This controversial novel, excoriated by some critics for the violent behavior and perverse desires of some of the characters, was the basis of the 1996 film of the same name, also quite controversial, directed by David Cronenberg. The novel features a first-person narrator named James Ballard, a film director, who meets a crash-obsessed man named Vaughn.

In surreal and explicit descriptions of car crashes and of the erotic impulses they induce, the narrator tells in the first chapter of Vaughn’s last self-inflicted car crash. It was a failed attempt to unite in death with a film star named Elizabeth Taylor, which terminates Vaughn’s life in a satisfactorily violent manner in spite of missing the intended target.

The narrator goes on in chapter two to recount in vivid detail his own horrific experience in a head-on collision (a life experience the narrator shares with the author) during which a passenger dies in the car he hits. In the aftermath of this crash, the narrator feels drawn to the driver of the other car, a survivor like himself and the wife of the dead passenger. The crash and the attraction to the woman illuminate the erotic role that cars have assumed in contemporary life, especially when combined with the brutal violence of a fatal crash.

Gerard Fritz/Corbis

The narrator is soon obsessed with the event that brought him so close to death without tipping him over into it, and that obsession has brought him to the attention of Vaughn, the master of crash obsessives. Through the crash, he enters into a new perspective on life, on erotic arousal, and on technology.

The novel germinated, for the author, in the experience of surviving a violent crash. Afterward, he mounted an exhibit of crashed cars at an experimental art gallery; the responses of visitors to the exhibit fascinated him and gave rise to ideas for the novel. The story is a departure from the science-fiction settings of Ballard’s first four novels, but it introduces an array of themes that recur in his next two novels, Concrete Island and High-Rise. He repeatedly depicts a contemporary world of desolation, mechanization, and numbed indifference in which human beings must find a way to survive and thrive however they can. The result is a grim perspective on the wasteland of concrete, metal, plastic, and glass in which modern life is embedded.

Bibliography
Luckhurst, Roger. “The Angle Between Two Walls”: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.
Stephenson, Gregory. Out of the Night and into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Fiction of J. G. Ballard. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: Analysis of J.G. Ballard's Crash, automobile eroticism Ballard, Ballard autobiographical fiction, Ballard Concrete Island themes, Ballard exhibition crashed cars, Ballard High Rise connections, Ballard surrealism and violence, car crash fetishism literature, Crash and technology, Crash novel controversy, Crash novel eroticism and violence, Crash novel J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg Crash film, desolation and mechanization in literature, Elizabeth Taylor car crash, experimental fiction 1970s, fatal crash desire psychology, Gregory Stephenson Ballard, J.G. Ballard Crash analysis, James Ballard narrator Crash, postindustrial dystopia literature, postmodern trauma fiction, Roger Luckhurst Ballard, Vaughn character analysis Crash