Concrete Island

Product Information

What begins as a frustrating story about the bystander effect morphs into something darker when Maitland becomes obsessed with dominating the island. The best-guess location for the ‘real’ Concrete Island, based on Ballard’s descriptions in the book, is a small open space at the convergence of the Westway roundabout and the two southern spurs of the West Cross Route. The early sections of the story are pretty compelling as Maitland tries to escape the island, then comes to realise he must survive while he awaits help. The Jag careers through some wooden barriers lining the road and plunges down an embankment into a large overgrown grassy area.

The dense grass and the foliage of a stunted elder sealed off all but a faint glow of the late afternoon sunlight, and he could almost believe that he was lying at the bottom of a calm and peaceful sea, through which a few bars of faint light penetrated the pelagic quiet. Compared to the gorgeous and masterful final volume of the urban disaster trilogy High-Rise, Concrete Island is leaning a little bit too much on the power of its perceptive allegory.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. No one is expecting him—neither wife nor mistress nor co-workers—so no one will notice that he is gone. Barely injured by this violent tangent that had grazed his life, Robert Maitland lay across his steering wheel, his jacket and trousers studded with windshield fragments like a suit of lights.

This often leaves me in conflict with the general planning or lack thereof of the terrain, leaping crash barriers to dart across empty Garden State Parkway ramps, or ducking between concrete parapets beneath highway overpasses.For many, the necessary restrictions of Lockdown are akin to being an urban castaway: long hours confined to one location; limited opportunities for social interaction; homes becoming concrete islands. The ambiguity with which Ballard infuses his modern urban landscapes is his most powerful technique, as he explores the ‘inner space’ of his characters in his modern fables.

Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). In what I suppose was a shocking scene for 1974 Maitland asserts his authority when Proctor is lying drunk on the grass after drinking one of Maitland’s last bottles of wine, by undoing his flies and urinating all over the mental defective. Of course, that means that the absolute STUPIDEST shit imaginable occurs on pretty much every leaf, but it's fun to see him pull it off.He reached the foot of the embankment, and waved with one arm, shouting at the few cars moving along the westbound carriageway. Given the peculiar topography of the island, its mantle of deep grass and coarse shrubbery, and the collection of ruined vehicles, there was no certainty that he would ever be noticed at all. Furthermore, from my position of happy ignorance, I feel entitled to spout twaddle without recourse to academic rigour or the necessity of tiresome self-justification. It will be interesting to see if the current Lockdown provides inspiration for similarly visionary writing in the future.

I gotta hand it to Ballard: there hasn't been one book I've read of his where, halfway through, I'm not ready to yank my fucking hair out only to have him pull it out of his ass. When he's ambulatory again, though barely, the island begins to reveal heretofore unsuspected features. 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.A few months later I read Concrete Island and I was intrigued by the imagery that cropped up in both novels, as I mention in this review. Everyone must familiarize themselves with this oracle, well, at least if you consider literature a serious Art. He shines best in his short novels, when he just takes one simple idea and draws it out to the extreme of absurdity. The concrete island onto which Maitland crashes is the objective-corellative of his psyche – of the isolation of the human spirit, the alienation inherent in bourgeois society. This type of Concrete Traffic Island has 3 x M16 lifting sockets and is available in a variety of sizes - 1200 x 1200mm, 1500 x 1500mm and 1800 x 1800mm.