J.G. Ballard’s 'Crash' by Paul March-Russell

(Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

Reviewed by Paul Kincaid

By the 1960s, the new generation of British science fiction writers who had grown up since the Second World War had come to view their world as a technologized hellscape. This landscape of mechanised death and destruction was usually apostrophized in overlapping triplets of resonant names: ‘Belsen … Buchenwald … Passchendaele’ (Keith Roberts, Pavane, 1968); ‘Gomorrah, Hiroshima and Buchenwald’ (M. John Harrison, ‘Lamia Mutable’, 1972); ‘Cape Canaveral, Hiroshima and Belsen’ (J.G. Ballard, ‘Myth Maker of the Twentieth Century’, 1964). And in their present of the 1960s they saw the end result of that violent past in an alienating landscape of brutalist architecture and motorway intersections. This was the landscape that J.G. Ballard found himself inescapably drawn to explore in a series of controversial works as the decade and the British New Wave drew to their inevitable close.

He first began to write about this depersonalised world in the sequence of “condensed novels” that he started in the middle of the decade, the first major works he would write after the death of his wife, Mary. These stories, that would eventually be collected as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), would juxtapose topics such as celebrity, sex and technological violence in a way that was immediately controversial. So controversial, indeed, that the first American publisher pulped the entire print run for fear that it would offend American readers, and also, perhaps, that it would therefore lay them open to lawsuits. It was not to be Ballard’s last brush with controversy.

The linking of sexual desire and car crashes (a powerful image of technologized death) were brought out particularly in the condensed novel called ‘Crash!’ This seemed to resonate strongly with Ballard, who used it, as Paul March-Russell lays out in this book, as the basis for a play that was never performed, for an exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory, and for a short documentary film that Ballard narrated and that also featured the actress, Gabrielle Drake. Finally, he turned what seemed to be becoming an obsession into the basis for his next novel, Crash (1973).

The subject matter meant that Crash was, of course, even more controversial than The Atrocity Exhibition. This appears not to have been intentional on Ballard’s part. In this acute study of the novel, Paul March-Russell shows that Ballard was short of money at this time and so desperately needed the novel to be a bestseller. Indeed, he worked very closely with his editor, Tom Maschler, cutting the novel down hugely in length and trying to make it into something with wide appeal. But he couldn’t help himself: this was what the novel was about, the car crash as aphrodisiac, fantasies of making love to the actress Elizabeth Taylor in the back of a crashed car, using gaping wounds in a damaged body as a new sex organ. It didn’t help that he made the whole thing especially personal by giving his protagonist his own name, James Ballard. The book was never the bestseller he wanted, but it became a cult success that continued to sell for decades after many more immediately popular books had faded from view.

But what sort of book was it? Ballard was, of course, a science fiction writer, an intrinsic part of the New Wave. Does that mean that Crash is science fiction? March-Russell returns again and again to the question of the novel’s canonical status. A key question, one might think, for a volume in a series called ‘Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon’, but one that remains unresolved. Perhaps it is unresolvable, for this was a time, in the rapidly changing 1960s, when art and theatre and writing not otherwise associated with science fiction would explore the same fundamental question about how we are changed simply by being part of the modern.

So yes, the novel grew out of stories that first appeared in New Worlds magazine, stories that collectively have come to be seen as in some way definitive of the New Wave. And yes, one chapter in this book explores how Ballard’s aesthetic was shaped by his involvement with the New Wave. But that is one chapter out of six. I find it interesting (in the dual sense of revealing about Ballard, and revealing of March-Russell’s approach to this book) that more time is spent discussing the influence of artists such as Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, and the Independent Group who were engaged in creating the visual iconography of the modern world; behaviourists such as B.F. Skinner, who were starting to explore the nature of our relationship with the modern; the early twentieth century writer and Vorticist, Wyndham Lewis, who had in many ways laid the foundations for what would emerge during the 1960s; and Angela Carter and her notion of moral pornography, than is spent on science fiction. The idea that dehumanising pornography might actually be a way of humanising a depersonalised and dysfunctional world strikes me as an especially fruitful way into the grim mindscape of Crash. The novel is here presented, therefore, as bringing together all of these different ways of engaging with the restless, alienating now.

In short it seems to me that the question of whether Crash might be considered science fiction is irrelevant. Crash along with its predecessor, The Atrocity Exhibition, and its two successors, Concrete Island (1974) and High Rise (1975), was a way of thinking oneself into the alienation that science fiction had been imagining into being. And Paul March-Russell’s, J.G. Ballard’s 'Crash', is an excellent introduction to how that novel came about and what it is trying to achieve.

Review from BSFA Review 25 - Download your copy here.