You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by veerle
Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard
5.0
Robert Maitland, a 35-years old architect, crashes his Jaguar and ends up on a concrete island, trapped between highways. Injured, it is impossible to get off the island. Soon he finds out he is not the only one there. Proctor, a former trapeze artist, and Jane, a prostitute who escaped an unhappy marriage, try to keep him there. He taps into his best Robinson Crusoe skills to try to survive on the island and escape from it.
The story of Concrete Island seems a metaphor for feeling being trapped in life. Maitland has a succesful career, a wife, a kid, a mistress, basically everything society expects, yet he finds a certain satifaction on the concrete island he is missing in his life. Maybe Jane and Proctor are metaphors for surpressed parts of his mind, because Jane suggests at a certain point that she and Proctor think Maitland has been on the island before. I probably should reread it from this perspective to see if my assumption works.
Once more Ballard unveils the poetry in modern day structures. The wastelands hides so many interesting and beautiful things from the past: the basements of houses, an oldcinema, air-raid shelters from the Cold War era, a breaker's yard. His descriptons, his characters, it feels like a play where the concrete island serves a stage. Can't wait to read another Ballard, I'm am addicted :)
The story of Concrete Island seems a metaphor for feeling being trapped in life. Maitland has a succesful career, a wife, a kid, a mistress, basically everything society expects, yet he finds a certain satifaction on the concrete island he is missing in his life. Maybe Jane and Proctor are metaphors for surpressed parts of his mind, because Jane suggests at a certain point that she and Proctor think Maitland has been on the island before. I probably should reread it from this perspective to see if my assumption works.
Once more Ballard unveils the poetry in modern day structures. The wastelands hides so many interesting and beautiful things from the past: the basements of houses, an oldcinema, air-raid shelters from the Cold War era, a breaker's yard. His descriptons, his characters, it feels like a play where the concrete island serves a stage. Can't wait to read another Ballard, I'm am addicted :)