His movement across this forgotten terrain was a journey not merely through the island’s past but through his own” (69-70). An architect is driving home from his London offices when a blow-out sends his speeding Jaguar hurtling out of control and crashing through the motorway barrier. The image in his mind of a small boy playing endlessly by himself in a long suburban garden surrounded by a high fence seemed strangely comforting.

I think I may have dated Jane once or twice in my younger days, but luckily I was just wily enough to not drink the paraffin. Maitland, poor man, you're marooned here like Crusoe - If you don't look out you'll be beached here for ever.

There's a lot of criticism I could offer of this or any of his work, but saying he wasn't his own man would never be a part of it. And so it goes on in the same vein, with Maitland struggling to even walk, struggling to keep a sense of purpose, experiencing lightheadedness due to hunger, dehydration and the recurrent fevers caused by the severe injuries to his hip and thigh, which sweep over him, making him vomit, pass out, come to with no memory of where he is and, increasingly, who he is. Proctor is strong but subservient to Jane, and she lives a strange decadent existence, turning tricks with passing motorists and smoking marijuana in an abandoned theatre. Ballard’s Concrete Island has always been one of my favourite books, and so I was recently pleased to come across a copy of the Jonathan Cape first edition of the novel, originally published in 1974, and with its stylish dust jacket, designed by Bill Botten. He realized, above all, that the assumption he had made repeatedly since his arrival on the island – that sooner or later his crashed car would be noticed by a passing driver or policeman, and that rescue would come as inevitably as if he had crashed into the central reservation of a suburban dual carriageway – was completely false, part of that whole system of comfortable expectations he had carried with him.

Shielding his eyes from the sunlight, Maitland saw that he had crashed into a small traffic island, some two hundred yards long and triangular in shape, that lay in the wasteground between three converging motorway routes. Ballard achieves the sort of desert island romanticism which may not succeed so well in the face of reality. Concrete Island is the second of Ballard’s thematic trilogy of urban disaster, following Crash and preceding High-Rise. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. I haven’t read much Ballard, only one of his collections of short stories, The Disaster Area, which I was quite impressed with, but I remember some of the stories had restricted settings, people within closed compounds or in small communities.

Janes packs a shabby suitcase and heaves it up the embankment – she has no secret way out, she just has two functioning legs, unlike the cripple Maitland. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The grass seethed and whirled around him, as if sections of this wilderness were speaking to each other… The grass flashed with an electric light, encircling his thighs and calves. Is he perhaps using his injuries as an excuse for not trying harder to escape, in a sense choosing to remain – a rejection of the outside world?He tries to get drivers’ attention as they drive to and from home to work on the weekdays, and then as they drive off to picnics and other leisure activities on the weekend. It seems like most people are usually down on Ballard because he deals with uncomfortable themes, but I would think anyone who is a serious student of writing would want to give him a look because of his brilliant writing style. It feels a long, long way from the trilogy of florid disaster novels in the early 1960s or from the jewelled prose of Vermilion Sands and the more lush and decadent of his many short stories, a long way from the dead astronauts and drained swimming pools of the desert resorts.