Concrete Island

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In the description above, Ballard claims it is only 200 yards long, but Maitland’s subsequent adventures make it feel more like a village than the concrete island of the title.

By about page 100 of the 126-page-long version I have Maitland realises that he can dominate them both, and sets about managing Proctor with a combination of ‘presents from his car, and strategic cuffs and blows. Here again Concrete Island and Empire of the Sun resemble one another, for in both the absence of parent figures, and of the props of civilized society means the individual must rely on himself to survive.Ballard’s protagonists in Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), and High-Rise (1975) are modern, urbane creatures, educated and detached, who embrace their technology-centric urban lifestyles. Affluent Robert Maitland crashes his Jaguar on a precipitous traffic island such as we see all the time occupying the waste ground between ramps and highways.

It is within sight of White City to the west; Grenfell Tower to the east; and Imperial College London’s new ThinkSpace to the northwest. The novel charts his descent not only into physical collapse, but this is accompanied by a wonderful description of his mind decaying, starting off lucid and determined to escape, and then charting his slow lapse into drunkenness (when he drinks a bottle of wine in shock), delirium, dehydration.In fact, the whole city was now asleep, part of an immense unconscious Europe, while he himself crawled about on a forgotten traffic island like the nightmare of this slumbering continent.

But then I realised Ballard is doing something canny: the book opens with the height of factual, police evidence-level pedantic precision. Ballard, by contrast, was fascinated by the idea of the whole superstructure of our civilisation suddenly removed and the possible psychological con Maitland’s fate is the fate of the individual in the dehumanizing modern world, a technological world that alienates people from each other even as it crowds them closer and closer together, a social world that leaves a man feeling empty even when he possesses all the social marks of success—a Jaguar, a mistress, a high-paying career.Like an urban castaway, Maitland must come to terms with the reduced circumstances of his new territory; conquer his surroundings; and reassess what is important in his life.

His 1984 bestseller ‘Empire of the Sun’ won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It is as if through suffering and struggle he sheds all imperfection, and transcends all his past memories, unburdening them onto the island; the island of the subliminal which he has not experienced since childhood. A commitment that is evidenced by the power play and consummated behind the charade of a cash transaction demanded and afterwards recinded by Jane. Though the story is largely metaphorical, Ballard doesn’t neglect the surface level and creates a fascinating character in Maitland. Maitland is alienated from his family, from his mistress (and the presence of a mistress only reinforces his alienation from his wife), and from society.All this being said, if Peter Chung ever makes an animated movie of High-Rise or The Atrocity Exhibition, I'm fucking THERE. When he's ambulatory again, though barely, the island begins to reveal heretofore unsuspected features. Isolation, alienation, although surrounded by civilisation(there’s lots of traffic speeding by), does he want to leave? Certainly one can choose to read it as an extension of, as the jacket flap notes, Ballard's 'metaphor of the automobile as the symbol of modern life. For the island is occupied by a latterday Caliban – a one-time acrobat, made redundant through injury – and a prostitute seeking refuge from a broken relationship.