J. G. Ballard, Crash (© 1973, Vintage Books 2005)
tl;dr: Yuk!
Having seen Crash on Tim Walters’ list of must-read science fiction / fantasy novels about 15 years ago, I got hold of a copy via Bookmooch, and it has been sitting on my To Be Read shelf ever since. I knew a David Cronenberg movie was based on it, and that it was about car accident survivors who share a sexual fetish for cars and car crashes.
Not an attractive proposition. But it’s a slim paperback, so I overrode my reluctance and packed it to read on the plane on my recent trip.
The Vintage Books edition has an Introduction written by J. G. Ballard in 1995, which includes this:
Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology.
If pornography is something that feels you leaving just a bit less than fully human, he succeeds. If it’s something that makes you feel sexy, not so much. I’m a long way from being a connoisseur of porn, but the book this reminded me of was the one in the podcast My Dad Wrote a Porno. It has the same obsession with genitalia and sex-related bodily fluids – which in this book means pretty much all bodily fluids – but it’s not funny, even unintentionally. The patriarchal world view is overwhelming, and the sex is somehow tangled up with, or smeared or squirted on, car dashboards, crumpled metal, and terribly scarred bodies. The book is not for the faint-hearted, and I include myself in that category. In case that makes it sound titillating, I should add that it’s not for the easily ignored either: it goes on and on with unerotic sex scenes that are described in clinical, mechanical language (I won’t inflict examples on you) but still manage to be anatomically/mechanically confusing..
It’s not that I was clutching my pearls. I read the whole thing in the hope that it would deliver on the ‘total metaphor for man’s life’ etc. There’s a whiff of a promise that it would shed light on our society’s widespread fascination with car crashes, or the frisson produced by famous road deaths (Jane Mansfield, Albert Camus and James Dean are mentioned). But no more than a whiff. The opening paragraph foreshadows a near escape by ‘the film actress Elizabeth Taylor’ (whose Cleopatra appeared in the year the book was published), but she pretty much remains an abstraction.
Suffice to say I’m not rushing out to see the movie.
I wrote this blog post on the unceded land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation, where the earth has been reshaped over the last century to accommodate the needs of motor vehicles. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, with gratitude for their care of the land over millennia, and hope that the rest of us can learn from them in time.
Me fail? I fly! 
Thanks for the warning – I liked his memoir/novel Empire of the Sun. I’ll leave it at that! Jim
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Same, Jim, though in my case it was the movie Empire if the Sun that predisposed me to like his writing
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And I saw the movie. Kinfolk were in that same Civilian Internment Camp (a wall-enclosed missionary – Protestant – College eventually holding around 2,000 people) called Lunghwa. I visited it early one morning when in Shanghai in 2013 – by then one of the leading high schools in China – many of the buildings still recognisable from its wartime era. Jim
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Wow!
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Jowett Murray – youngest son of the OED Editor James Murray & wife – 1943-1945 – later worked as part of the team translating the Bible directly from original languages into Chinese – known as Lu’s Version for the Professor leading the team – Jowett’s part was New Testament Greek…
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I have a feeling that might have been my list (doubtfulpalace on Metafilter). Probably not many such lists contain Crash, The Book of the Night, and Galaxies.
I found Crash fascinating, but I can certainly understand why someone wouldn’t. The movie was, I thought, a failure–the actors couldn’t help, well, acting, which is the wrong move here.
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It was somehow connected with Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Making Light blog. Does that ring a bell? I can see how the book could fascinate. Maybe I took it too literally
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Yes, I was a Making Light regular back in the day.
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In that case, thank you. I’ve been nibbling at books from that list for years, whenever the itch for SF/F comes on.
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You’re welcome! It came about because somebody offline asked me for recommendations, and then there was a thread of people discussing their favorites so I reused it (putting up a link to it rather than dumping it into the comment because it was so long). A few years later I noticed that it was still getting hits.
I always felt like it should have some discussion rather than just being a bare list of titles, but so were the Nurse With Wound list and Appendix N, so I guess I’m in good company.
The link is currently broken. I should fix that.
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I don’t know about the Nurse With Wound list– it sounds Ballardian 🤔. As a bare list of titles, though, yours (if it is yours I borrowed) constitutes an endlessly interesting conversation already.
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I’ve fixed the link, if you’d like to confirm or deny: https://doubtfulpalace.com/mustread.html/
The Nurse With Wound list is sort of Appendix N for experimental music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_with_Wound_list
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Yes, that has to be the list, Tim. I’ll add the link to the body of the post
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