Crash, Ballard’s most controversial and second most famous book, explores the idea that there is ‘a strong connection between sexuality and the car crash, a fusion largely driven by the cult of celebrity’: just think of James Dean, Grace Kelly, Mark Bolan, President Kennedy (‘a special kind of car crash’) or Princess Diana. In 1970, shortly before he began writing the novel, Ballard decided to ‘test my hypothesis about the unconscious links between sex and the car crash by putting on an exhibition of crashed cars’. On the opening night ‘there was a huge tension in the air, as if everyone felt threatened by some inner alarm that had started to ring.’ People got drunk and behaved badly, and over the following weeks further acts of vandalism were inflicted on the exhibits. Ballard’s ‘suspicions had been confirmed about the unconscious links that my novel would explore’. The hostile responses that the book provoked when it was published, and which David Cronenberg’s film version reanimated 25 years later, are on this view further evidence of its deep ‘psychological and emotional truth’. The only possible explanation for such fiercely negative reactions, Ballard says, is denial: it’s the classic Freudian ‘no means yes’ defence.

There is an altogether more superficial problem with Crash, however. It’s not all that hard to accept that in the postmodern world there is a strong and complex connection between cars, sex and death, if only because cars are forever being both advertised and interpreted as extensions and expressions of their owners’ libidos; car accidents are by far the most common cause of injury and violent death in the West; and we don’t need Freud to tell us that we’re all deeply confused about sex, death and whatever it is that they may or may not have in common. It’s not the general truth of Crash that’s the problem, then, so much as the particular untruths; not the tenor of the metaphor, but – sorry – the vehicle. Before Ballard introduced readers in Miracles of Life to Bobby Henderson, few would have thought to doubt the authenticity of Jim’s parentlessness in Empire of the Sun. But Crash doesn’t even seem to have persuaded the novel’s own characters that car accidents could be a turn-on. Despite all the bodily fluids spurted and smeared onto wrecked dashboards, the problem isn’t that it’s too pornographic but that it isn’t pornographic enough: the novel is too conscious of the deeper meaning of the sex and violence for the sex and violence to work as elements in themselves. As Baudrillard put it in his celebrated 1976 essay on the novel (translated into English by Arthur Evans in 1991), ‘gone are the “erogenous zones”: everything becomes a hole for reflex discharges.’