In J.G. Ballard‘s Concrete Island, architect Robert Maitland crashes his car through a highway barrier, and he expects that he will be easily found and rescued, returned to his safe world of family and extramartial affairs. Only he finds himself injured and unable to escape the abandoned island between motorways – he has great difficulty climbing the embankment, peak hour traffic won’t stop for him and the curve of the highway doesn’t give drivers enough time to register him. Increasingly desperate, he resigns himself to an extended period of isolation on the island.

He realized, above all, that the assumption he had made repeatedly since his arrival on the island – that sooner or later his crashed car would be noticed by a passing driver or policeman, and that rescue would come as inevitably as if he had crashed into the central reservation of a suburban dual carriageway – was completely false, part of that whole system of comfortable expectation he had carried with him. Given the peculiar topography of the island, its mantle of deep grass and coarse shrubbery, and the collection of ruined vehicles, there was no certainty that he would ever be noticed at all.

This is Ballard, and I’m surprised that such a bleak look at the world we’ve built ourselves was able to break my prose fiction reading rut. As always with J.G., the concepts are stronger than the execution, but the ideas are so compellingly prescient. Ballard’s prose style is a pornography of violence, with fetishistic details of Maitland’s seriously injured body and gleeful lingering over the twisted metal carcasses of crashed cars. It’s no surprise that this book was released only a year after Crash. In Crash the car crash was sexual, Concrete Island sees the structures which support transportation as potentially alienating, but again, offering liberation from the constraints of contemporary society.

After a few days spent in total isolation fending for himself – including a fevered psychosis that the the island is a physical manifestation of himself and his past – Robert is taken in by a brain-damaged acrobat and his young female keeper, Proctor and Jane Shepherd. They are curiously unwilling to do anything to help Robert escape the island, but do assist his survival. The return to primal instincts is a key element of the story, as Robert fights for his dominance over the two and their “conspiracy of the grotesque.” His cruelty is perhaps unwarranted – especially toward the sweetly loyal Proctor – but he is able to intellectualize it as necessary for his survival. Robert ultimately decides to remain on the island, intent on finding his own way out.

Concrete Island is full of ambiguity, lacking the closure that Robert’s escape would bring, the uncertainty about Jane and Proctor’s past, or the nature of the island itself. Otherwise innocent embankments now have a sinister implication, that element of the unknown. When so much of the earth’s land has been discovered, perhaps the only real places we can become stranded are those that we ignore daily. Ballard’s is an ugly world, where isolation in the shadow of heavily populated areas is all too possible, and when there is hope, there’s always a stolen sports car in the night, speeding with its headlights off to knock you back to reality.