Title: Crash

Author/Artist: Iain Sinclair

Publisher: BFI Publishing

Media: Book

Reviewer: Pan

As Iain Sinclair makes clear in this slim but interesting little book, Crash exists not as a single work by Ballard, but as a sequence of projects that has mutated and evolved over time. Crash exists as a set of works by Ballard, as an exhibition piece, as a documentary, as a film by Cronenberg and now as a series of essays by Sinclair. This abundance of works, over-lapping in terms of media, time and intent are ably uncovered by Sinclair, who exposes the secret histories, the hidden and the submerged. With an almost surgical precision he delves into ‘Crash’ to expose the different agendas at work in its various incarnations.

Sinclair’s critical intelligence posits Cronenberg’s film a work that obscures Ballard’s subversive fictions. He makes it clear that the film is a re-writing of Ballard. And, just as persuasively, he shows us that the film is a necessary step for Cronenberg, according him the critical respect that his earlier films did not garner. Crash was an inevitable and logical progression from A Naked Lunch.

With this as a central thesis Sinclair also examines JG Ballard and James Ballard. The blurring of fact and fiction, author and fictional creation, is a central theme of Ballard’s work. Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women are written as a means to an end, according to Sinclair. Ballard writes Ballard in order to recast himself, to control the picture of the man and the myth.

Anyone who seeks to understand Ballard needs to read this. It is the most incisive and interesting commentary on Ballard to date.

And, one has to ask, what of the hidden themes that underlie Sinclair’s Crash? Just as Ballard and Cronenberg seek to change or control public perceptions, so to does Sinclair. This book is as much a part of the uncovering of London, in particular the relationship between the urban and the suburban, as it is about Cronenberg’s not very interesting film.

I look forward to seeing where Sinclair takes us next.