Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2012 March 07 • Wednesday

I wonder if J. G. Ballard ever saw Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Concrete Island, Ballard's follow-up to Crash, is another transposition of the basic story.

Like the protagonist of Crash, Concrete Island's Robert Maitland is an adulterous middle-class professional whose life is changed by a car accident. Maitland's car leaves the road and ends up on "a small traffic island, some two hundred yards long and triangular in shape, that lay in the waste ground between three converging motorway routes".

Steep embankments lead up to the roads from the island. Maitland immediately climbs one to signal a passing car for help, but the density and speed of the traffic prevent cars from stopping. Maitland is injured by a passing sports car and falls back down the embankment, unable to climb back up.

Part of Ballard's genius is in making this bizarre and unlikely situation—stranded on a concrete island in the middle of a highway—into a believable story. Once Maitland is too injured and weak to climb the embankment again, the novel addresses the problems of the castaway: food, water, shelter.

And like Robinson Crusoe, Maitland finds, to his shock, that he's not alone on the island.

Concrete Island is great, very absorbing, one of Ballard's best. It's the dessert after the large dinner of Crash.