Concrete Island. J. G. Ballard
has equipped us. Can we overcome fear, hunger, isolation, and find the courage and cunning to defeat anything that the elements can throw at us?
At an even deeper level there is the need to dominate the island, and transform its anonymous terrain into an extension of our minds. The mysterious peak veiled by cloud, the deceptively calm lagoon, the rotting mangroves and the secret spring of pure water together become out-stations of the psyche, as they must have done for our primeval forbears, filled with lures and pitfalls of every kind.
The Pacific atoll may not be available, but there are other islands far nearer to home, some of them only a few steps from the pavements we tread every day. They are surrounded, not by sea, but by concrete, ringed by chain-mail fences and walled off by bomb-proof glass. All city-dwellers know the constant subliminal fear of being marooned by a power failure in the tunnels of a subway system, or trapped over a holiday weekend inside a stalled elevator on the upper floors of a deserted office building.
As we drive across a motorway intersection, through the elaborately signalled landscape that seems to anticipate every possible hazard, we glimpse triangles of waste ground screened off by a steep embankments. What would happen if, by some freak mischance, we suffered a blow-out and plunged over the guard-rail onto a forgotten island of rubble and weeds, out of sight of the surveillance cameras?
Lying with a broken leg beside our overturned car, how will we survive until rescue comes? But what if rescue never comes? How do we attract attention, signal to the distant passengers speeding in their coaches towards London Airport? How, when faced with the task, do we set fire to our car?
But as well as the many physical difficulties facing us there are the psychological ones. How resolute are we, and how far can we trust ourselves and our own motives? Perhaps, secretly, we hoped to be marooned, to escape our families, lovers and responsibilities. Modern technology, as I tried to show in Crash and High Rise, offers an endless field-day to any deviant strains in our personalities. Marooned in an office block or on a traffic island, we can tyrannise ourselves, test our strengths and weaknesses, perhaps come to terms with aspects of our characters to which we have always closed our eyes.
And if we find that we are not alone on the island, the scene is then set for an encounter of an interesting but especially dangerous kind…
Memories of J. G. Ballard, Jim to his friends – and I was never one of them, being too young and arriving too late in the world of writers, but still, he’s Jim Ballard as I was introduced to him, like the boy in Empire of the Sun. He was standing beside William Burroughs at an art opening, affable and dry and avuncular, thoroughly suburban, as he observed the eighties artistic freakshow that surrounded him, somehow managing to be both part of it and detached. I did not talk to him, then or any of the times I could have done. I was awed, and he always seemed too near and too far away.
Children, the kind who read, read everything that they find in the house; they read their parents’ books (the ones the parents had as children, the ones they had as adults); they read Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe alongside Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel; The Coral Island then Dune Messiah; The Island of Adventure beside Conan the Adventurer: they read all the books they can because the books are there, and because books offer information and escape. Or I did, anyway. Also, I knew we were all headed for the future, and I wanted to know what things would be like when we got there, surrounded by robots, with our hand-held communications devices.
Which meant that, growing up, two of my favourite books were The Crystal World by J. G. Ballard – a strange apocalypse I barely understood, and to which I was attracted by the cover, showing a beautiful, glassy landscape, and the back-cover blurb, which told me that this was about people exploring the Amazonian rainforest, trying to find out why the world was becoming crystal – and SF 12, edited by Judith Merrill, the book in which I discovered R. A. Lafferty and William Burroughs, Samuel R. Delany and Kit Reed, Carol Emshwiller and Fritz Leiber, Brian Aldiss and Tuli Kupferberg and a host of authors and ideas, including a story called ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’, by J. G. Ballard, about a cloud sculpture and the men who fly small planes, about love and about murder.
These books meant that Ballard was, in my head, part of the club of SF writers, the people who wrote things I loved (even if I did not entirely understand them), and this meant I read everything by him that I could find. And when, aged thirteen, I changed schools, I discovered a school library filled with books that had not been in my previous school library: I found Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books there, and The Master and Margarita and 1984 (which I read mostly to understand Bowie’s Diamond Dogs and because there were jokes in the Alan Coren 1984 parody in Punch I suspected I was missing), and, on a high shelf, a tiny clutch of Ballard novels.
I read Crash first. I did not understand it, but I loved the writing, loved the smell of leather upholstery and the jewelled glitter of broken glass on the motorway. It seemed peculiarly intellectual: Elizabeth Taylor and crashing cars for sexual pleasure were both very abstract concepts for a teenager who had not been a teenager for very long.
Then I read Concrete Island, and I was in love.
I did not read then for character or for language (although I could be hooked by either and responded to both); I read for story, and in Concrete Island, I recognised a story, and came upon a story I recognised. It was Robinson Crusoe: here was a man, Robert Maitland, stranded on an island, cut off from civilisation, learning how to feed himself and survive, obsessed by the need to get off the island, get back to civilisation, to his wife, to his company, to his mistress, to his world.
I was of an age where I was beginning to see metaphor and pattern. He’s on an island, I thought, and he’s been on an island his whole life. It was a revelation.
I thrilled, reading it then, as I thrill each time I reread it, to Maitland’s problem-solving efforts in the first few chapters: his plans to send up signal flares, his search for drinkable water, his attempts to get people to see him and stop. And to his joy at the thrown-away chips. Robinson Crusoe had breadfruit and other foodstuffs alien to a small boy in Sussex. He didn’t have a lorry driver’s discarded chips.
I was saddened and thrilled when Maitland found that he was not alone on his island: Crusoe had Friday, had that footprint in the sand. Maitland had two people, whose behaviour towards him seemed pretty much right: I was a schoolboy, after all, and casual cruelty was usual. Lord of the Flies and Unman, Wittering and Zigo both seemed, to me, realistic about the way the children around me behaved, or would behave given half a chance.
Reading Concrete Island now, I read it with adult eyes. And if you have not read the book, stop reading this introduction here. The story is too good to spoil for you, after all.
I marvel at Ballard’s ability to bring the Coral Island home, to recognise that a traffic island was, for someone stranded on it, as remote as the South Seas. I am fascinated by the politics of Friday, and the way that Ballard breaks that role in two, and subverts it; and how savage Maitland needs to become in order to gain dominion over his Island Kingdom. Friday, the savage that Crusoe rescues, who knows more of the island and the ways of survival than Crusoe ever will, becomes two survivors: a mentally subnormal acrobat, and a young woman whose tragedies are never explained, only implied, and who leaves the island and returns, a heart-hurt whore who no longer fits the world she fled. Both people whom Maitland would look down on in everyday life, both people on whom he finds himself depending for his survival.
I admire the way the island is a palimpsest: the world, the town, before the motorway existed shows through, just as Robinson Crusoe shows through in Concrete Island, from time to time.
I did not understand when I was a boy that the best way to prepare