Concrete Island

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Untidy tears to top edge of jacket, approx 2cm to top front of DJ spine, almost 4cm to top rear corner of DJ and 1. His Jaguar goes flying over the guardrail of the high-speed highway he was driving on and crashes on the titular concrete island below. As things are looking worse for Maitland, he is picked up by two denizens of the island, Proctor and Jane Sheppard. Robert Maitland, at the wheel of a Jaguar speeding home one afternoon on the Westway out of central London, is hurled through a temporary barrier when his front nearside tyre explodes. He tries to get drivers’ attention as they drive to and from home to work on the weekdays, and then as they drive off to picnics and other leisure activities on the weekend.

His puckered face had the expression of a puzzled child, as if whatever limited intelligence he had been born with had never developed beyond his adolescence. The car plunges down a steep embankment and comes to rest, not on an uncharted tropical island like Crusoe, but its modern equivalent maybe: a traffic island. The man was about fifty years old, plainly a mental defective of some kind, his low forehead blunted by a lifetime of uncertainty. After the protagonist crashes his car and becomes trapped on a concrete island in the middle of a highway, he becomes a modern day Robinson Crusoe. In Concrete Island, Ballard creates a fitting metaphor for the social and emotional alienation that plagues modern men and women.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. Concrete Island is a representative work for him, I think, because it shows what he can do with a couple satirical characters in a nightmarish situation. And when it becomes more than they can bear, they retreat from it, slipping in and out silently, without leaving a mark on it, like Jane. Soon after three o’clock on the afternoon of April 22nd 1973, a 35-year-old architect named Robert Maitland was driving down the high-speed exit lane of the Westway interchange in central London.

The Desert Island List is a classic interview question: what would you take to a remote island, if you were to be marooned? When he tries to climb the embankment or flag-down a passing car for help it proves impossible - and he finds himself marooned on the concrete island. This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard’s works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Zadie Smith, Adam Philips, Adam Thirlwell and Robert Macfarlane) and brand-new cover designs from the artist Stanley Donwood. Tengu: Japan’s Long-Nosed Demon-God Tengu are mythical Japanese demon-gods (yokei) who live in remote forests and mountains of Japan.Is he perhaps using his injuries as an excuse for not trying harder to escape, in a sense choosing to remain – a rejection of the outside world? The location and rough shape seem plausible, but every photo of it which Bonsall has taken seems wildly unlike the place Ballard describes. In its lonely desperation Concrete Island reminds me of Stephen King's classic short story Survivor Type, where a wealthy, corrupt surgeon finds himself marooned on a small island, with nothing but his surgical tools, his boat and a kilo of pure heroin. None of the drivers could see him, let alone hear his dry-throated croak, and Maitland stopped, conserving his strength. There’s a particularly over-ripe moment when it occurs to Maitland that his plight, marooned in this no-mans’-land has an improbably vast symbolism.