Vaughan dies in his final car-crash. The car he stole from his friend James Ballard, the narrator-cum-character, ten days ago. It was his last crash, Vaughan dies in his final car-crash. The car he stole from his friend James Ballard, the narrator-cum-character, ten days ago. It was his last crash, the one he had planned meticulously during the course of his friendship with Ballard. His earlier crashes were but rehearsals for this final performance, when he would crash the car into the limousine of American actress Elizabeth Taylor, killing both of them in an orgy of flesh and metal, an erotic encounter that would reach its mutual orgasm at the precise moment of the crash that would give their bodies a final metallic caress. The gaping wounds would be their new orifices, their indulgence into a sexual act that required neither love nor intimacy, but a mingling of chrome, blood, pale bodily secretions and a shared acknowledgment of the simultaneous collision of cars and bodies, uniting them in a ritual of carnality in the act of death.
Thus begins the weirdest novel I have ever read, and a highly controversial one, especially following Ballard’s real-life car-crash post-publication, a morbid symphorophilian tale of the fusion of ‘meat’ and metal, unlike anything Gibson could have ever imagined. A dark, fascinating account of Vaughan, apparently a police photographer who obsessively collects photos of wounded victims, tracing the contours of their scars, boring over the graphic details of genital wounds. Always making love in the back of his car, recreating postures from his latest photographs of the newly dead. Staining his seats with the mixture of their viscous fluids, surrounded by the erotically charged vistas of gleaming metal.
Ballard, the writer, weaves deftly this marriage of the metal and the body, eroticizing wounds, with an unnervingly calm, composed approach to death that borders on the beautiful –
“Yesterday his body lay under the police arc-lights at the foot of the flyover, veiled by a delicate lacework of blood.”
“[…] she sat unsteadily in the crushed compartment, fragments of the tinted windshield set in her forehead like jewels.”
In his hands, the dark and sinister becomes synonymous with an erotic ritual love-making. It is tender, yet violent; passionate, yet detached; intimate, yet vicarious. As Ballard-the-character arouses his wife Catherine with blood-laden fantasies and Catherine spices up their car-bound amorous encounters with details of her open lovers, the reader is taken on a frantic ride that is, amidst its prolific, graphic sexual acts, ominous of death. Because if corporal wounds are the rituals that arouse them, ‘rehearsal’ crashes, one of which will ultimately culminate into death, are their release, their orgasms.
Literary critics make us believe that his works in general, and this in particular, conform to the style now known as Ballardian - defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments."
To the critics, probably, the cars are symbolic of mechanization of the world and the capacity of humans to destroy themselves with the technology they created.
But to me, beyond the metal-induced eroticism and fetishism regarding symphorophilia, there is nothing psychologically insightful, nothing Ballardian to this extraordinary piece of fiction. Pages after pages are filled with the intricacies of characters with a fetish for sex, metal and death. There is no love; no fear; none of the ordinary stuff that guides our lives. Only a reliving of sex, death and crashes. Car crashes. Both Vaughan and Ballard-the-character revisit the end of prominent celebrities who met their death in car-crashes – Albert Camus, James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, and John Kennedy. And engineer the deaths of random car-passengers on their way, rehearsing for their final crash that would claim Elizabeth Taylor.
Vaughan dies; but what happens to Taylor? Well, I’m not revealing that.
I find Ballard’s writing beautiful. With a taboo-topic like that, it is difficult to capture a reader’s interest, who potentially shares none of the characters’ fetishes. With a first-person narrative style and a delicate, sensitive style at the outset, the unsuspecting reader is gently introduced to the death of Vaughan. It darkens, the ominous orgy becomes gradually more explicit, then more frequent, as Ballard-the-character, faced with his friend’s death falls into a reverie and begins to tell their story.
For the most part, the writing is delightful. It is primarily the only thing that salvages and elevates an otherwise gross depiction of desire and death. But sometimes, especially in the latter part, even exquisite writing is not enough. The once-steamy scenes become repetitive and predictable, worsened by its frequent inclusion. At a conservative estimate, there are at least 30 explicit, graphic depictions in about 200 pages. All in a car’s rear-seat, most of them moving.
And then, sometimes the writing loses its charm, as in two of the worst descriptions below:
I remember my first minor collision in a deserted hotel car-park. Disturbed by a police patrol, we had forced ourselves through a hurried sex-act. Reversing out of the park, I struck an unmarked tree. Catherine vomited over my seat. This pool of vomit with its clots of blood like liquid rubies, as viscous and discreet as everything produced by Catherine, still contains for me the essence of the erotic delirium of the car-crash, more exciting than her own rectal and vaginal mucus, as refined as the excrement of a fairy queen, or the minuscule globes of liquid that formed beside the bubbles of her contact lenses.
This passivity, her total acceptance of any situation, was what had attracted me to Catherine. During our first sex acts, in the anonymous bedrooms of the airport hotels, I would deliberately inspect every orifice I could find, running my fingers around her gums in the hope of seeing even one small knot of trapped veal, forcing my tongue into her ear in the hope of finding a trace of the taste of wax, inspecting her nostrils and navel, and lastly her vulva and anus. I would have to run my forefinger to its root before I could extract even a faint scent of faecal matter, a thin brown rim under my fingernail.
I call it utterly gross; and then you find even the repetitious acts preferable to these extraordinary acts. Thankfully, the list of these horrible acts end here. No more torture in the rest of the pages.
So well, yes, it was a fantastic one-time read; but because it has nothing beyond this exquisitely written shocker, I might not read it again, unless many years down the lane I’ve managed to completely forget it and am in a mood for reading a forbidden concoction of blood, wounds, chrome, desire and death. Lastly, I am upset at its near-unanimous inclusion in SF – there’s not the barest resemblance to it in any way.
It is a startling work with beautiful, stylistically gripping narration for the most part, but utterly inconsequential in every sense. And dark erotica is interesting, but not when over-done with repetition of content at every few pages. Perhaps this is best read over the week, and not in one sitting as I did. Torn between 3 and 4 stars.
For those who like their encounters strictly delicate, intimate with a generous dose of acceptable emotion, this is certainly not the place to be. But for those comfortable with exploring the amoral and the amorous, the dark and the wild, the bloody and the gory, stripped of any vestiges of normalcy (and with a high tolerance for some occasional grossness) - Get into the car; Ballard will take you for a ride. ...more
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