Crash (1973)

I struggled some with this J.G. Ballard novel, which doesn’t have much in terms of characters or story. It earns any outrageous reputation it may have for its premise, conflating sex and auto accidents, actively repulsive in its wanton fetish breeding. I thought I might have detected echoes of Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Crowd,” which is similarly unnaturally fixated on auto accidents. Like the David Cronenberg movie that came of Ballard’s novel in 1996 (not to be confused with a 2004 movie of the same name), Crash the novel is weird and unsettling. But it is also now unfortunately dated in a couple ways. First the OPEC oil embargo circa 1973 changed a lot of attitudes about car culture. Then climate change has made these kinds of fetishes more taboo. When Ballard was writing he was exaggerating but it felt more in the realm of possibility. It’s much less the case now. Crash feels to me inert, wallowing in depravities and extremes of masochism, e.g., wounds are equated to sexual apertures. Male organs and the cum are flying. I’m not sure which was harder to deal with, the lugubrious pace or the endless coarse sexualizing. It feels closer in spirit to Tom Wolfe’s celebration of customized cars in the ‘60s than SF. But I do appreciate the single-mindedness here. Ballard takes his meditation on cars and sex a good distance down the road. Another nice detail is setting it in and around the airport section of London. The architecture of the setting does much to get at the themes even better than all the weird sex. It’s pavement and roadways and curling bridges and vehicles on land and in the air, all screaming machinery and petroleum. The novel is mercifully short, just over 200 pages. My copy had an introduction written by Ballard in 1974 which has some good points but also feels a little empty on science fiction. Is Crash even science fiction? It’s not much like anything else I’ve ever seen, save only perhaps the 2021 movie Titane, which is more clearly science fiction and should not be missed btw. Ballard’s near future is very near, or was in 1973, and the speculative elements are more about currents in perversion. But let’s not oversimplify trying to escape the implications. At base it’s a novel about the relationship of humans and the machines they build, intended not just as tools but literally as extensions of ourselves. Sexuality just comes along for the ride. It’s a good idea and Ballard attacks it and grinds it to dust as he goes. I never caught much momentum to the narrative, which made it sloggy. But there are some pretty big ideas in here at the same time. Don’t read this when you’re going through a breakup. That’s probably my best advice.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.