Concrete Island

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Time becomes abstract -meaningless, orientation imperceptible, deliverance is so close but so distant. Determined to survive above all else, he would exploit this strain of cruelty in himself in the same way that earlier he had exploited his self pity and contempt.

They're not made to be moved in without a car or train, so how easy would it be for the uninitiated to get out? But at his most flaccid, he is also capable of a kind of second-hand bombast which suddenly makes you sit up and ask yourself: ‘Actually, is this brilliant or… is it over-the-top rubbish? The best-guess location for the ‘real’ Concrete Island, based on Ballard’s descriptions in the book, is a small open space at the convergence of the Westway roundabout and the two southern spurs of the West Cross Route.He becomes trapped by a man-made superstructure where he is isolated by the breathless pace of modern living. Their presence had brought out unwelcome strains in his character, qualities irrelevent to the task of coming to terms with the island. There's a lot of criticism I could offer of this or any of his work, but saying he wasn't his own man would never be a part of it. Ballard, by contrast, was fascinated by the idea of the whole superstructure of our civilisation suddenly removed and the possible psychological con

Over the next few days, he discovers that at one end are the ruined walls and foundations of Victorian houses. 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. Although no more than a hundred yards away, this freshly grassed slope seemed hidden behind the overheated light of the island, by the wild grass, abandoned cars and builder’s equipment.

The rest of this very short novel charts the slowly changing relationships between these three, as they play off one another. Described as "The best British novel about the Second World War" by The Guardian, the story was adapted into a 1987 film by Steven Spielberg. Through these bribes Maitland persuades Procter to lead him to the secret food source – a nearby garbage dump. Jane watches him do it, and the gesture asserts control over her, too, although only intermittent, and subject to her own unpredictable mood swings.

Crash in particular has some baffling moments but, while I don’t aspire to grasp every nuance of Concrete Island, it has a seductively intuitive quality. Jane comes and goes as she pleases, moving mysteriously between the outside world and her isolated island existence. The exploding air reflected from the concrete parapet seemed to detonate inside Robert Maitland's skull. They dwell smack in the middle of a traffic interchange, yet they are alienated from the society that streams around and above them.The protagonist, whether Maitland in Concrete Island or Jim in Empire of the Sun, attains the mastery necessary to survive, and because that mastery is as much related to the landscape of the interior as the the exterior, the hostile environment becomes the hearth and home of the soul; the soul and its environment adapt to each other, and in shedding the flesh of the previous bourgeois existence, a leaner, self-sufficient being emerges. He shines best in his short novels, when he just takes one simple idea and draws it out to the extreme of absurdity. Soon after three o'clock on the afternoon of April 22nd 1973, a 35-year-old architect named Robert Maitland was driving down the high-speed exit lane of the Westway interchange in central London. Tengu: Japan’s Long-Nosed Demon-God Tengu are mythical Japanese demon-gods (yokei) who live in remote forests and mountains of Japan. was at last beginning to shed sections of his mind, shacking off those memories of pain, hunger and humiliation.