The modern psychoplay that Ballard orchestrates impresively is what makes this one a notch above "High-Rise"; portrait of a decomposing soul via modern Everyman. But then I realised Ballard is doing something canny: the book opens with the height of factual, police evidence-level pedantic precision.

Bale, who played the lead in Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Ballard's Empire of the Sun, apparently is no longer attached to the project. Survival becomes a game of dominance and Maitland in the epicenter - exactly where he belongs…“You were on the island long before you crashed here…. As the wrecked Maitland lies inside his wrecked car Ballard’s interest in the connection between man and technology could not be clearer. Part cripple, illiterate, half blind, destitute, afflicted, tormented, Proctor lives only to please and to serve. He tries to get drivers’ attention as they drive to and from home to work on the weekdays, and then as they drive off to picnics and other leisure activities on the weekend.

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.

Crash in particular has some baffling moments but, while I don’t aspire to grasp every nuance of Concrete Island, it has a seductively intuitive quality. Conflicts ensue with the other inhabitants and before long Maitland is struggling to determine whether he was truly meant to leave the island at all.Ballard seems to have had a real interest in people regressing to a primitive state/escaping from civilized society. Now that I'm somewhat underwhelemed by his heavy-handed post-existentialist allegorism (did i rly just type that) and poor handling of anything involving more than one character (or one object, preferably gleaming, burning or exploding at that)- whether it be an improbable dialogue or a barely insightful introspection- even now I think of Ballard as more of a 'could have been my favourite author ever' than anything else. 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.

His Jaguar goes flying over the guardrail of the high-speed highway he was driving on and crashes on the titular concrete island below. A literal example of “the grass is greener…” Speaking from personal experience, the reality is rather nasty scrubland with lots of rubbish… but the compulsion to investigate remains strong.The novel heavily references Shakespeare's The Tempest, with its remote island setting, its stranded inhabitants, the belief in sorcery and its Caliban character, the unstable acrobat. He learns to survive by scavenging discarded food from littering motorists, and eventually comes to think of the island as his true home. A repair truck parks on the hard shoulder of the overpass with ropes and a workman’s cradle hanging down. 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. Affluent Robert Maitland crashes his Jaguar on a precipitous traffic island such as we see all the time occupying the waste ground between ramps and highways.

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? 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.

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. Furthermore, his island isn't of the traditional type - it's a 200-yard long traffic island, one of those many patches of scrub and dirt around the world that are hemmed in by roaring, speeding traffic. The exploding air reflected from the concrete parapet seemed to detonate inside Robert Maitland’s skull. G. Ballard was busily creating modern fables of mankind’s increasingly urban environment and the alienating effect on the human psyche. You get a natural disaster or something happens to tear holes in the fabric of society, and his characters are still sipping Perrier from crystal snifters as their mansions burn.