Concrete Island

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.

This modern 'Robinson Crusoe' tale tells the story of an architect trapped in a concrete traffic island after a car crash. Man's selfishness is exposed by the fact that nobody stops for him. He meets his 'Friday's in the form of two outcasts surviving in a shelter on the island, 'their last hiding place, appropriately in the centre of this alienating city.' Like the main character in Kobo Abe's 'The Woman in the Dunes', the architect tries to escape. But, when eventually he is free, he considers his escape as 'meaningless. Already he felt no real need to leave the island.' J.G. Ballard has written a forceful portrait of man's solitude in a concrete city, illustrating violently Robert Frost's profoundly human sentence 'Every Man is an island'. Not to be missed.

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.........??????

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.