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Crash

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About this listen

The definitive cult, post-modern novel – a shocking blend of violence, transgression and eroticism.

When our narrator smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, his sense of sexual possibilities in the world around him becomes detached. As he begins an affair with the dead man's wife, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes. Then he encounters Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, who has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of erotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash – a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant and iconic celebrity.When our narrator smashes his car into another and watches a man die in front of him, his sense of sexual possibilities in the world around him becomes detached. As he begins an affair with the dead man's wife, he finds himself drawn with increasing intensity to the mangled impacts of car crashes. Then he encounters Robert Vaughan, a former TV scientist turned nightmare angel of the expressway, who has gathered around him a collection of alienated crash victims and experiments with a series of erotic atrocities, each more sinister than the last. But Vaughan craves the ultimate crash – a head-on collision of blood, semen, engine coolant and iconic celebrity.

Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Movie, TV & Video Game Tie-Ins Psychological Thriller & Suspense

Critic reviews

'A work of very powerful originality. Ballard is amongst our finest writers of fiction.' Anthony Burgess

'One of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilarating imagination.' Guardian

'Ballard has issued a series of bulletins on the modern world of almost unerring prescience. Other writers describe; Ballard anticipates.' Will Self

'Britain's number one living novelist.' John Sutherland, Sunday Times

All stars
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A hard book to narrate.. good attempt though a little flat with just a few words spoken as if not known.. suture.. perineum and macadam..

it was better when i read it

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This is a fascinating book, looking at the link between technology and desire. The reading of it is good also- it was nice to hear a reasonably normal English accent, rather than the plummy one you often get on audiobooks. It is quite a deadpan delivery, but this seem appropriate for the lewd, twisted content of the book. The earlier ratings are too low in my opinion. But I guess this book is not for everyone. It could seem to some as pornographic novel- which it is- but then we live in a pornographic culture with sex mediated by technology, with a fascination for sex, as well as the dismemberment of bodies and death. It is more diagnosis of this culture than anything, but still- don't listen to it out loud on the bus!

Disturbing yet fascinating

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I have no idea how I managed to finish this but I’m glad I did. It’s clearly a window into the mind of the perverse and fascinating in a sickening way.

Absolutely bizarre

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loooool Ballard's bizarre pornographic novel is what it is, the dispassionate medical descriptions of perverse sexual acts within an almost autistic pagescape of civil engineering, functional service occupations and transport nomenclature forming a psychotic nexus between the dystopia of autogeddon and the conceptual anus of middle classes. Or something.
Narrated in slightly gauche plummy tones by an earnest young man, this audiobook version is somewhat inexplicably marred by arbitrary chapter divisions that bear no relation to those of the paper book, and curious mispronunciations of words like 'macadam', casting it not as the scottish surname of the inventor of tarmac but as some new kind of mediterranean nut, a minor postcolonial error between pistachio and penis.

chapter points are all messed up

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It was totally and utterly unlike anything I have ever read before.
The narrator was a bit meh and I found it hard to listen to him for longer periods.

Well written and masterfully descriptive

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