and repetitive parts, I do believe it's a reflection of a world growing numb to gratuitous violence. In my view, its writing is supposed to get engrained into your brain until it doesn't shock you or excite you anymore, until it becomes mechanical. Just like the acts depicted in the story.
Another thing I'd like to point out is that there's a perfect pace of growing sexual tension between Ballard and Vaughan that had me gripping my hair and saying "just do him, goddamn it!".
I like to think a great work of fiction is the one that challenges my preconceived notions of life and people and of good and bad and has me teetering between disgust and enjoyment. This one hit the mark.
And I also think while the book did have its boring and repetitive parts, I do believe it's a reflection of a world growing numb to gratuitous violence. In my view, its writing is supposed to get engrained into your brain until it doesn't shock you or excite you anymore, until it becomes mechanical. Just like the acts depicted in the story.
I'm not sure how to feel about this one.
What I mean to say -- I didn't like the characters, I didn't like the story. But there weren't meant to be likeable, they were meant to be appalling. So I guess it was a very successful book.
What I mean to say -- I didn't like the characters, I didn't like the story. But there weren't meant to be likeable, they were meant to be appalling. So I guess it was a very successful book.
... Vivid, an exhaust(excuse the pun)ing read. Words I don't want to see again for a while: mucus; pubis; technology; marriage.
If art is aimed at eliciting responses, than this book is certainly art. While reading at it I went through intense boredom to disgust to fascinated interest to having the weirdest boner. I can't really say I enjoyed reading this, and more than once I hoped the book would be over while mired in to another stretch of repetitive fetishistic imagery. In the end, Crash delivers - especially considering its age it's still a very much transgressive and experimental bit of writing, more of an experience than enjoyment to read.
I desperately wanted to like this book. Read some reviews and the themes it delves into really interest me. Unfortunately its just so fucking repetitive. When you aren't phased by its grotesque imagery it's just kind of self masturbatory similes and euphemisms to vague life events of a character we know nothing about over and over that meander around the shock value of a car crash fetish . Like ok. Sure. We goon to car crashes. Now what? Nothing that interested me. It was boring. DNF!