CRASH COURSE

A British graphic novelist offers a highly stylized critique of driving and its tragic consequences.

In this “extensively revised and updated version of Rumble Strip, Phoenix’s 2009 book, he delivers a painfully shocking indictment of driving. While not the most conventional medium for this kind of societal condemnation, the graphic narrative is undoubtedly thought-provoking. Phoenix opens with a frightening analogy positing that anytime you go anywhere, there’s a grand piano dangling from a flimsy fixture above your head. Sure, the point is that driving presents a danger to almost everyone, but despite its minimalist aesthetic, it’s a powerful image. The author delivers on the subtitle’s promise with real-world examples of people who were run down, either by accident or on purpose, and the perpetrators went free. Along the way, Phoenix explores the psychology of driving, institutional racism, and road rage, “an indulgent, doting term, dignifying and excusing behavior that has no dignity and no excuse.” The author also examines many of the absurd rules that govern driving worldwide as well as specific, avoidable deaths, like that of activist Heather Heyer, who was struck by a car and killed during the 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville. Phoenix’s ruminations on the inherent human behaviors behind driving—that primal need to be first, to be in front, to be the fastest, etc.—are among the book’s most searing insights and should drive readers to analyze their own conduct behind the wheel. The author also describes his own near-death experience during what should have been a simple drive from London to Brighton. The author’s probing commentary, combined with its stark visuals, effectively stokes the complicated emotions its author intended to instill in his readers: “I wrote this book to make you mad.” Mission accomplished.

A keen and unapologetic consideration of how driving often brings out the worst in us.