Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #265934 in Books
• Published on: 1994-07-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Synopsis
A 35-year-old architect is driving home from his London office when his car swerves and crashes onto a traffic island lying below three converging motorways. Uninjured, he climbs the embankment to seek help, but no one will stop for him and he is trapped on the island, where he remains.

About the Author
J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. He published his first novel, 'The Drowned World', in 1961. His 1984 bestseller 'Empire of the Sun' won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. His most recent novel is 'Kingdom Come', published in 2006, his autobiogaphy 'Miracles of Life' was published in 2008 to much acclaim.

Customer Reviews

I am the island
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.

A short, and normalish, dream in Ballard land.
For some reason I find that Ballard's prose is not the most lucid to read, and I think that I know one of the reasons for this. As Martin Amis writes in The War Against Cliche, Ballard gives great attention to names of objects, (such as the components of a car), and this may be a trait that he developed in his studies of medicine before turning full-time writer. It seems that Ballard is somewhat a polymath of object names, perhaps similarly to Burgess. Ballard is, though, a master of metaphors. It is one of the things that he is most often associated with, and when you read Ballard you will realise that he really is partial to metaphors and similies. I am told that Ballard's unnerving otherworldliness is more diminished in Concrete Island than in the bulk of his ouvre, (it isn't experimentally written like Crash for example). In this novella however, there was at least one point at which I thought - with elation - "Ballard is insane". I doubt that fans of Ballard's more bizarre stories will be as satisfied with this book. I enjoyed reading it, but having finished reading Amis's London Fields on the same day, or the day before, it didn't have much of an impact.

Not what it should have been
As I gradually devoured the masteful works of Ballard, Concrete Island was the one that gave me indigestion. It is obvious that Ballard's strength lies in his limitless imagination, articulating absurd possibilites within today's society and Concrete Island is no exception. It IS a great idea, worthy of joining the rest of Ballard's 'Urban-disater' novels, but not a great book. In the writing of this, the idea that was great became stretched and weakened and with every chapter strays closer to 'Robinson Crusoe', losing its Ballard identity. Progression is slow, characterisation was personally unsatisfactory (though this isnt unusual for Ballard) and the story just isnt interesting or exciting. When a story lacks these qualities, it will normally make up for it in the form of magnificent imagery or poetic moments but that was never going to be the case.

There just wasnt enough substance for me in the idea of a modern re-working of 'Robinson Crusoe'. It could have been so much better, but then again some ideas are best left untouched.