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.
It’s a short novel and a lot more restrained than either of its predecessors, but still explores a mind-bending situation and eventually takes us into familiar Ballard psychotic territory.
35-year-old Robert Maitland is a partner in a successful architectural practice in Marylebone. He is married and lives with his wife Catherine and eight-year-old son David somewhere near Richmond. He is, rather inevitably, having an affair with a younger woman at work, Helen Fairfax, and has spent the past few nights with her. This, apart from showing what a rake he is, is important to the plot.
(In the 1960s it seems to have become fashionable to have extra-marital affairs, amid much talk about free love and the death of marriage and women’s liberation, see, for example, the fiction of John Updike, specifically Couples. At some point during the 1970s it just became a rather tiresome tic of bourgeois fiction. And by the 1980s it had become a really hackneyed cliché, the subject of bloated, boring mainstream fiction [see Stanley and the Women or The Russian Girl by Kingsley Amis]. The decline of the ‘affair’ as a token of intellectual adventurousness into a symptom of middle-aged complacency can be tracked in the fiction of J.G. Ballard).
The plot
The novel opens dramatically with a clinical description of a car crash.
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. Six hundred yards from the junction with the newly built spur of the M4 motorway, when the Jaguar had already passed the 70 m.p.h. speed limit, a blow-out collapsed the front nearside tyre.
The Jag careers through some wooden barriers lining the road and plunges down an embankment into a large overgrown grassy area.
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.
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. It is this, second accident, which seals his fate.
Because when he comes to several hours later, Maitland discovers his thigh and hip are so badly injured that he can barely walk and, when he slowly painfully drags himself back to the earth embankment, he finds it is too loose and soft and friable – and he is now to weak – for him to climb up it. He tries repeatedly but only gets half way up then slips and tumbles back down, eventually giving up the effort.
The island
Maitland’s thigh and hip have been badly damaged by the impact of the wooden barrier. The Jag is among a band of other wrecked and derelict cars in the long grass. Maitland makes a crutch and hobbles around the grassy space and makes a discovery – there is no other way off this patch of abandoned waste land: he is trapped on this ‘island’.
The island is a long thin V shape, with the unclimbable embankment along one side; a sheer concrete wall leading up to another motorway which curves round to join the one he was driving along on the second side; and a tough ten-feet-tall wire mesh fence on the third side. At least I think that’s right. To be honest I found Ballard’s descriptions of the island a bit confusing and sometimes contradictory. Here’s the longest and clearest description:
Shielding his eyes from the sunlight, Maitland saw that he had crashed into a small traffic island, some two hundred yards long and triangular in shape, that lay in the wasteground between three converging motorway routes.
The apex of the island pointed towards the west and the declining sun, whose warm light lay over the distant television studios at White City.
The base was formed by the southbound overpass that swept past seventy feet above the ground. 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.
Behind Maitland was the northern wall of the island, the thirty-feet-high embankment of the westbound motorway from which he had crashed.
Facing him, and forming the southern boundary, was the steep embankment of the three-lane feeder road which looped in a north-westerly circuit below the overpass and joined the motorway at the apex of the island. 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. Traffic moved along the westbound lanes of the feeder road, but the metal crash barriers screened the island from the drivers. The high masts of three route indicators rose from concrete caissons built into the shoulder of the road.
As I read on, I wondered if the story refers to an actual physical location, or is imaginary. Here’s a piece from the Ballardian magazine where writer Mike Bonsall suggests a plausible location for the island, in a long narrow strip of grass running south from the raised roundabout junction of the Westway and the A3220, not far from Latimer Road tube station.
The location and rough shape seem plausible, but every photo of it which Bonsall has taken seems wildly unlike the place Ballard describes. It looks bland and flat and lacks the prison-like walls which Ballard describes. It looks like you could just stroll across the road from Bonsall’s ‘island’. All of which leads to the conclude that Ballard’s ‘concrete island’ is very much an island of the mind.
I read this book some time in the 1980s and retained the impression that it really was a ‘concrete’ island. I had completely forgotten that there’s a lot more to it than that. For a start it’s big enough for him to get lost in. Over the next few days, he discovers that at one end are the ruined walls and foundations of Victorian houses. In the middle are a number of bomb shelters with steps down into them hidden by nettles and long grass. At one point there’s an overgrown graveyard, with references made to the tombstones. And believe it or not there’s the ruins of a small fleapit cinema, with a ticket booth and the shape of the crescent of seats. And somewhere in the centre the array rusting cars which he calls ‘the wreckers’ yard’.
In the description above, Ballard claims it is only 200 yards long, but Maitland’s subsequent adventures make it feel more like a village than the concrete island of the title.
All of this is overgrown by long swaying grass and castles of wild nettles, lush greenery which leads Maitland, as he develops a fever, and becomes dehydrated, to really think of it as an ‘island’.
Fever
Because that’s what happens: fever from his injuries overtakes him. There’s some wine in the boot of the jag but that just dehydrates him more. After a night and a day on the island he is in bad shape and goes steadily downhill from there. He loses weight, he is starving, he begins to hallucinate. 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. After several days with no food and little to drink except rainwater, he is in serious psychological trouble.
Maitland’s descent is marked by a series of incident:
- initial accident at 3pm
- hit by sports car and crash barrier about 4pm
- wakes at 1.45 having lain unconscious at the bottom of the embankment, trousers and shirt ripped
- drinks a bottle of wine to damp the pain
- wakes at 8am the next morning feeling terrible
- makes a crutch from the rusted exhaust of one of the other derelict cars
- reflects that he is marooned like Robinson Crusoe
- dehydrated, he rips open the windscreen wiper reservoir of the Jag and greedily drinks the water
- explores the perimeter of the island, realising he’ll never cut through or climb the high wire fence
- back at the Jag he tries to clean his grazed hands and wounded hip an legs with cologne and rags
- there’s a brief rainstorm and he positions the bonnet of one of the ruined cars to create a funnel channeling rainwater so he can drink it
- strips off ruined clothes and changes into dress shirt he keeps in the boot and drinks another bottle of wine
- fever: time passes; he dozes, comes round
- dusk falls; a motorist chucks a cigarette from a car whizzing along the motorway and it occurs to Maitland to set the car alight
- he does this, creating a leak in the fuel tank and using the cigarette lighter to start it – but the blaze is not like the movies, surprisingly brief and only succeeds in gutting his car
- 10pm on the second day and a passing motorist chucks a half eaten chicken sandwich out his window which tumbles down the embankment; ravenous, Maitland chomps it down, dirt and all; he sleeps till dawn
- dawn of the second day: Maitland vomits and is feverish; he sees an old man walking a motorbike along the hard shoulder and instead of shouting to him, becomes incoherently terrified that it is a horrific implement of torture and the old man is coming to chain him to it, so he hides
- he stumbles across to the supporting wall of the other flyover, the one curving into the one he crashed off, and uses the charcoal off the burnt spark plugs to try and write a message big enough for passing motorists to see: HELP INJURED DRIVE CALL POLICE
- he realises there’s a sheet of greasy newspaper nearby and excitedly reaches for it; sure enough it has a few cold soggy chips attached to it which he wolfs down
- it starts to rain and he sets off hobbling with the use of the exhaust pipe-crutch back to the Jag but gets lost and finds amid the nettles, an entrance to some kind of mouldy basement where he holes up during the shower; when he emerges he sees the big Help message he’s written on the motorway wall has been erased
And so it goes on in the same vein, with Maitland struggling to even walk, struggling to keep a sense of purpose, experiencing light-headedness due to hunger, dehydration and the recurrent fevers caused by the severe injuries to his hip and thigh, which sweep over him, making him vomit, pass out, come to with no memory of where he is and, increasingly, who he is.
Jane and Proctor
On the third day Maitland discovers the island already has two inhabitants, the fifty-year-old mental case, Proctor:
The man was about fifty years old, plainly a mental defective of some kind, his low forehead blunted by a lifetime of uncertainty. His puckered face had the expression of a puzzled child, as if whatever limited intelligence he had been born with had never developed beyond his adolescence. All the stresses of a hard life had combined to produce this aged defective, knocked about by a race of unkind and indifferent adults but still clinging to his innocent faith in a simple world. Ridges of silver scar tissue marked his cheeks and eye-brows, almost joining across the depressed bridge of his nose, a blob of amorphous cartilage that needed endless attention. He wiped it with his strong hand, examining the phlegm in the paraffin light. Though clumsy, his body still had a certain power and athletic poise. 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.
And a young woman with red hair wearing a combat jacket, Jane Sheppard.
Lit by the paraffin lamp behind her, her red hair glowed like a wild sun in the shabby room, shafts of light cutting through the home-set waves that rose above her high forehead.She was about twenty, with an angular, sharp-witted face and strong jaw. She was good-looking in an almost wilfully tatty way.
He blunders into a fight with Proctor and Jane rescues him. Maitland recovers consciousness on her bed in the bunker she’s sort of decorated in the basement of the derelict cinema. It’s lined with posters of Charlie Manson and Black Power. She’s a drop-out from a troubled middle-class family. She is spiky but vulnerable. After a few days we realise she is a hooker and puts on shiny clothes and stilletos to go get business. She returns with groceries from a local shop. Maitland realises she knows a way out and yet… by this stage… he is in such a strange zone that he doesn’t ask her… not just yet, anyway… sometime…. not yet.
The rest of this very short novel charts the slowly changing relationships between these three, as they play off one another. By about page 100 of the 126-page-long version I have Maitland realises that he can dominate them both, and sets about managing Proctor with a combination of ‘presents from his car, and strategic cuffs and blows.
Maitland realises that Proctor actually wants to be mastered and controlled, he offers up his scar for whipping, it confirms his self-image as a humiliated loser. In what I suppose was a shocking scene for 1974 Maitland asserts his authority when Proctor is lying drunk on the grass after drinking one of Maitland’s last bottles of wine, by undoing his flies and urinating all over the mental defective. From now on, he is boss.
Jane watches him do it, and the gesture asserts control over her, too, although only intermittent, and subject to her own unpredictable mood swings.
And reflecting on his urge to humiliate both of these outcasts, Maitland can’t help reflecting that he, too, is not the great white success he likes to think. His marriage with Catherine was on the rocks, he wasn’t happy in his work. Is Jane right when she suggests that his arrival on the island wasn’t an accident: that at some deep unconscious level, Maitland wanted to crash?
‘Oh, come on… why don’t you straighten your life out? You’ve got a hundred times more hang-ups. Your wife, this woman doctor – you were on an island long, before you crashed here.’
The novel moves quickly towards a harsh climax. A repair truck parks on the hard shoulder of the overpass with ropes and a workman’s cradle hanging down. Proctor climbs up in it to impress Maitland with his acrobatic abilities. But the truck pulls off unexpectedly and Proctor becomes entangled in the ropes and is swept backwards, helplessly, into a vast concrete stanchion where his body is smashed and he is garrotted, the ropes snapping and dropping his body to the ground as the truck carries on regardless.
Cut to Jane and Maitland by Proctor’s broken body. Sobered, Jane announces she is leaving the island. She says she’ll phone for help, she’ll get the police and an ambulance, hey can be there in half an hour. But Maitland insists she doesn’t, insists she leave him be. He wants to leave, ‘but in his own way’, when he’s ready, and not before.
Janes packs a shabby suitcase and heaves it up the embankment – she has no secret way out, she just has two functioning legs, unlike the cripple Maitland. After she’s gone he is happy. He spends hours of back-breaking labour digging a grave for Proctor in the old cemetery, drags him over to it and buries him.
Now the island is finally his without any interference. He’ll leave. Of course, he’ll leave. When he’s good and ready. In his own time…
Style
Losing rationality
Only as Maitland began his mental collapse, did I realise the significance of the opening lines. I had liked them because I like factual accuracy…
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.
But then I realised Ballard is doing something canny: the book opens with the height of factual, police evidence-level pedantic precision. Clarity and lucidity and accuracy. Because these are the very things which the protagonist proceeds to slowly loses as he descends into into fever dreams and increasingly weird psychic states.
The grass
There’s an appealing thread running through the book, which is the importance of the grass. As Maitland goes out of his mind he begins to think the long grass on the island is talking to him, encouraging him, urging him on, and he starts talking back to the grass, sharing his plans with it.
The grass lashed at his feet, as if angry that Maitland still wished to leave its green embrace. Laughing at the grass, Maitland patted it reassuringly with his free hand as he hobbled along, stroking the seething stems that caressed his waist.
I’m not being too cute when I say that the grass was my favourite character in the book, preferable to the Caliban-clumsiness of Proctor, and to the unhappy mood changes of neurotic Jane who – alas and alack – inevitably eventually gets her kit off and has sex with Maitland on her smelly mattress in the basement of the ruined cinema. That eventuality had a thumping inevitability, whereas the character of the grass, that’s not something you read every day.
The grass seethed and whirled around him, as if sections of this wilderness were speaking to each other… The grass flashed with an electric light, encircling his thighs and calves. The wet leaves wound across his skin, as if reluctant to release him…
No point in going back to the car, he told himself.
The grass seethed around him in the light wind, speaking its agreement.
‘Explore the island now – drink the wine later.’
The grass rustled excitedly, parting in circular waves, beckoning him into its spirals.
Yes, you can make a strong case for the grass being the most sympathetic character in the book.
Melodrama
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.
Regrettably, a little of that hysterical tones seeps into what is, for the most part, the much sober style of the story.
- He lurched into the roadway again, blocking the outer lane and waving his briefcase like a demented race-track official
- When she came into the room she turned up the lamp and glared down drunkenly at Maitland. Her wild hair flamed around her in the vivid light like a demented sun
- By some nightmare logic he was convinced that the old man was coming for him,
- He began to tell the young woman about his crash, eager to fix his nightmare ordeal in someone else’s mind before it vanished
There’s a particularly over-ripe moment when it occurs to Maitland that his plight, marooned in this no-mans’-land has an improbably vast symbolism.
Pretty over-ripe – although, to be fair, Maitland is feverishly hallucinating at the time
Ballard is capable of thinking things nobody else had ever thought, and often framing it in wonderfully bizarre and inventive purple prose. 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?’
Conclusion
It’s a brilliant, vivid and haunting novella.
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.
It’s West London in 1973 – and yet it is a vivid, a disturbingly super-vivid, picture of how quickly the most successful, articulate, intelligent and rational people in our culture can be reduced by a relatively minor twist of fate to abject squalor and mental collapse.
It feels astringent and modern and is at its most effective when, in prose terms, it is most restrained.
After the next book, High Rise, was published in 1975, it became possible to see the three novels – Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), High Rise (1975) – closely linked as they are by publication date and subject matter – as a trilogy, and sure enough, they’ve come to be referred to as the ‘urban disaster’ trilogy.
Original covers of Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975)
High-minded critics may well laud Ballard’s avant-garde experimentalism and analyse his post-modern fictional strategies and his prophetic insights into the post-modern condition – but it’s funny to realise that, at the time, his publishers still marketed his books with images of bare boobs and tough guys.
Credit
‘Concrete Island’ by J.G. Ballard was published by Jonathan Cape in 1974. Page references are to the 1985 Triad/Panther Books paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.
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