Maybe it's Ballard; maybe it's me

Adventures reading outside of my comfort zone

I must have read ‘Crash’ because of its cover. ‘A Brutal, erotic novel,’ it promises. I wasn’t familiar with Ballard, but my husband, well read in the realm of post-war Sci-Fi authors, was. His description of Ballard’s work piqued my curiosity. It was a definite departure from my usual Happily-Ever-After fiction. And that cover. Brutal, yes. Possibly erotic. The hint of a bare breast gives one pause, as does the artfully-placed, smoking quarter panel. Ouch, that’s gotta hurt. That torched metal must be hot. Here, let me just pull that away and…never mind.

It was summer, at the beach. Patio, complete with loungers and umbrellas, beckoned. To-Be-Read pile. I could read and keep an eye on our boys at the same time. One thing led to another. The cover did the rest.

‘Crash’ turned out to be one of my favorite novels, and not because I’m a SFF fan. I’m not and I’m not certain I’d even call Ballard a science fiction author, although some do. But his no-holds-barred dive into the bleak despair of the urban landscape grabbed me out of my rom-com loving rut and smacked me upside the head. And every now and then that’s a good thing.

Crash, in case you don’t know, features a man whose apartment overlooks London’s Heathrow airport. But it’s not the aircraft take-offs and landings that interest him. Instead, he watches the automobile ingress and egress around Heathrow, awaiting traffic accidents. And, given this is a novel about automobile crashes and their victims, Ballard gives us plenty.

Our hero - also named Ballard - has gathered about him a group who have in common a sexually-charged fascination with automobile crashes. When our hero spies a crash disrupting the traffic flow, he masturbates to the aftermath, the rescue, the victims’ condition.

Ballard describes the look, the feel, the texture of the hero’s ejaculate soaking his clothing; the stickiness of the dried semen on his hands, which go unwashed, and builds into a filthy crust to serve as a reminder of his past episodic … hmmm - machinations. (Yeah, that’s enough of that).

And that isn’t all. Mr. Ballard projects his lewd fantasies on a friend, Vaughn, who has suffered disfigurement in a prior wreck. To wit: he bears the imprint of a car’s dashboard on his abdomen - you know, steering wheel scar, turn signal arm puncture; column shift impalement. A macabre turn of man-becomes-machine, or vice versa. I mean, this is hot stuff, people.

It gets better. Or, perhaps not. Vaughn’s ultimate fantasy is to die in a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor. My goodness.

And this is one of my favorite novels? What does that say about me? Don’t answer. My own thoughts about it are alarming enough.

One more thing. After I finished the book, a friend and I swapped our reads. I gave her Crash. She gave me, well I can’t remember the title or author, but it was women’s fiction. This author was no slouch. She’d won the Booker for a different novel. The title of this I do recall - The Kite Runner.

Anyway, my reader friend was as repulsed by ‘Crash’ as I was by her women’s fiction novel. As I related to my friend - the most uplifting scene in her book was the execution of one of the female characters in a Tehran stadium full of thousands of cheering … probably men, since women don’t take part in public life over there, unless they are condemned to die.

I’m not a women’s fiction fan. Nor do I partake of science fiction, although the people who read it are some of the coolest folks I know. And what does it say about this writer-as-reader that I prefer Ballard’s orgasmic perversion of twisted automobile wreckage to public beheadings? Hey, I just read the stuff. Blame Ballard for writing it.

But I will say this. As we edge closer to the dystopian human-machine melding called ‘transhumanism,’ Ballard’s ‘car fetish porn’ - as one Amazon reviewer summed up so nicely - Crash takes on a new dimension. I just haven’t decided what that is.