Concrete Island

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We took inspiration from the rhizolith: a root system encased in mineral matter that is created through processes of erosion and cementation that protects and strengthens the natural composition of the earth,” said Syracuse Architecture professors Roger Hubeli and Julie Larsen, partners at APTUM. “So our proposal for Isla Rhizolith is a breakwater system comprised of ‘root-like’ concrete elements and planted mangroves that, when set floating upon the water, act as both an artificial and natural rhizolith,” they add. 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. Interestingly, Ballard's novel The Drowned World also dealt with a kind of reversion to a primal, primitive state in an overgrown world. Ballard seems to have had a real interest in people regressing to a primitive state/escaping from civilized society. Even if no man is an island, in the modern world any man could be found living in a total psychological isolation like on a desert island. And anyone can feel lonely in a crowd… 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.

I’m convinced that Ballard didn’t care what people thought. Of course he did, though. His sentences are polished enough that he ironed most of them out like a fussy tailor. He shines best in his short novels, when he just takes one simple idea and draws it out to the extreme of absurdity. His landscapes retain a corny sort of Twilight Zone quality. Concrete Island is a representative work for him, I think, because it shows what he can do with a couple satirical characters in a nightmarish situation. Even more than High-Rise, I think this book epitomizes what he was going for. One puts oneself in the character’s shoes, wondering if it would be possible to live under such circumstances. Next time you pass a freeway island you’ll wonder, imagine yourself erecting a lean-to on the side of the road.He deliberately sought out the areas of deepest growth, as if he were most at home in the invisible corridors that he had tunnelled in his endless passages around the island” (127).

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. Aunque la lectura no se hace especialmente ágil o adictiva, cuando uno lo deja está deseando retomarlo para saber qué demonios pasa con Maitland. 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. Sometimes he wonders what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would be merely an encumbrance." Maitland goes from trying to escape the island to trying to “dominate” the island. The island, of course, is himself.In 2011, Barcelona-based production company Filmax announced that it was producing a film adaptation of the novel. Scott Kosar was set to adapt Ballard's story, and Brad Anderson was to direct. Actor Christian Bale was announced as the main character. A start date has yet to be announced. [3] 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. [4] Günümüz dünyasındaki robotlaşan insanlara çok sert tokatlar atıyor Ballard bu eserinde. Çevirdiğimiz her sayfayla birlikte biraz daha gözlerimizin önüne seriliyor rezil hayatlarımız. Biraz daha ortaya dökülüyor kirli çamaşırlarımız. Ballard acımıyor bizlere, yerden yere vuruyor. Hemen hemen tüm eserlerinde insanın dönüşümünü odak noktasına oturtan, uzayı değil, insanları en ince ayrıntısına dek irdeleyen yazardan şaşırtmayan, güçlü bir eser.

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. But then, as with Robinson Crusoe’s discovery of the footprint on his desert island, there’s a twist, and Maitland discovers he’s not alone on his concrete island. He meets Jane and Proctor, two social outcasts (a prostitute and an old circus acrobat who has learning difficulties) who are squatting in an old cinema on the island, and the three form an unlikely, and uneasy, alliance. More and more, the island was becoming an exact model of his head. His movement across this forgotten terrain was a journey not merely through the island’s past but through his own” (69-70). 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. English director Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, out in the United States on May 13, represents the latest effort to extract a movie from J.G. Ballard’s so-called “urban disaster trilogy.” High-Rise, the last novel in Ballard’s trilogy, first appeared in 1975, and was preceded by Concrete Island (1974) and Crash (1973). David Cronenberg, a one-man Impossible Missions Force when it comes to adapting the unadaptable, took a shot at bringing Crash to screen in the 1990s. (The novel, about a subculture that gets off on car accidents, is short on dialogue and plot.) High-Rise, for its part, concerns a class war that reduces each floor of a luxury apartment to a veldt. (Dog is cooked, incest committed.) These are postwar masterpieces, but postmodern assaults on realism, too; neither Crash nor High-Rise produces a character with which readers can identify for long.

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At first glance, mangrove forests are just shrubs and small trees that grow on tropical coastlines, but despite their deceptively simple appearance, mangrove forests are a fascinating form of vegetation. Adapted to harsh living conditions, these plants create homes for many migratory birds and sea life, and are also adept carbon sequesters, taking C02 out of the atmosphere. On coastlines they act as one of the most effective barriers against wind and coastal erosion and thus even help prevent flooding, as the video above explains. But is it a great book? Well, it wouldn't make it onto my Desert Island List, or my Traffic Island List either. An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. Just like in The Drowned World, Ballard introduces more characters and action in the second half of the book, but I think it works better in Concrete Island than it did in The Drowned World. Jane and Proctor are also alienated individuals. Together the three characters reveal three different relationships to the island: