{"id":17648,"date":"2016-03-01T00:01:02","date_gmt":"2016-03-01T04:01:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=17648"},"modified":"2016-02-29T16:12:25","modified_gmt":"2016-02-29T20:12:25","slug":"j-g-ballard-concrete-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2016\/03\/01\/j-g-ballard-concrete-island\/","title":{"rendered":"J.G. Ballard: Concrete Island<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
Concrete Island\r\n<\/em><\/strong><\/span>by J.G. Ballard\r\n<\/span>Picador (2001)\r\n<\/span>Originally published in 1974\r\n<\/span>176 pp<\/span><\/pre>\n
Concrete Island<\/em> was the middle of three “steel and concrete” short novels written by J.G. Ballard in the 1970s.\u00a0The first, Crash<\/em>, was made into a film which kicked up a stink due its depiction of people with fetishes for car accident victims.\u00a0The third, High Rise<\/em>, is soon to be adapted by Ben Wheatley and details a civil war between residents of a block of luxury flats. It was announced five years ago that the screen version of Concrete Island<\/em> should be along one of these days too.\u00a0Quite what it will include is not so clear, because despite various attributes it is rather a slight novel\u00a0in terms of characterization, ambition, and scope.\u00a0Nevertheless, what works best is that the world the novel inhabits exists today in countries that should know better.\u00a0The standard description of this novel as something like \u201curban science fiction\u201d is inadequate because its setting, if anything, is too realistic.<\/p>\n
\"Concrete<\/p>\n
Whilst driving west on what is not named but is clearly the hideous A4, which carries one from central London towards Heathrow Airport and the West, 35-year-old architect Robert Maitland loses control of his Jaguar, crashes through a barrier, and rolls down a 200-foot embankment.\u00a0He drags himself back onto the edge of the road to seek help but is ignored by passing motorists for a few hours before a trestle he kicks into the road in frustration is knocked towards him by a passing car, causing an injury which forces him back down into the concrete island, surrounded on three sides by 200-foot high gray walls.\u00a0And that, really, is pretty well it.<\/p>\n
The rest of the novel is split between his forlorn attempts to escape and his efforts to dominate the island.\u00a0In Robinson Crusoe<\/em> fashion, Maitland needs fire. Instead of rubbing sticks together, he uses his car\u2019s cigarette lighter.\u00a0He is thirsty, so instead of breaking open a coconut he drains the car\u2019s windscreen washer reservoir.\u00a0He needs a crutch, so instead of breaking a branch he pulls his car exhaust apart.\u00a0His ordeal is presented is predictable stages in that he arrives, he fails to escape, then he explores and salvages what he can from his car.\u00a0Then, he accepts that he might be\u00a0around for a while, shortly after which\u00a0his new surroundings\u00a0become his home.\u00a0So far, nothing here is especially interesting.\u00a0There is only so much one can write about gray walls and the noise of traffic beyond them, but this does not stop Ballard trying.\u00a0The general result is evidence of the limited scope for such a novel, hence repetition is necessary to pad it all out a bit. A single sample will suffice:<\/p>\n
In his aching head the concrete overpass and the system of motorways in which he was marooned had begun to assume an ever more threatening size.\u00a0The illustrated route indicators rotated above his head, marked with meaningless destinations . . .<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There is a lot of this.\u00a0There should not be too much of anything in a novel of 170 pages.\u00a0And a continuity error involving money and Maitland shaving — shaving! — in his situation rather demeans the idea that this should be a novel at all.\u00a0Maitland barely alters, and what we know is coming — that he will stop trying to escape the island and instead try to dominate it — is brought to us quickly.\u00a0He encounters two other characters: a mad, whorish girl and a grunting, Caliban-like tramp.\u00a0The dialogue which occurs is so functional that it reveals a remoteness to Ballard\u2019s dealings with the human race.\u00a0The characters are almost a gesture, a mechanism via which Ballard writes about things more interesting to him.\u00a0Maitland finds lots of things, such as buried remains of former buildings, an ex-cinema, an air raid shelter and an abandoned churchyard, but none of it makes any apparent difference to him at all. No novelist can expect readers to be engaged by characters and situations so perfunctory that they fail to stimulate the writer himself.\u00a0There are examples of short stories which later made excellent novels — Fahrenheit 451<\/em> was one — but Concrete Island<\/em> feels like it should have been the opposite.<\/p>\n
Which is odd, because Ballard\u2019s short story output was prodigious.\u00a0A 2010 complete omnibus contained ninety-eight stories across 1,200 pages, amongst them (it can\u2019t be ignored) \u201cWhy I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan\u201d and \u201cThe Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as\u00a0a Downhill Motor Race.\u201d\u00a0Other ideas investigated are local people who disfigure a massive corpse they find on a British beach, eventually rendering it down into fat.\u00a0Elsewhere, a shop supervisor keeps a model of his home town in a box at home, complete with live-action figures.\u00a0Ballard was a man of an extraordinary quantity of ideas, some of them bearing parallels with Jos\u00e9 Saramago\u2019s looks into what happens when something taken for granted suddenly ceases to be, such as, in his case, sight, death, and the rather attractive idea of a general election in which a large majority of the population casts blank ballots. The point to be drawn from all this is that Concrete Island<\/em> does not necessarily contain the finest of Ballard\u2019s ideas.<\/p>\n
Let it not be said, however, that nothing works here.\u00a0This would be an excellent choice to accompany a train or coach ride through urban Britain, perfectly complimenting occasional looks out of the window for confirmation that practically everything constructed there since World War Two is of almost indescribable vileness.\u00a0And designed, in fact, by architects like Robert Maitland.\u00a0There are examples in practically every town and city, and Ballard saw them\u00a0clearly.\u00a0Though he is known as a writer of science fiction, Concrete Island<\/em> is set firmly in this world of drainage culverts, concrete overpasses, grey ramps, and dark tunnels. The “circuitous route through the labyrinth of motorways” which Maitland seeks could be an experience easily replicated today without having crashed one\u2019s car through a barrier; simply attempt to address the M8 motorway on the outskirts of Glasgow or Spaghetti Junction in Birmingham.\u00a0If the \u201cforgotten world whose furthest shores were defined only by the roar of automobile engines . . .\u00a0an alien planet abandoned by its inhabitants, a race of motorway builders who had long since vanished but had bequeathed to him this concrete wilderness,\u201d sounds appealing, head for the once attractive Victorian town of Reading, formerly, according to Roger Scruton, \u201ca charming Victorian town, with terraced streets and gothic churches crowned by elegant public buildings and smart hotels.\u201d\u00a0Had he not crashed and instead continued west for about another forty-five minutes, Reading is where Maitland would have ended up.\u00a0The only difference between it and the concrete island into which he did plummet is that it might have been easier to escape Reading, perhaps from its crumbling concrete bus station.\u00a0The best that can be said of Reading now is that at least the graffiti which defaces it cannot be described as vandalism.<\/span><\/p>\n
For further evidence that Ballard was not predicting the future but observing the present, you are urged to put Google to use to browse the following sample of London monstrosities: Trellick Tower in Kensal Town, Balfron Tower at Bromley, the National Theatre at the Southbank, Robin Hood Gardens at Poplar, and The Barbican.\u00a0All unspeakably appalling and all built between 1966 and 1976, by which time there wasn\u2019t even the excuse of war damage presenting the need for swift and functional building.\u00a0Rather, it was deliberately unattractive functionality inspired by the sinister early to mid-twentieth century ideas of the highly suspect Frenchman Le Corbusier, who, according to Theodore Dalrymple, “was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform.”\u00a0Where his designs were constructed — such as in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh, which is separated into numbered concrete sectors — no tourism\u00a0industry exists,\u00a0and aesthetics and indeed history have been obliterated. There is nothing to remind anyone of what was there before.\u00a0Pol Pot and Le Corbusier could have shared the motto assigned to them by Dalrymple: “before me, nothing: after me, everything.”\u00a0Like Le Corbusier\u2019s vision, Maitland\u2019s surroundings are threatening to human life; they confuse, overwhelm, and intimidate.\u00a0It is a nice touch of Ballard\u2019s to make Maitland an architect, as it invites the conclusion that he gets everything he deserves.\u00a0But there the engagement with the human beings of Concrete Island<\/em> stops.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chris reviews J.G. Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island<\/em>. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":17649,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[852],"tags":[],"coauthors":[620],"class_list":["post-17648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-j-g-ballard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Concrete-Island.jpg?fit=1100%2C1650&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-4AE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17648"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17653,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17648\/revisions\/17653"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17648"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=17648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}