Was the entire island an extension of the Jaguar, its windshield and windows transformed by his delirium into these embankments? It is unthinkable, and yet Maitland sustains several injuries with little show of concern before being finally hurled back down into the pit. Long before Facebook and iPhones invented (maybe long before you were born), the great minds of the twentieth century were anticipating the perils of modern living. It’s very difficult to say more about the plot without giving away spoilers, so I’ll just say that the storyline held my interest all the way, and to the end I remained curious about Maitland’s eventual fate.

Concrete Island continues the obsession with cars and car crashes which was evident in the experimental texts which made up The Atrocity Exhibition and which then exploded into the fetish pornography of Crash. He learns to survive by scavenging discarded food from littering motorists, and eventually comes to think of the island as his true home. 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.

It was great by any Ballardian standards, but I feel that the allegory overtook the narrative and the characters a little bit compared to HIGH RISE. 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? G. Ballard novel ( Concrete Island is my fourth in the last year or so) I think two things: 1) hey, that was pretty terrific; 2) it's a shame I didn't read it ten years ago.

I like stories that focus on a single individual and especially on the inner workings of that individual’s mind. Mike Bonsall goes into more detail about the discovery of the site in his excellent article in the Ballardian. He spends his time between a wife and a mistress, and seems to "have it all" in that straight, corporate world view of things. At last left alone on the island, with a “new-found physical confidence” he feels able to face “the task of coming to terms with the island.

Catherine would be sleeping quietly in her white bedroom, a bar of moonlight across her pale throat. Our protagonist Maitland finds himself injured and dazed, unable to climb up the steep embankments but also invisible from the drivers on the expressways. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’.