*****WARNING THIS IS A GRAPHIC ADULT REVIEW NO KIDDIES PLEASE.*****”I knew that Vaughan could never really die in a car-crash, but would in some way be re-born through those twisted radiator grilles and cascading windshield glass. I thought of the scarred white skin over his abdomen, the heavy pubic hair that started on the upper slopes of his thighs, his tacky navel and unsavoury armpits, his crude handling of women and automobiles, and his submissive tenderness towards myself. Even as I had placed my penis in his rectum Vaughan had known he would try to kill me, in a final display of his casual love for me.” Albert Camus was tragically killed in a car crash in 1960. A crash of particular interest to Vaughan.I can see how a writer would need to immerse himself into this writing experience. He needs to stay close enough to get splattered with semen and blood, and drink the erotic cocktail of sex, cars, and pain. J. G. Ballard certainly added an extra kink to the perversity of this novel when he elected to give the narrator his own name. Vaughan a “former TV-scientist, turned nightmare angel of the expressways” is obsessively planning a head on collision with the actress Elizabeth Taylor. He has a police scanner in his car and every time there is an accident he appears on the scene with his cameras whirring and his penis stirring. He is there when Ballard has his own accident. A head on crash that kills the driver of the other car putting both Ballard and the wife of the dead man in the hospital for a lengthy recovery. Ballard has always had symphorophilia or car-crashsexual fetishism, but after his crash and meeting Vaughan it becomes more than just an obsession, but a full time addiction. When someone suffers from a depraved obsession they quickly learn to hide those tendencies from everyone around them, but when they meet someone with the same affliction it fuels the fire. The synergy of mutual interest escalates the need to go further, to do more, to cross all boundaries. ”Vaughan excited some latent homosexual impulse only within the cabin of his car or driving along the highway. His attraction lay not so much in a complex of familiar anatomical triggers--a curve of exposed breast, the soft cushion of a buttock, the hair-lined arch of a damp perineum--but in the stylization of posture achieved between Vaughan and the car.”The emergence of a new sexuality born from perverse technology. Jackson Pollock was tragically killed in a car crash in 1956.I wrecked once. I was checking the map and looked up just as a deer stepped out into the road in front of me as casually as if he were John Steed going for a walk in a London park lacking only the hat and a fine walking stick. I made several tactical errors.I was on a dirt road recently coated with pea size gravel so it was still loose and slick. I hit the brakes and swerved to avoid the deer who just watched me fly past him as casually as if this was an everyday occurrence. Maybe he did this regularly for entertainment. I went into this rather elegant spin slewing sideways up the road. I tried a steering correction to keep myself on the road, but I still had too much speed.As I’m writing this my heartbeat is speeding up. My back tire went off into the ditch which unfortunately was not at the most convenient place in the road. In fact it was right beside a very steep ravine. I tilted off the road. Everything slowed down. I’m one of those guys that has to have his eyes open on a roller coaster. I’m fine as long as I can see what is coming. A tree branch went through the side door window behind my head. I can remember thinking close your eyes for just a second because there is going to be glass. I rolled completely over once and then twice. Debris was rolling around in the car like clothes in a dryer. The Jeep Cherokee came to a stop on the driver’s side. Seatbelts are very difficult to get off when adrenaline is doing a tap dance with your hands. I crawled up the seats and opened the passenger door, not really a door anymore, but more of a hatch. I felt like I’d just wrecked a dune buggy on the moon. The back wheel was still spinning. I can remember thinking this could have been worse, lots worse. The slope was steep enough that I had to angle my ascent sideways to climb it. I stood on the road. The deer seemed to have had better things to do. He was gone. Two cars with Kansas tags slowed down to look at me, but didn’t stop. One guy in a truck with Kansas tags sped up when he saw me. Finally a little guy in a small Toyota pickup with a camper on the back with Minnesota tags stopped to see if I was alright. Thank goodness there was someone from out of state. He walked back down the slope with me and between the two of us we tilted the Jeep back up on it’s wheels. (Adrenaline was more useful for that task.) There was not a single panel that did not have a dent and the tree limbs had scraped some red paint off in lurid grooves as if a wild animal had attacked. We stood and looked at it for a moment. “I’m going to try and start it.” I remember saying.He shook his head, but didn’t say anything. I could tell he didn’t think there was even a chance. It started on the first turn of the key. I drove out of the pasture until I found a gate. I then drove it home, about a hundred miles, keeping an eye locked on the gauges waiting for, expecting, some kind of trouble. As I drove down the road looking like I’d just escaped from a demolition derby I did receive some long stares. I’m sure there were many discussions about that fool driving that junker. The Jeep was totalled. It was the first vehicle I had ever bought brand new. :-( James Dean was tragically killed when he crashed his Porsche Spyder in 1955.They reach a point where sex is only good in a car. Vaughan has sex with Ballard’s wife an experience more intense than she expected. Ballard has sex with the wife of the man he killed in his accident. They find places close to where the accident happened to consummate their mutual need. ”I knew that she was about to enter that period of unthinking promiscuity through which most people pass after a bereavement. The collision of our two cars, and the death of her husband, had become the key to a new sexuality.” Vaughan gathers an entourage of car crash survivors, all of them unable to get past the traumatic event and many of them desiring another crash. They worship their scars, the calligraphy left behind by the steering wheel, dashboard, glass, and objects of impalement. They pick up hookers and have sex with them in the positions of famous car crashes. ”Vaughan’s semen ran down her left thigh on to the black vinyl of the seat. The ivory globes searched for the steepest gradient to the central sulcus of the seat.”This is a madness that becomes all consuming. Ballard starts to see Vaughan as someone out of control, but at the same time he wants to remain a spectator for the final gruesome scene. Vaughan is the Mad Hatter incapable of escaping his own self-imposed deranged destiny, but for it to be truly beautiful his final exit must involve Elizabeth Taylor the most alluring, most desirable woman on the planet. This is a very disturbing book. I have been contemplating if I’ve ever read a book more disturbing. Henry Miller was a thought because of the detailed sexual situations, but really he is pretty tame in comparison. The only one to compete is Naked Lunch , but there is something inaccessible about the Burroughs book. One can still hold it all at arms length. The way this book is written the reader is in it. I could feel it altering my view, skewing my vision of what is prudent and what I desire. An obsession with automobiles and sex are twisted together liked conjoined twins and all of it is laced with a steady dose of pain.I finished reading this book a few days ago and I am finally starting to feel like myself again. Though I do wonder if this book left behind a few nuggets of unhealthy desires in the corners of my brain. They might be waiting like hidden sleeper cells for a vulnerable moment to waken. David Cronenberg made a film back in 1996 which I plan to rewatch in the near future. I wouldn’t really recommend this book to anyone, but at the same time I have to admit it is probably a masterpiece. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.comI also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
Vaughan dies in his final car-crash. The car he stole from his friend James Ballard, the narrator-cum-character, ten days ago. It was his last crash, the one he had planned meticulously during the course of his friendship with Ballard. His earlier crashes were but rehearsals for this final performance, when he would crash the car into the limousine of American actress Elizabeth Taylor, killing both of them in an orgy of flesh and metal, an erotic encounter that would reach its mutual orgasm at the precise moment of the crash that would give their bodies a final metallic caress. The gaping wounds would be their new orifices, their indulgence into a sexual act that required neither love nor intimacy, but a mingling of chrome, blood, pale bodily secretions and a shared acknowledgment of the simultaneous collision of cars and bodies, uniting them in a ritual of carnality in the act of death.Thus begins the weirdest novel I have ever read, and a highly controversial one, especially following Ballard’s real-life car-crash post-publication, a morbid symphorophilian tale of the fusion of ‘meat’ and metal, unlike anything Gibson could have ever imagined. A dark, fascinating account of Vaughan, apparently a police photographer who obsessively collects photos of wounded victims, tracing the contours of their scars, boring over the graphic details of genital wounds. Always making love in the back of his car, recreating postures from his latest photographs of the newly dead. Staining his seats with the mixture of their viscous fluids, surrounded by the erotically charged vistas of gleaming metal.Ballard, the writer, weaves deftly this marriage of the metal and the body, eroticizing wounds, with an unnervingly calm, composed approach to death that borders on the beautiful – “Yesterday his body lay under the police arc-lights at the foot of the flyover, veiled by a delicate lacework of blood.”“[…] she sat unsteadily in the crushed compartment, fragments of the tinted windshield set in her forehead like jewels.”In his hands, the dark and sinister becomes synonymous with an erotic ritual love-making. It is tender, yet violent; passionate, yet detached; intimate, yet vicarious. As Ballard-the-character arouses his wife Catherine with blood-laden fantasies and Catherine spices up their car-bound amorous encounters with details of her open lovers, the reader is taken on a frantic ride that is, amidst its prolific, graphic sexual acts, ominous of death. Because if corporal wounds are the rituals that arouse them, ‘rehearsal’ crashes, one of which will ultimately culminate into death, are their release, their orgasms.Literary critics make us believe that his works in general, and this in particular, conform to the style now known as Ballardian - defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." To the critics, probably, the cars are symbolic of mechanization of the world and the capacity of humans to destroy themselves with the technology they created.But to me, beyond the metal-induced eroticism and fetishism regarding symphorophilia, there is nothing psychologically insightful, nothing Ballardian to this extraordinary piece of fiction. Pages after pages are filled with the intricacies of characters with a fetish for sex, metal and death. There is no love; no fear; none of the ordinary stuff that guides our lives. Only a reliving of sex, death and crashes. Car crashes. Both Vaughan and Ballard-the-character revisit the end of prominent celebrities who met their death in car-crashes – Albert Camus, James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, and John Kennedy. And engineer the deaths of random car-passengers on their way, rehearsing for their final crash that would claim Elizabeth Taylor.Vaughan dies; but what happens to Taylor? Well, I’m not revealing that.-----------------------------------------------------------------Now, back to the real world.I find Ballard’s writing beautiful. With a taboo-topic like that, it is difficult to capture a reader’s interest, who potentially shares none of the characters’ fetishes. With a first-person narrative style and a delicate, sensitive style at the outset, the unsuspecting reader is gently introduced to the death of Vaughan. It darkens, the ominous orgy becomes gradually more explicit, then more frequent, as Ballard-the-character, faced with his friend’s death falls into a reverie and begins to tell their story. For the most part, the writing is delightful. It is primarily the only thing that salvages and elevates an otherwise gross depiction of desire and death. But sometimes, especially in the latter part, even exquisite writing is not enough. The once-steamy scenes become repetitive and predictable, worsened by its frequent inclusion. At a conservative estimate, there are at least 30 explicit, graphic depictions in about 200 pages. All in a car’s rear-seat, most of them moving.And then, sometimes the writing loses its charm, as in two of the worst descriptions below: I remember my first minor collision in a deserted hotel car-park. Disturbed by a police patrol, we had forced ourselves through a hurried sex-act. Reversing out of the park, I struck an unmarked tree. Catherine vomited over my seat. This pool of vomit with its clots of blood like liquid rubies, as viscous and discreet as everything produced by Catherine, still contains for me the essence of the erotic delirium of the car-crash, more exciting than her own rectal and vaginal mucus, as refined as the excrement of a fairy queen, or the minuscule globes of liquid that formed beside the bubbles of her contact lenses.This passivity, her total acceptance of any situation, was what had attracted me to Catherine. During our first sex acts, in the anonymous bedrooms of the airport hotels, I would deliberately inspect every orifice I could find, running my fingers around her gums in the hope of seeing even one small knot of trapped veal, forcing my tongue into her ear in the hope of finding a trace of the taste of wax, inspecting her nostrils and navel, and lastly her vulva and anus. I would have to run my forefinger to its root before I could extract even a faint scent of faecal matter, a thin brown rim under my fingernail.I call it utterly gross; and then you find even the repetitious acts preferable to these extraordinary acts. Thankfully, the list of these horrible acts end here. No more torture in the rest of the pages.So well, yes, it was a fantastic one-time read; but because it has nothing beyond this exquisitely written shocker, I might not read it again, unless many years down the lane I’ve managed to completely forget it and am in a mood for reading a forbidden concoction of blood, wounds, chrome, desire and death. Lastly, I am upset at its near-unanimous inclusion in SF – there’s not the barest resemblance to it in any way.It is a startling work with beautiful, stylistically gripping narration for the most part, but utterly inconsequential in every sense. And dark erotica is interesting, but not when over-done with repetition of content at every few pages. Perhaps this is best read over the week, and not in one sitting as I did. Torn between 3 and 4 stars.For those who like their encounters strictly delicate, intimate with a generous dose of acceptable emotion, this is certainly not the place to be. But for those comfortable with exploring the amoral and the amorous, the dark and the wild, the bloody and the gory, stripped of any vestiges of normalcy (and with a high tolerance for some occasional grossness) - Get into the car; Ballard will take you for a ride.
What do You think about Crash (2001)?
I read this five years ago, and I hated it. I hated it fiercely. I recall thinking it better suited for a short story at best. I am almost tempted to read it again to see if I would still loathe it so strongly or if my reading tastes have changed. In the meantime, I'll just provide what I wrote about it at age seventeen:I disliked this book so intensely that I feel I have to warn people. I bought this book because Amazon recommended it after I rated some of Chuck Palahniuk's books. Their writing shouldn't even be compared if the rest of Ballard's novels are as bad as this one. His writing style isn't that bad, but simply monotonous, and the plot is beyond lacking. I could have read the first few pages and known what the whole book was about and saved myself the hour or so it took to finish it. It tells you in the beginning pages that Vaughan dies in an attempt at a car crash with Elizabeth Taylor, at the end of the novel Vaughan dies as said, and in between: SEX. That is all this novel really is. Sex in cars while thinking of car crashes and feeling detached. There are no plot twists, no surprises, and absolutely nothing worth $$$ and nothing to justify the time you might waste reading it. I really wanted to like this book, but I couldn't. It wasn't how sickening one might find the subject matter; it was how redundant and predictable it was.
—dara
Less of a conventional narrative arc-based novel and more of an exercise in rhythm and repetition of key phrases and imagery, Crash is not pleasurable reading. Nor, I figure, is it intended to be. It is extremely challenging, primarily owing to the graphic sex and violence, but also due to the clinical language Ballard employs to disengage the reader from the characters and their actions. The injuries are as distant as an anatomy textbook's illustrations. The sex is robotic. The word "mucus" seems to appear on nearly every page. Although its litanic abjection at times reminded me of Bataille's L'Histoire De l'Oeil, Crash reads less like a work of fiction and more like a commission report. There is also a third factor lending to the book's dificulty: it's really boring. After the initial novelty of the exercise wore off, my inability to engage with the text left me needing to dare myself to finish it, not because I was shocked, but because it's the literary equivalent of a dial tone.
—Joshua
If you've never read Ballard, and you're curious, this is the book you want to start with. I won't get into the plot or the antiseptic, yet haunting, prose. I'll just say that all the motifs of Ballard are here, and they are presented with crystal clear precision, with touches of what I'd call industrial surrealism.Some people find the book a little cold and detached -- but that's the whole point -- Ballard is not a Garcia Marquez, he's not painting a romantic picture full of pastels(I'm not knocking magical surrealism, nor pastels). Let me put it this way: if van Gogh & Garcia Marquez have similar styles - bright colors, rustic locales, than Ballard & Dali have similar styles - mechanical eroticisms, strange juxtapositions.To understand Ballard you can't approach him thinking you're going to read something in the traditional "belles-lettres" sense... don't get me wrong, his word's are beautiful, but they are beautiful in the way a neon sign reflected in a puddle of rain on a darkened city street can be beautiful.That's my best shot at conveying the sense of style that awaits you within this book...
—JBedient
