On the very first page, after a crashing car has come to rest, we get this: “Maitland lay across his steering wheel, his jacket and trousers studded with windshield fragments like a suit of lights…” Yep, for the first time in decades I’m back reading J G Ballard again.
    And this is classic Ballard too, from his early science-fiction days. Robert Maitland, at the wheel of a Jaguar speeding home one afternoon on the Westway out of central London, is hurled through a temporary barrier when his front nearside tyre explodes. The car plunges down a steep embankment and comes to rest, not on an uncharted tropical island like Crusoe, but its modern equivalent maybe: a traffic island. Formed at the junction of two motorways and a feeder road, this is a fenced-off, perhaps forgotten, triangle of uncut grass and the foundations of demolished buildings. Badly injured in a subsequent escape attempt, first comes self-pity, a bottle of Burgundy from the wrecked Jag, an exhausted sleep; then, next morning, his bid for survival begins: water, food, shelter, a signal-fire, rescue.
    But there are psychological problems to confront too—and these are more insidious, harder to overcome, because this only starts out like a modern Robinson Crusoe. Throughout his whole time on an eighteenth-century island, Defoe’s castaway never becomes anything other than the civilised man who washed up there in the first place; in fact, he expends a great deal of effort trying to recreate the world with all its home comforts he’s lost. Ballard, by contrast, was fascinated by the idea of the whole superstructure of our civilisation suddenly removed and the possible psychological consequences for any survivors. In many of those early science-fiction novels not everyone is devastated by this loss, and some are even glad to be rid of it all. So you may find water on your concrete island, even food of a sort, but can you sustain the desire to escape? Or might it begin to seem like a refuge, your prison of embankments and flyovers a release, a strange freedom? ( )

Great first half, really chilling stuff. The book then becomes thematically similar to Woman in the Dunes but with a less engaging style compared to Abe. ( )

The speed with which Maitland moves from wealthy architect to primitive is part of Ballard’s worldview, I think. Obviously, everything about this novel is echoed or parallel to the novel High-Rise. Honestly, it is kind of the same novel. It takes the same survival-satire-social subversion and instead of taking place in a high rise building, it takes place in the center of the “traffic” of normal society.

Anyway, there is a lot to wonder about in this novel, though none of it is necessarily positive or engaging. Most of it is dark and uncomfortable.

The conceps are worthwhile to explore, but at the end of this, I feel it was an intellectual exercise of an expression of discontent with society. I am sorry that Ballard is discontented. It was not horrible to spend a few minutes reading his satire, but I am not going to remain there, on these isolations, with him. ( )

That was a unique reading experience. J. G. Ballard expertly breaks down human psyche in his work and this contemporary telling of Robinson Crusoe explores the breakdown in the human mind when social restraints are ripped away. 3.5 stars. ( )

Ballard's prose is superb but as soon as the other characters emerged I was left cold. ( )