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Concrete Island

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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. Just like in The Drowned World, Ballard introduces more characters and action in the second half of the book, but I think it works better in Concrete Island than it did in The Drowned World. Laughing at the grass, Maitland patted it reassuringly with his free hand as he hobbled along, stroking the seething stems that caressed his waist.

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. 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. All of this is overgrown by long swaying grass and castles of wild nettles, lush greenery which leads Maitland, as he develops a fever, and becomes dehydrated, to really think of it as an ‘island’. As I read along, and as this poor man’s plight became more and more dire, I kept thinking: I know exactly how you feel, Mister.What makes the novel more than a simple modern adaptation of Robinson Crusoeis the relationship between Robert Maitland and the highway, the very object that meant to facilitate his high-efficiency existence and that ended up rejecting him.

Both Proctor, who’s realm the island is, and Jane, are necessary to Maitland’s survival, and while still weak from injury and hunger, he seeks to control them first by playing one against the other – winning Procter’s devotion through gifts, pieces of the car, burgundy and so on.Now that I'm somewhat underwhelemed by his heavy-handed post-existentialist allegorism (did i rly just type that) and poor handling of anything involving more than one character (or one object, preferably gleaming, burning or exploding at that)- whether it be an improbable dialogue or a barely insightful introspection- even now I think of Ballard as more of a 'could have been my favourite author ever' than anything else. soo, it's a 'let's be friends' for now, even though I do wish it could have been something more than that.

But at his most flaccid, he is also capable of a kind of second-hand bombast which suddenly makes you sit up and ask yourself: ‘Actually, is this brilliant or… is it over-the-top rubbish? And by the 1980s it had become a really hackneyed cliché, the subject of bloated, boring mainstream fiction [see Stanley and the Women or The Russian Girl by Kingsley Amis]. Still, even though I was drawn into the story, it felt drawn out and nowhere near as focused by the conclusion.This is set up in a series of short and punchy opening chapters; written in language precise, concise, and rich in possibilities. Mike Bonsall goes into more detail about the discovery of the site in his excellent article in the Ballardian. 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. The man was about fifty years old, plainly a mental defective of some kind, his low forehead blunted by a lifetime of uncertainty. 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.

All the stresses of a hard life had combined to produce this aged defective, knocked about by a race of unkind and indifferent adults but still clinging to his innocent faith in a simple world. But when he tries to climb the embankment or flag-down a passing car for help it proves impossible – and he finds himself imprisoned on the concrete island.

Part cripple, illiterate, half blind, destitute, afflicted, tormented, Proctor lives only to please and to serve.

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