Flies

Flies are both literal insects and a recurring image through which the novel converts the motorway landscape into a zone of contamination, suspended time, and unstable bodily identity. Their decisive appearance comes during the narrator’s LSD experience with Robert Vaughan, when they cover Vaughan’s wounded body and then spread across the car, the narrator, and the surrounding highway until ordinary distinctions between corpse, vehicle, landscape, and observer collapse.

Appearance and Material Presence

Flies first belong to the world of stalled and moving traffic, where the narrator reads the highway through images of bodies, wounds, and mechanical surfaces. During the immense silence around London Airport, the wounds on his knees and chest become imagined beacons transmitting signals that might release the immobilized drivers and send them toward the paradises of the electric highway. The insects are not yet present in that vision, but the association between damaged flesh and the technological landscape prepares their later function: the body becomes an instrument within a system of signals, vehicles, and compulsive movement.

The narrator’s return to the accident route intensifies this connection between bodies and cars. Driving hired vehicles around Stanwell, Harlington, and Western Avenue, he repeatedly arrives at the hour of his crash, either swept past the collision site or trapped in a jam only ten feet from the exact impact point. The cars retain the marks of previous occupants—heelmarks, cigarette remains, scratches, burns, and scuffings—so that each vehicle becomes a layered record of anonymous bodies and imagined violence. Within this world, Flies complete a process already begun by the cars: they make bodily residue visible, mobile, and impossible to separate from the machinery that carries it.

The LSD Vision with Vaughan

The most concentrated manifestation of Flies occurs when the narrator is driving with Vaughan under the influence of LSD. The insects crawl across the oil-smeared windshield, forming a blue veil between the narrator and the traffic. They then cover Vaughan’s blood-smeared chest and pallid stomach, extending from his limp testicles to the scars along his diaphragm like an apron of pubic hair. They gather around his mouth and nostrils as though waiting for the liquors of a corpse, yet Vaughan’s eyes remain open and alive, watching the narrator with a calm gaze. The image therefore refuses a stable distinction between living man and dead body: Vaughan is simultaneously conscious participant, injured flesh, sexual object, and corpse in preparation.

The narrator initially treats the insects as an irritation affecting Vaughan, attempting to brush them from his face. He discovers instead that his own hands and arms, together with the interior of the car, are covered by them. The infestation spreads from Vaughan’s body into the narrator’s body and the machine enclosing them, making contact itself a form of contamination. When the narrator opens the driver’s door, Vaughan raises a warning hand and tries to stop him, as though the open air might reveal something more terrible than the insects inside the car.

Outside, the motorway has become an abandoned world. The rough stones cut into the narrator’s shoes, the overpass walls resemble the entrance to a hypogeum, and the cars moving above have lost their cargoes of light and clatter like damaged instruments. Sunlight briefly turns the concrete into an incandescent cube, which the narrator identifies with a section of Vaughan’s body; he then imagines himself as one of the Flies crawling across Vaughan. The image reverses the usual hierarchy between observer and observed. The narrator does not merely see decomposition from outside; he enters its perspective and becomes part of the organic swarm feeding on the technological body.

The Hollow Wreck and the Return of Reality

The narrator eventually walks to a breaker’s yard and finds an abandoned car with its engine and wheels removed, resting on its axles beneath the overpass. The vehicle is no longer a functioning object of transport but a hollow wreck, and its fragmented glass covers the passenger seat. He sits inside it for an hour, crouched over the mud-streaked instrument panel and tightening his knees against his chest while waiting for the acid to pass through his nervous system. The abandoned car becomes a temporary shelter in which the narrator attempts to compress the experience back into his own body, while the earlier image of Flies continues to define the car as a receptacle for decay and altered consciousness.

As the hallucination recedes, the strange light effects sink back into the wrecks, the motorway embankments regain their blurred outlines, and the glass fragments glint like worthless coins. Yet the return of ordinary perception does not restore security. When the narrator leaves the wreck, Vaughan accelerates the Lincoln toward him, swerving into the abandoned car and tearing its passenger door from its hinges. The physical attack gives the vision a material aftermath: the Flies belong to hallucination, but the world they disclosed remains capable of producing real violence through cars, wounds, and deliberate collision.

Memory, Trauma, and Recurrence

After recovering from the acid trip and the near-death that follows, the narrator remains at home with Catherine Ballard, watching the motorway for signs of Vaughan. The LSD has left him detached from his own body, as if muscles and bones were separated and joined only at a few wound points. Segments of the experience return intact, including images of cars wearing coronation armour and pedestrians dressed in suits of light. The Flies recur within this traumatic memory as a particularly oppressive fragment: the narrator again sees the grey overpass, the damp hypogeum, and thousands of insects festering on the instrument panel and on Vaughan’s body while Vaughan lies back with his trousers around his knees.

These repetitions make Flies less a single hallucinated detail than a mechanism of traumatic return. The narrator’s question about the season reflects a failure of temporal stability, while changes within his retina shift the seasons without warning. The insects belong to that same collapse of coordinates. They return whenever the motorway, the car, and Vaughan’s body reassemble in memory, preserving the experience as an image that cannot be safely assimilated into ordinary chronology.

Symbolic and Narrative Significance

Flies expose the underside of the motorway’s promise of speed and destination. The highway appears to organize movement, but the narrator repeatedly encounters queues, stalled traffic, wrecked cars, and drivers enclosed within artificial horizons. In the LSD sequence, the insects turn this immobilized technological order into a scene of organic decomposition. The car is no longer simply a means of travel; its windshield, steering wheel, instrument panel, and seats become surfaces on which life, blood, oil, and insects accumulate.

Their movement also mirrors the unstable relationship between the narrator and Vaughan. Vaughan guides the narrator through a motorway that seems created for him alone, combining hostility and affection until the emotions become interchangeable. Later, the narrator thinks of Vaughan as covered with Flies like a resurrected corpse and imagines that Vaughan cannot truly die in a car crash, but will be reborn through twisted radiator grilles and cascading windshield glass. The insect-covered body thus anticipates Vaughan’s conversion from man into recurring crash-image, while the car becomes the medium of his persistence.

At the same time, Flies reverse the apparent direction of technological power. The motorway carries vehicles at enormous speed, and the narrator later watches Vaughan mimic Catherine Ballard’s driving as their synchronized brake lights move down the expressway like the dialogue of a long-married couple. Yet the insects ignore that choreography. They crawl across glass, flesh, controls, and hands, reducing the grand circulation of traffic to a tactile scene of infestation. Their small, resistant movements reveal a world in which the most advanced systems remain vulnerable to decay, hallucination, and the body’s refusal to remain separate from its machines.