“More and more,” Ballard writes, “the island was becoming an exact model of his head. In the above quote, Maitland looks “like a grotesque scarecrow” - later he “slid around like a scarecrow in his mud-spattered dinner jacket,” and even later “ along like an animated scarecrow.” In one scene, “the red glow warmed his broken hands like a piece of the sun.” In another, “his legs stretched in front of him like ragged poles.” Elsewhere, “his wet clothes clung to him like a dead animal.” This is problematic and lands as amateurish, and ultimately deflates the power of an otherwise moving turning point of the novel. Ballard leans heavily on edgy similes, many of which reappear throughout the novel. Ballard feverishly expands and contracts Maitland’s traffic island into an expansive realm where anything can happen, resulting in scenes of dizzied exploration, discovery and transformation.Ĭoncrete Island was published a year after Ballard’s celebrated novel Crash and thirteen years after his debut The Wind from Nowhere, yet the work still feels like an early novel by an underdeveloped writer. Maitland, talking to himself, says “you’re marooned here like Crusoe–If you don’t look out you’ll be beached here for ever.” Concrete Island is indeed a twentieth-century Robinson Crusoe, and follows a number of the Defoe novel’s postcolonial plot points. His tall figure was warped like a grotesque scarecrow, and his white-skinned face bled away in the curving contours of the bodywork.”īallard shows his hand early in Concrete Island. “In the polished panels of the rear wheel housing,” Ballard writes, ”Maitland stared at the distorted reflection of himself. Maitland’s plight is presented as wholly avoidable but universally possible the novel conspicuously shines a mirror to reflect society’s current state. Ballard delivers scenes of Maitland using the hood of his Jaguar for shelter and drinking fine red wine for hydration with a pointed sort of cruelty. Ballard’s Concrete Island is a hyper-modern tale of survival and a portentous, scathing look at the perils of contemporary excess. Maitland’s life of excess and entitlement has finally caught up to him.
And worse, nobody would care enough to look for him: his wife at home had grown accustomed to turning a blind eye to Maitland’s infidelities downtown and would certainly not suspect any mortal danger if he didn’t come home for a few nights at a time.
The traffic island is a dead zone triangulated between incessant motorways, a grassy surplus of city planning that was never meant to be traversed.
Dazed and wounded from his accident, Maitland slowly realizes he’s stranded. Speeding home from his London office, thirty-five-year-old Robert Maitland crashes his Jaguar off the highway and onto an empty stretch of land surrounded by speeding traffic.
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