The Jag careers through some wooden barriers lining the road and plunges down an embankment into a large overgrown grassy area. speed limit, a blow-out collapsed the front nearside tyre.

Six hundred yards from the junction with the newly built spur of the M4 motorway, when the Jaguar had already passed the 70 m.p.h. 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. The novel opens dramatically with a clinical description of a car crash. The decline of the ‘affair’ as a token of intellectual adventurousness into a symptom of middle-aged complacency can be tracked in the fiction of J.G. And by the 1980s it had become a really hackneyed cliché, the subject of bloated, boring mainstream fiction. (In the 1960s it seems to have become fashionable to have extra-marital affairs, amid much talk about free love and the death of marriage and women’s liberation, see, for example, the fiction of John Updike, specifically Couples. At some point during the 1970s it just became a rather tiresome tic of bourgeois fiction. This, apart from showing what a rake he is, is important to the plot. He is, rather inevitably, having an affair with a younger woman at work, Helen Fairfax, and has spent the past few nights with her. He is married and lives with his wife Catherine and eight-year-old son David somewhere near Richmond.

It’s a short novel and a lot more restrained than either of its predecessors, but still explores a mind-bending situation and eventually takes us into familiar Ballard psychotic territory.ģ5-year-old Robert Maitland is a partner in a successful architectural practice in Marylebone. Concrete Island continues the obsession with cars and car crashes which was evident in the experimental texts which made up The Atrocity Exhibition and which then exploded into the fetish pornography of Crash.

Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard