It’s April 22, 1973 and 35 year old Robert Maitland, a successful architect, is driving his Jaguar home from a tryst with his mistress when he loses control on an exit ramp from the highway, goes through a temporary wooden barrier, and ends up smashing into a derelict taxi in the eponymous concrete island formed by the exit ramps and multiple lane highways far above.  Maitland has suffered some significant injuries but he’s conscious and able to free himself from the wreckage. In his dazed and injured state, however, it is an enormous struggle to climb the embankment to the road.  There, despite trying his best, he is unable to flag down the homeward bound rush hour traffic, and climbs back down to the concrete island and his car.

Thus starts an ordeal in which Maitland is first reduced to an uncivilized state driven by hunger and thirst but eventually settles into a role of ruler of the island.  The book is reminiscent of “The Heart of Darkness”, Joseph Conrad’s classic novel about a German named Kurtz who goes ‘native’ and becomes the ruler of a tribe in the Congo.  The thin veneer of civilization and order that is the everyday stuff of our normal lives disappears rapidly for Maitland as it did for Kurtz.

Ballard, who died in 2009, is perhaps best known for his novel “Empire of the Sun” which was short-listed for the Booker and which Steven Spielberg made into an award-winning movie. He is generally thought of as a science fiction writer with an emphasis on the dystopian.  From the distinct nature of his fiction, the term Ballardian has come to mean “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments”.  Before opening this book I tried to read another of his novels which has been made into a movie, “Crash” and quit after the first chapter which focused on a man obsessed with car crashes involving sex and Elizabeth Taylor.  Duh?

I had a love/hate relationship with this book which on the one hand was a page turner and on the other left me upset and unsettled.  I don’t think I’ll dip into his other 19 novels or 23 short story collections.  One was enough for me.