"No other novelist cuts so incisively to the heart of contemporary ennui"

Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - books
The boring brilliance of JG Ballard
Lee Rourke
25 Oct 2007

 

Who is Britain's greatest living novelist? If pressed, I would have to say JG Ballard. No other contemporary writer, in my opinion, has engaged with modernity and our urban environment quite like Ballard. And with Crash, his startling novel of 1973, he tackles the evident intersection of our prevailing psychological, philosophical, sexual and technological violence - so engrained is it in our modern age - in a way that nobody else has managed.

Crash is the definitive novel of technocentrism: where the blurring of our technologies and functionality is evoked through a cultural and political desert in the urban environment, revealing a society governed by the car and the - mostly sexual - violence we are left with. A crumbling world where we are dwarfed by a new machine age that has no real need for us - a world we are ill-equipped to understand as it leaves us standing - forcing us to worship its gleaming by-products and ignoring its manipulation of us. To put it simply: Ballard understands that modernity has left us to our own basal needs - and we're not coping too well.

Interwoven through this dazzling narrative is the palpable, all too human, presence of boredom. It is the glue that binds the sequence of events in Crash together: behind its synthesis of crumpled fenders, chrome headlights, semen, brake fluid and oil, Crash is a book about boring people who are simply bored; these people cling to the one thing they can control. The car is the symbol of a limited body, and through the motorcar - through its actual prostheses and a series of repeated collisions - these bored individuals can begin to understand the things ordinarily beyond their own control: sexual urges, the realisation of death, violence and desire.

Crash serves to remind us that we can never fully grasp the meaning of modernity. We are ruthlessly exposed as limited vessels in its presence. For me it is the most telling and damning novel of our age: in a world that is devoid of all meaning it is extremism that dominates as the prevailing alternative to the collective ennui that binds us together.

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