The exploding air reflected from the concrete parapet seemed to detonate inside Robert Maitland's skull.

All this being said, if Peter Chung ever makes an animated movie of High-Rise or The Atrocity Exhibition, I'm fucking THERE. It may, at this point, behove me to confess that I have no qualifications in this area, beyond the obligatory ones, and know not whereof I speak.It's just that I have grown used to thinking of Ballard as potentially my favourite author, one whose brutalist anti-fantasies would forever define my personal ideal for architectural aesthetics conveyed in writing. Jane watches him do it, and the gesture asserts control over her, too, although only intermittent, and subject to her own unpredictable mood swings. Robert Maitland, at the wheel of a Jaguar speeding home one afternoon on the Westway out of central London, is hurled through a temporary barrier when his front nearside tyre explodes. I read this book some time in the 1980s and retained the impression that it really was a ‘concrete’ island. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.

As things are looking worse for Maitland, he is picked up by two denizens of the island, Proctor and Jane Sheppard.For many, the necessary restrictions of Lockdown are akin to being an urban castaway: long hours confined to one location; limited opportunities for social interaction; homes becoming concrete islands.