Crash was a highly controversial novel when it was published in 1973, as was David Cronenberg’s 1996 film adaptation, marrying as the story does the aftermath of automobile accidents with sexual predilection.

Even for someone that does not recoil at the idea that a person could be aroused by an automobile accident or the damage that it inflicted on the human body, the novel is an uncomfortable read, being an unrelenting account of one man’s sexual obsession. The terms ‘perineum’, ‘natal cleft’, ‘anus’, ‘heavy groin’, ‘semen’ and other graphic and clinical phrases recur – almost literally – ad nauseum, coupled with imagery of rent flesh and mutilated limbs.

Following a collision in which he is injured, and one of the other party killed, the narrator – himself named James Ballard – finds his sexual fantasies and desires increasingly centred around what he calls the ‘deviant technology’ of the automobile. In its design he perceives both a sexuality of its own and a continuum between it and the human body it carries of which he was previously unaware. A number of new relationships develop, and existing ones alter, as a result of this new found stimulus.

The potency of the automobile and of human beings’ relationship with it is summed up by Ballard’s observation that an automobile crash is one of the few ways in which it is still legal to kill someone. The personal automobile is an accepted and treasured facet of human society, technically available to all and a necessity to many. Yet it is a barbarous form of transport and a casual instrument of death that invokes in its user a dangerous illusion of safety and power.

In its car a human being is isolated and convinced of its freedom; the car is the pinnacle of selfishness, the technological realisation of a solipsistic tendency. The combustion engine is crude, a barely harnessed explosion upon which the conveyed rides as if it didn’t exist. Yet the car occupies an exalted space in a human being’s life: people name them; lavish upon them more affection than they do their sexual partner; become emotionally attached to the fate of metal, glass and plastic.

Crash is a story of an onanistic obsession because in reality the personal automobile becomes an unconscious extension of the owner’s body. Ballard shows us that the car not only represents a realm of sexual possibility that usually remains unrealised – indeed, unrecognised – but is an element of the physical self that is sexually unexplored. This leaves a base desire unfulfilled.

Ballard marches into this territory without dreading the opinion of others, but his story does suggest a fear of the pain and death that automobiles confer so easily – a fear that is heightened by the fact that they, and therefore the mutilation that they perpetrate, are sanctioned by society. Human beings have created a pervasive technology that surrounds them and that all too easily and unexpectedly rips through the flesh from which it was born. The automobile reminds us at alarming proximity how frail our bodies are in comparison with the strength of our minds and what they create.

Ballard’s fetishisation of the personal automobile can therefore be seen as an account of the desire to eliminate this fear coupled with the sexual love of the self – of which the machine is a part. Crash is a Murder Ballad, a tale of one human being’s narcissistic dance of death in the face of proof of his frailty.

Those who are appalled by Crash will doubtless say that their dismay is a result of the fact that the story is depraved, pornographic or simply ‘sick’, framing their reaction in judgemental moral terms that Ballard studiously avoids. I would counter, however, with the suggestion that it caused such a reader to recognise in its self such ‘deviant’ proclivities. As Ballard said about his reasons for writing the book, “I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.” Crash unveils the deviant relationship between a human being and its car, and there is nothing more unpalatable than self knowledge.

It is my firm belief that there is an understandable reason for every action, however unsavoury. Judgement, therefore, should be withheld not simply ‘lest ye be judged’, but also because it is impossible to judge accurately without a full knowledge of that which is to be judged.

It is this state of affairs that often explains the success of the antihero in art, and in particular enables sympathy to be invoked for a violent protagonist. Once a novel or a film has laid out a life, that life is understandable; the chain of events from cause to effect can be discerned and, even if the actions are still not condoned, the actor is considered in a different light.

The Killer Inside Me, however, does not reveal the driver for its hero’s action until very late in the story, and, as the violence he perpetrates features from the very beginning, I find myself asking, why did I warm to him? What did I find attractive about a misogynistic, sadistic, scheming narcissist that I found myself desiring not only his salvation but his triumph?

I do tend to sympathise with whoever is telling me the story, or whoever is its focal point. I allow myself to see the story from their point of view, which is also the only way to be surprised by events unfolding. In constantly attempting to deduce the ‘truth’ about a situation, one deprives oneself of the joy of the story: one acts as an adult.

But what Thompson has done is to present a murderous schizophrenic in such a way that he does not appear in any way crazed or irrational. Lou Ford is apparently a calm, rational man, aware of himself and his situation. He is intelligent and personable, and it is in no way surprising that he is a successful and well liked deputy sheriff. It is almost possible, at times, to lay his violent actions to one side – and I read the book in a day.

Ford is the perfect anti-hero not because his root motivations are laid out, but because they are not. His delusion and lack of self awareness are such that everything he does seems perfectly rational, both to himself and, therefore, to the reader who suspends their disbelief. Once the root cause of Lou’s disposition is known, one is able to sympathise as one would with many other antiheroes, but before that point one does so on another level. We are all prisoners of ourselves, of our own inescapable place in the world, from which point everything makes sense – because it is what we do, it must. Nothing could be more rational than the action one chose to take.

The Killer Inside Me was brought to my attention because it has recently been made into a film by director Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People) and writer John Curran, but what recommended it to me was Stanley Kubrick’s opinion that it is “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered”. What chilled me the most was how that mind could be described as both balanced and unbalanced. Ford is warped, yes, but, more importantly, he is human – and there but for the grace of circumstance go I.

A tree amongst brick;
The hand of us denying
Its hatred of life.

If you stay with me
To teach your painful lesson,
How am I to learn? OR
Then I cannot learn. OR
Will I ever learn? OR
I will never learn. OR
I can never learn. OR
Then I will not learn.

Walk to the station;
Hardly anyone around.
Is it zombie time?