Everyone must familiarize themselves with this oracle, well, at least if you consider literature a serious Art. Crisscrossed by old and new transit options and little else, this stretch of marshes and landfill mounds has become an entirely liminal space, a place designed only to be passed through without stopping. It's much more than a simple retelling of Robinson Crusoe anyway, although it has undeniable elements of it.

Our protagonist Maitland finds himself injured and dazed, unable to climb up the steep embankments but also invisible from the drivers on the expressways. Now that I'm somewhat underwhelemed by his heavy-handed post-existentialist allegorism (did i rly just type that) and poor handling of anything involving more than one character (or one object, preferably gleaming, burning or exploding at that)- whether it be an improbable dialogue or a barely insightful introspection- even now I think of Ballard as more of a 'could have been my favourite author ever' than anything else. Robert Maitlan, an urban Crusoe with unresolved issues and his concrete prison a platform for resolution and identity seeking. but of course most people who end up on sandy atolls don't get their choice of either their supplies or their location, and so it is in Concrete Island. I gotta hand it to Ballard: there hasn't been one book I've read of his where, halfway through, I'm not ready to yank my fucking hair out only to have him pull it out of his ass.Supported on massive concrete pillars, its six lanes of traffic were sealed from view by the corrugated metal splash-guards installed to protect the vehicles below. They dwell smack in the middle of a traffic interchange, yet they are alienated from the society that streams around and above them. Couple this perfect conceptual terrain, so near to my own weird heart, with a generally quick and incisive narrative and crisp evocative description of the detritus of modernity, and this is up with Crash in Ballard's solid mid-70s not-really-sci-fi high point (as far as I can tell so far).

Is there a part of him that wants to leave his complex modern life and revert to a kind of isolated savagery?It is unthinkable, and yet Maitland sustains several injuries with little show of concern before being finally hurled back down into the pit. Which is not to say I'm ashamed I've been so slow to hop on the Ballard train, or worried I've become terminally bourgy in my old age. Having just read the short story collection Vermilion Sands my head was reverberating from Ballard’s extravagant over-use of Edgar Allen Poe-level over-the-top Gothic terminology – everything in Vermilion Sands is a nightmare, a living hell, demented and insane. Part cripple, illiterate, half blind, destitute, afflicted, tormented, Proctor lives only to please and to serve. Ballard's descriptions of the island and Maitland's travails are vivid and immediate, giving a strong sense of isolation and despair.

Ballard's papers at the British Library include his screenplay (1972) for Concrete Island (Add MS 88938/3/9).The Renaissance was a time of renewed classical learning, of discovered continents and rediscovered manuscripts, progress in the arts and sciences, and the expansion of . Ballard’s Concrete Island has always been one of my favourite books, and so I was recently pleased to come across a copy of the Jonathan Cape first edition of the novel, originally published in 1974, and with its stylish dust jacket, designed by Bill Botten. Formed at the junction of two motorways and a feeder road, this is a fenced-off, perhaps forgotten, triangle of uncut grass and the foundations of demolished buildings.

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. As he swayed from side to side on his small feet Maitland saw that he moved with the marred grace of an acrobat or punch-drunk sparring partner who had gone down the hard way. Robert Maitland is alone, trying to signal help for half of Concrete Island a what's going inside his mind during that time is important.When he comes round from his daze, Maitland staggers up the loose earth of the embankment, which has recently been covered with fresh soil and hasn’t grown firm with grass yet, to the verge of the motorway and the hard shoulder where he weaves in a daze shouting and waving his arms at passing cars, and nearly hit by several of them. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments. Ballard, by contrast, was fascinated by the idea of the whole superstructure of our civilisation suddenly removed and the possible psychological con