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Rating: Architect Robert Maitland is a man like many: a son, a wife, and a relationship with another woman. He is the protagonist of this delirious story, on the brink of madness. On a quiet spring afternoon, the explosion of a front tire will project him and his car off the highway into a grassy embankment. Catapulted into a strange and surreal place: a vast traffic island, a dilapidated environment dominated by utter abandonment.
A bizarre adventure, at times bewildering, centered on the desperate and indomitable will of a man to survive and dominate the environment around him. Wounded and feverish, he will explore the surrounding area: a junkyard with carcasses and wrecks of rusty cars, abandoned tires, hardened cement bags, bales of wire, garbage, and weeds. Thus begins "Concrete Island", which could be interpreted as the work connecting the previous "Crash" and the subsequent "High-Rise". The entire island and what it contains, including him, merge into a strange material and psychic regression seemingly without conclusion.
"Almost urged on by the grass, Maitland climbed onto the roof of an abandoned air-raid shelter, where he caught his breath, studying the island more closely. Comparing it with the highway system, he noted that it was much older than the surrounding land, as if that triangular area of wilderness had survived for a unique exercise in cunning and perseverance, and would continue to survive, unknown and neglected, for a long time even after the highways had crumbled to dust" [Concrete Island].
Maitland increasingly realizes that all things considered, in that ambiguous solitude, in that disastrous environment, with that atmosphere between nightmare and wakefulness, he is not in a condition so hostile after all. It seems as if he is fleeing society, from the feelings and demands of family and friends. Emerging madness?
"He looked despairingly at the island, with its deserted highway embankments. Was he still trapped in the car, by chance? Perhaps the island was nothing more than an expansion of the Jaguar, and it was his delirium that transformed the windshield and windows into those embankments... Perhaps, while he lay with his chest pressed against the steering wheel, the windshield wipers had broken and were going back and forth endlessly, reiterating some nonsensical message on the steaming glass..." [Concrete Island].
Is his an introspective search for a past to destroy or relive?
"...Many of the happiest moments of his life had been solitary... Not to mention the childhood, re-mythologized for years: the mental image of a little boy playing alone endlessly in a long suburban garden surrounded by a high fence gave him a strange solace..." [Concrete Island].
But in this forgotten place lives someone, perhaps more desperate than he is... Ballard creates a distorted but fascinating evocative and visual effect, masterfully describing the profound psychophysical discomfort of his character. The writing, reduced to the essential, without bombastic vocabulary, produces a powerful novel, capable of startling the reader with constructive intentions. Also, interesting reflections on the discomfort and alienation of Man in a cold and inscrutable society emerge. {ƒ}
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