I have never been a JG Ballard fan, but I can see why other people are. His new novel, Crash, is a grindingly earnest and scrupulous attempt to understand why we are all obsessed with accidents on the road, and why so many people die or are mutilated in car-crashes while the rest jaw piously about safety belts and speed limits.
If I say that Ballard would probably equate the safety belt with bondage and/or the chastity belt then you’ll maybe get the drift, or skid, of this horrific and certainly memorable exercise in controlled surrealism. It concerns the narrator’s involvement with a young woman doctor whose husband he has killed in a car crash, and with Vaughan a “hoodlum scientist” who has a lot of nasty theories connecting the internal combustion engine with sadism, and likes to speculate about the effects of accident mutilation on film actresses.
As with earlier texts by Ballard, I could grasp why he sees a need to create a modern mythology out of technology gone mad, but I have to say that the tone strikes me as hellish.
