El libro tiene una serie de virtudes que son muy meritorias, destacando la propia escritura y arquitectura del mismo:

Maitland’s fate is the fate of the individual in the dehumanizing modern world, a technological world that alienates people from each other even as it crowds them closer and closer together, a social world that leaves a man feeling empty even when he possesses all the social marks of success—a Jaguar, a mistress, a high-paying career. The story of Concrete Island seems a metaphor for feeling being trapped in life. Maitland has a succesful career, a wife, a kid, a mistress, basically everything society expects, yet he finds a certain satifaction on the concrete island he is missing in his life. Maybe Jane and Proctor are metaphors for surpressed parts of his mind, because Jane suggests at a certain point that she and Proctor think Maitland has been on the island before. I probably should reread it from this perspective to see if my assumption works. Overall, Maitland's struggle and his coming to terms with being exiled from his life, while still being only metres from rescue, makes for an interesting and engaging story. We follow Maitland in this struggle and watch as his desire to escape is tested, and his motivations in general come into question. Concrete Island is a novel by British writer J. G. Ballard, first published in 1974. [1] Plot introduction [ edit ]So Concrete Island can be read as a parable of alienation of an individual in the vast urbanized world. James Graham "J. G." Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Ballard came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard focused on an eclectic variety of short stories (or "condensed novels") such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which drew closer comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Burroughs. In 1973 the highly controversial novel Crash was published, a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism; the protagonist becomes sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car crashes. The story was later adapted into a film of the same name by Canadian director David Cronenberg. Similarly, there are no zombies in Concrete Island — no irrational, irradiated hordes pitched against a heroic individual. Maitland’s wasteland isn’t the outcome of nuclear war; it’s the blank patch at the edge of our blueprints, the social void in our peripheral vision. If there are monsters in Ballard’s book, they’re the many motorists who regard Maitland blankly as they pass, urged ever onward, in well-defined lanes, by the traffic behind. A man driving a silver jaguar crashes his car and finds himself marooned and injured in a no-mans-patch-of-land in the middle of three highway overpasses. No one stops to help, or even notices he’s there.

This is my dumb Summer-self knowingly bowing before Entertainment rather than Enlightenment. Why? 'Cause sometimes the old girl upstairs needs a break. I believe there are worse crimes. Say, television.

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Like the protagonist in King's story Maitland is stranded. He has crashed his car off a freeway and down an embankment onto an overgrown patch of wasteland. After suffering an injury to his leg he cannot climb the steep slopes hemming him in and finds himself trapped (interestingly King's story sees his protagonist hobbled too, with a shattered ankle, although his injury leads him in a very different direction to Maitland). This is 1973, prior to the development of cellphones, so despite being in sight of a busy road he is marooned as effectively as Robinson Crusoe.

This little book is the perfect complement to Ballard's more infamous novel, 'Crash'. The difference here is that we get a look at the not so fun side of the car crash compared to the zany, sexually fetishized thing that 'Crash' had going for it.

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In its lonely desperation Concrete Island reminds me of Stephen King's classic short story Survivor Type, where a wealthy, corrupt surgeon finds himself marooned on a small island, with nothing but his surgical tools, his boat and a kilo of pure heroin. As his strength wanes and his thoughts become blurred from hunger and illness he begins to wonder: did he subconsciously contrive to put himself on the island? Is he somehow working against himself as he tries to escape? Is there a part of him that wants to leave his complex modern life and revert to a kind of isolated savagery? Proctor’s arrival was gradual. The highway was simply built around him. Having no motivation to leave, he allowed himself to be isolated. Now the island is his protection from the outside world.

This is the story of one man, Robert Maitland, and for almost half the book he is the only character. I like that. I like stories that focus on a single individual and especially on the inner workings of that individual’s mind. Ballard is great at making the normal abnormal, at skewing mundanity into weirdness and horror, and he makes the rubbish-strewn and overgrown no-mans-land between the freeways into a unique and desperate little world that his protagonist must struggle against to survive. Once he is stranded on the island, his inner isolation becomes something physical. He is alone. He is invisible. Even when he tries to summon help, no one stops. He can see his office building, but the people within cannot see him. He can see his wife’s car go by, but she cannot see him. No one is expecting him—neither wife nor mistress nor co-workers—so no one will notice that he is gone.This is what the world can do to people. And when it becomes more than they can bear, they retreat from it, slipping in and out silently, without leaving a mark on it, like Jane. Or passively letting it go on around them while remaining apart from it all, like Proctor. Or being abruptly flung out of it by an accident that was waiting to happen, like Maitland. In fact, the whole city was now asleep, part of an immense unconscious Europe, while he himself crawled about on a forgotten traffic island like the nightmare of this slumbering continent.