Conflicts ensue with the other inhabitants and before long Maitland is struggling to determine whether he was truly meant to leave the island at all. It is this second accident rather than the crash itself which clinches the situation, because Maitland doesn’t see a sports car hurtling along the flyover towards him until too late, the car swerves and hits one of the wooden barriers which whiplashes brutally against his legs, hurling Maitland back down the earth embankment. Of course in true Crusoe form he discovers he’s not alone on the island, there’s a young woman and a disabled man. 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. Robert Maitlan, an urban Crusoe with unresolved issues and his concrete prison a platform for resolution and identity seeking.

This leaves the reader with an almost vertiginous effect, as if the traffic island were somehow in motion, instead of static. Like a mendicant desert chief presiding over his baren kingdom, squatted on the bed in the mouth of the rusty pavillion.He tries repeatedly but only gets half way up then slips and tumbles back down, eventually giving up the effort. His movement across this forgotten terrain was a journey not merely through the island’s past but through his own” (69-70). Anyone who has ever stood beside a broken down car on the side of the road wondering why the hell no one will stop can certainly relate to this situation.

The rest of this very short novel charts the slowly changing relationships between these three, as they play off one another. In 2011, Barcelona-based production company Filmax announced that it was producing a film adaptation of the novel. Maitland is alienated from his family, from his mistress (and the presence of a mistress only reinforces his alienation from his wife), and from society.This is set up in a series of short and punchy opening chapters; written in language precise, concise, and rich in possibilities. 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. Though surrounded by motorists and within sight of large buildings, Maitland is unable to escape the median strip and must struggle for survival.

As I read along, and as this poor man’s plight became more and more dire, I kept thinking: I know exactly how you feel, Mister. To access your ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose. In this twisted version of Robinson Crusoe, our hero must learn to survive - using only what he can find in his crashed car. Catherine would be sleeping quietly in her white bedroom, a bar of moonlight across her pale throat. It feels a long, long way from the trilogy of florid disaster novels in the early 1960s or from the jewelled prose of Vermilion Sands and the more lush and decadent of his many short stories, a long way from the dead astronauts and drained swimming pools of the desert resorts.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.