Customer Reviews

Concrete Island

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Gosh, I hate to see this great, little book slammed or passed over because people were unaware of what they were getting themselves into when they bought it.

Some of the negative or lukewarm reviews are correct in that those readers obviously did not like certain elements of the book, notably the lack of logical narrative progression or fuller character development but they are mistaken to consider these peculiarities of style as deficiencies worthy of criticism. This book is not intended to be a straightforward adventure story or a character driven drama, or even a novel with some surrealistic elements.

Concrete Island, like Ballard's most popular book Crash, is a novel length exploration of abstract concepts wrapped in a traditional narrative format. Consider Ballard's earlier, short science-fiction stories, where a characters' specifics are more or less incidental to the situations in which they are placed. Or his later short works where characters are no more than conceptual cyphers or sometimes just a specific instance of a notional character spanning across several stories.

With that in mind, the events and settings are supposed to be surreal and incomplete. The characters are supposed to be unrealistic and uni-dimensional. You aren't supposed to identify with anyone or anything, at least not physically, and then only to the extent that you might become aware of forces acting in your own life or impulses in your own psyche which these fantastical situations and characters represent.

So if you are familiar with Ballard's other work, or are interested in Ballard but want something a bit more approachable than, say, Crash or Atrocity Exhibition, then you will really enjoy Concrete Island - its relatively tight and fast moving, much more fleshed out than his shorter works with plenty for your brain to chew on for a while, but without frying your mind as much the Ronald Reagan-Liz Taylor psychosexual stuff.

Our physical nightmares nowadays are usually imposed from the outside: terrorism, plagues, stray asteroids, footloose vampires, these are the agents of horror. Another literary thread--starting, I suppose, with Poe, continuing through Ambrose Pierce, and going on to William Golding--deals with the nightmares we can create for ourselves, in isolation or in small groups. With "Concrete Island," first published in 1973, J.G. Ballard carries forward this latter tradition, but in a postmodern environment of superhighways, abandoned outbuildings, and rippling plains of weeds. The book itself is as constricted and airless as the story it tells, and won't be to everyone's taste. But if your appetite is whetted, read "Concrete Island." Ballard is a master of his genre.

A Londoner who has spent his adult life trying to disconnect from those around him finds himself lost in the middle of the city. Robert Maitland is a successful architect, who feels stifled at home with his wife but is unable to commit to his lover. He has self-consciously arranged things at work so that he wouldn't be missed if he left for a while. So when he finds himself stranded, marooned, in the grassy junkyard median between three overlapping highways, he knows it's up to him to find his way out. Initially his injuries prevent him from climbing the steep embankment or the high fence that surrounds his little island. He is injured further when he tries to flag a passing vehicle during rush hour, and then it is a question of survival. Before long, he discovers that leaving is not at the top of his list of concerns.

There are clear (and quite deliberate) parallels with Robinson Crusoe, but this is very much a modern novel of alienation, that highlights the longing for isolation, solace, and self-sufficiency in a world where we are utterly dependent on others and on technologies; where we seem to be connected in so many ways, but are in fact bound by these connections, both alienated and enslaved. If that sounds heady, the novel isn't. Ballard's art is almost effortless, and he depicts the ironies of modern life, ostensibly liberated by technology and commerce, in simple and subtle ways. This was the book I happened upon as a late introduction to the late J.G. Ballard, and I found it to live up to his strong reputation as a high concept novelist of provocative pulp fiction. I'll definitely read more.

I found this by chance at the library MANY years ago. I never forgot it. Nor did I forget the title, so I looked it up again and it had the same impact the second time as the first. More so, in fact. Very surreal. Very unforgettable.

Don't read too much into it, just enjoy the strange and bizarre idea of a man trapped on a concrete island in the middle of a city. I like the ending.........??????

Ballard's universe is a cruel, airless and peculiarly British place, even when his dramas occur in an unspecific everywhere, a generalized Euro-city on the edge of decay. I looked forward to reading "Concrete Island" as it sounded so preposterous, and therefore possessing one of the qualities of Ballard's best stories. Reading him at his best is thrilling, like watching a circus performer on a tightrope. You're aware how precarious it must be keeping everything in the air and stable, yet also appreciating the secret art of it, aware that it's supposed to look hard. The illusion doesn't quite succeed here. It is not quite the masterpiece "Crash" was, though it does share many of that books disturbing themes. He describes a world exactly like our own, yet drained of empathy and common purpose. People, like the figures who populate the "island", scratch about to survive, forced to compete violently and self-destructively for resources while the rest of us, oblivious, rush off to appointments or home for dinner. This is one of the most obviously and persuasively political of Ballard's books. It is however a pity, and a familiar limitation of his writing (and SF generally) that at no time do the characters transcend their function in the novel's machinery and step out to become fully formed creations. He is a writer of images and ideas, obsessively visual and descriptive, but oddly lacking in the ability to give his characters independant existence.

This is a modernized update on the Robinson Crusoe story, which accomplishes next to nothing in theme or plot development. Ballard has used the premise as an exercise in man-against-nature and man-against-self conflict construction. Here, a man named Maitland, in busy London, has crashed his car into a traffic island that is cut off from the rest off the world by freeway ramps. He finds himself in an unknown place that he can't escape, a la Crusoe. The fact that he is actually just a few feet away from the bustling city and its millions of people, though is isolated in an invisible small space, gives the reader an interesting sense of irony that lasts for about a minute. But otherwise, the book mostly becomes tiresome character developments as Maitland fights through exhaustion and evaluates how he really feels about being isolated. Another problem is the two supporting characters, homeless denizens Jane and Proctor, who are poorly constructed to the point of incomprehensibility, and whose psychoses are merely literary vehicles for Ballard to clumsily shed light on Maitland's foibles. It seems that Ballard merely decided to take some stock settings and themes, and perform a quaint exercise in building a sense of urban isolation through predictable inner conflicts within poorly drawn characters. Others may be amazed by this book's supposed "surreal" or "allegorical" qualities. Fair enough, but that doesn't mean it has a storyline that goes anywhere interesting. [~doomsdayer520~]

Coming from one of the weirdest setups ever, Ballard weaves a tale of despair, loss of identity and courage. We follow Maitland, a big business architect, as he crashes his car into a grassy island whose boundaries are limited by 3 roads. His attempts at leaving the island are foiled by numerous adverse circumstances and the unkindness of passing drivers (who would stop his speeding car in the middle of a busy road to help a man who looks like a bum?). Maitland's inventness and resourcefulness in using his car's attributes to try leaving the island makes this book very interesting and exhilarating. It's hard not to identify with this character as this is one of those "it could happen to you" situations. I like this book very much, but some characters that Maitland meets on the island are a bit too exagerated and grotesque for my liking. Implausibility has its limits and Ballard walks the fine line in this case.

This book was very dream like ,I kept expecting the main character to wake up from his accident with a concussion...like Dorothy on the Wizard of Oz. Actually it was more like a nightmare. Imagine being trapped on a motorway island for weeks and not having the strength to get off of it. Try THIS one on that "Survivor" show! The characters in the story were not very complex but the story moved along and there was enough going on to compensate for that. It showed exactly to what lengths one would go if faced with being marooned on a concrete island. It was just under 200 pages and a short read by anyones standards....a good book to take on a vacation. That is as long as you don't plan to spend time on any deserted islands! The ending to the book was a bit of a letdown, but it leaves things open for a sequel, but how interesting would these characters be in NORMAL situations? If you enjoy reading the likes of Chuck Palahniuk, and Alex Garland...then you'll probably like this one enough to give it 4 stars also.

--Having learned of the recent death of J.G. Ballard, I decided to honor his memory by re-reading "Concrete Island," which I first read a lifetime ago.

--I don't think I ever realized before how much it parallels Kobo Abe's classic "The Woman in the Dunes." Instead of falling into a hole in the sand, here a man crashes his Jaguar onto a traffic island. Inevitably, he ends up trapped, his efforts to escape failing one by one; as if in a nightmare, he miscalculates and sabotages himself again and again.

--There is a strong surreal and absurd element to the plot, and yet for the most part it proceeds with a lethal sort of logic.

--A nightmare logic.

--He's reduced to the most basic elements of survival--food, shelter, and self-protection. For, as he will eventually discover, he's not alone on the "island."

--Ballard within the novel itself draws a comparison to Robert Maitland's predicament and that of Robinson Crusoe.

--It's a sardonic homage to the old classic, in postmodern dress, to be sure. Ironically, Maitland is stranded not on an island in the middle of an ocean, but a man-made one in the middle of a freeway complex. Here he deconstructs his former "civilized" life and reverts to something of a savage.

--The concrete island represents the cast-off in our society--trash, car chassis, building foundations, abandoned air raid shelters, graveyards--and now Maitland himself. How quickly through the merest tick of chance we can go from a respected member of society to homeless tramp living on the fringes--that's part of the chilling message of "Concrete Island," one that strikes a particularly strong chord nowadays when people are losing their jobs and homes everywhere you look.

--It's a stark, surreal allegory about what happens when the guard-rails in life fail us...or we're incautious enough to crash through them.

--The book has the tight, quick-paced, satisfying structure of a well-made film. The writing is spare and yet stunning--a powerful and visually evocative prose. Ballard does a convincing job tracing Maitland's ever-varying psychological states as the island becomes a kind of hermit's retreat where he faces his personal--and interpersonal--demons. Ballard's success in using Maitland's absurd predicament to point up the flaws in both man and the world he has made is impressive.

--This is a book that is well worth reading--or, in my case, re-reading. It belongs to that special class of speculative fiction that just isn't written today--works like "1984," "Lord of the Flies," and the aforementioned "The Woman in the Dunes." It's one of those books that--while the details may fade over time--are never forgotten.

--Rest in peace, J.G. Ballard. You won't be forgotten.

Like all of Ballard's writing Concrete Island is about a particular locution of the contemporary mind; it explores the kind of empty dread, the failure to connect that spells the end of empathy and humanity and the beginning of some new kind of consciousness that doesn't recognize the importance of compassion or community. His work parallels that of David Cronenberg whose explorations of the "new flesh" in films like Videodrome and The Fly posit a future that is both less than and more than human. Ballard, in contrast, is more interested not in the way our bodies will be shaped by the present and future fetishes of display, but how our minds are likewise affected by new modes of interaction.

Ballard's books, as a result, aren't interested in the comfort of linear narrative or sympathetic characters, but take a kind of primitive glee in avoiding anything traditional. Concrete Island is no different from any of his other work, using a tense matter of fact voice to tell a story of delirium and failure. It's also an amazing read.