I’m keeping this short because Concrete Island isn’t a book you should know much about before reading. After the next book, High Rise, was published in 1975, it became possible to see the three novels – Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), High Rise (1975) – closely linked as they are by publication date and subject matter – as a trilogy, and they’ve come to be referred to as the ‘urban disaster’ trilogy.

Jane watches him do it, and the gesture asserts control over her, too, although only intermittent, and subject to her own unpredictable mood swings.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. Ballard is great at making the normal abnormal, at skewing mundanity into weirdness and horror, and he makes the rubbish-strewn and overgrown no-mans-land between the freeways into a unique and desperate little world that his protagonist must struggle against to survive.

It's just that I have grown used to thinking of Ballard as potentially my favourite author, one whose brutalist anti-fantasies would forever define my personal ideal for architectural aesthetics conveyed in writing. The novel charts his descent not only into physical collapse, but this is accompanied by a wonderful description of his mind decaying, starting off lucid and determined to escape, and then charting his slow lapse into drunkenness (when he drinks a bottle of wine in shock), delirium, dehydration. I think I may have dated Jane once or twice in my younger days, but luckily I was just wily enough to not drink the paraffin. Part cripple, illiterate, half blind, destitute, afflicted, tormented, Proctor lives only to please and to serve. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".

Even if no man is an island, in the modern world any man could be found living in a total psychological isolation like on a desert island. He prefers rather to confront the rush hour traffic, suffer injury, and so render himself incapable of reclimbing the embankment.

As his strength wanes and his thoughts become blurred from hunger and illness he begins to wonder: did he subconsciously contrive to put himself on the island? This type of Concrete Traffic Island has 3 x M16 lifting sockets and is available in a variety of sizes - 1200 x 1200mm, 1500 x 1500mm and 1800 x 1800mm. During the few seconds before his crash he clutched at the whiplashing spokes of the steering wheel, dazed by the impact of the chromium window pillar against his head.Ballard’s protagonists in Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), and High-Rise (1975) are modern, urbane creatures, educated and detached, who embrace their technology-centric urban lifestyles.

Shielding his eyes from the sunlight, Maitland saw that he had crashed into a small traffic island, some two hundred yards long and triangular in shape, that lay in the waste ground between three converging motorway routes. Maitland, poor man, you're marooned here like Crusoe - If you don't look out you'll be beached here for ever.

his need to be freed from his past, from his childhood, his wife and friends, with all their affections and demands, and to rove for ever within the empty city of his own mind. It is within sight of White City to the west; Grenfell Tower to the east; and Imperial College London’s new ThinkSpace to the northwest. Ballard is capable of thinking things nobody else had ever thought, and often framing it in wonderfully bizarre and inventive purple prose. 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. Behind Maitland was the northern wall of the island, the thirty-feet-high embankment of the westbound motorway from which he had crashed.