Rating: 
Summary: A brilliant work but not for everyone.
Review: Gosh, I hate to see this great, little book slammed or passed over because people were unaware of what they were getting themselves into when they bought it.Some of the negative or lukewarm reviews are correct in that those readers obviously did not like certain elements of the book, notably the lack of logical narrative progression or fuller character development but they are mistaken to consider these peculiarities of style as deficiencies worthy of criticism. This book is not intended to be a straightforward adventure story or a character driven drama, or even a novel with some surrealistic elements. Concrete Island, like Ballard's most popular book Crash, is a novel length exploration of abstract concepts wrapped in a traditional narrative format. Consider Ballard's earlier, short science-fiction stories, where a characters' specifics are more or less incidental to the situations in which they are placed. Or his later short works where characters are no more than conceptual cyphers or sometimes just a specific instance of a notional character spanning across several stories. With that in mind, the events and settings are supposed to be surreal and incomplete. The characters are supposed to be unrealistic and uni-dimensional. You aren't supposed to identify with anyone or anything, at least not physically, and then only to the extent that you might become aware of forces acting in your own life or impulses in your own psyche which these fantastical situations and characters represent. So if you are familiar with Ballard's other work, or are interested in Ballard but want something a bit more approachable than, say, Crash or Atrocity Exhibition, then you will really enjoy Concrete Island - its relatively tight and fast moving, much more fleshed out than his shorter works with plenty for your brain to chew on for a while, but without frying your mind as much the Ronald Reagan-Liz Taylor psychosexual stuff.
Rating:
Summary: Truly unforgettable, unique, surreal story.
Review: I found this by chance at the library MANY years ago. I never forgot it. Nor did I forget the title, so I looked it up again and it had the same impact the second time as the first. More so, in fact. Very surreal. Very unforgettable. Don't read too much into it, just enjoy the strange and bizarre idea of a man trapped on a concrete island in the middle of a city. I like the ending.........??????
Rating: 
Summary: There's Nothing There
Review: I liked the premise--some guy unexpectedly stuck on a manmade island in the middle of civilization and all he wants is to go home, but somehow it is very hard. I wanted to see what the things were that would keep him there and what ideas he would come up with to escape. So I was hoping for a story about a character that is really clever and resourceful and determined. I would have enjoyed just a simple survival story. And it starts off that way, but ends up with the main character, Maitlin, doing this wrestling-with-his-personal-demons thing, which I just don't like for the conflict of a story. People that are dehabilitated by their psychological problems aren't all that interesting to me as story characters. Especially when, like in this book, the characters' problems are never adequately described. Or I would have liked something that makes more of a statement about human nature, like Lord of the Flies, a book that also starts off as a survival story and tries to become something more. The author seems to be trying to say something important, but I don't think he has anything to say. The closest he comes is when he shows Proctor and Jane accepting Maitlin's dominating role. The characters were drawn shallow and sometimes fake. I felt I was owed an explanation for why Maitlin and Jane were what they were and did what they did. For Maitlin, too much is explained by him being sick and exhausted. Someone who has clear reasons for making extraordinary decisions is much more interesting. I didn't care about getting an explanation for Proctor...he was just a freak that got thrown in. I mean have you ever met a person in your life, retarded or whatever, that consistently referred to themselves in the 3rd person ("Proctor take Mr. Maitlin to the Food Place")? That's like a monster from a 1940's horror movie. Also the thing with white collar men being unhappy jerks is a cliche. Yeah, yeah, the irony of someone who has everything but is still not satisfied... the irony of someone who seems so stable and respectable, but in the right situation will show himself to be a horrible monster... okay, I got it.
Rating: 
Summary: A very interesting book.
Review: I read this book straight through in about an hour. After I put it down, I was unsure how I felt about it. I still am. Was it an interesting story, one to present new ideas, one to make you think long and hard about each character, or was it a rehash of things already said by other authors? This is definitly not a 'story' story - don't get it to be enthralled by a man's life and death struggle on a traffic divider. It is more about inner human nature. When he first crashes onto the island, his first thoughts are about escape. Slowly, as he realizes that no one is stopping for him, his attitude seems to change - though he still outwardly (and sometimes mentally) acts like he wants to escape (even on the last page), he truly wants to stay - as if he has now seen the other end of the stick, the side that is affected by the uncaring masses that inhabit our world, and now that he has seen it he does not want to go back to the side inflicting pain. As a final comment - I think Jane's story would make a good book all on its own!
Rating:
Summary: Illuminates the thin line between savagery and civility
Review: In "Concrete Island" Ballard delivers a haunting urban fable that's better than "High-Rise," more accessible than "Crash," and charged with the author's trademark irony and psychological horror. "Concrete Island" opens with achitect Maitland bursting through a crash barrier and into a dessicated patch of land that has gone all-but-unnoticed by the city around it. Maitland quickly realizes that he's stranded, and the rest of the novel deals with his persistent efforts to escape and claim the "island" as his own before re-emerging into civilized society. "Concrete Island" is an inventive and horrifying story that illuminates the thin line between savagery and civility as deftly as "Crash" dissected our collective fetish for the mechanical. Ballard's thoughts on the modern predicament are as insightful as they are chilling, and "Concrete Island" ranks among his finest visions.
Rating: 
Summary: A spectacular disappointment
Review: Mr. Ballard's novel CONCRETE ISLAND starts out somewhat promising, with a successful English salaryman unintentionally finding himself trapped beneath a freeway overpass. What could have been an interesting study on modern alienation becomes a bizarre parody of Steinbeck's OF MICE AND MEN, with the George Milton character supplanted by a teenage runaway. An incredibly frustrating novel that sucks you in with promises of something better but never delivers.
Rating:
Summary: Ballard is a genius
Review: My first Ballard novel. I'm hooked. Brilliant reading. For young and old alike. "Ballard's novels are complex, obsessive, frequently poetic, and always disquieting chronicles of nature rebelling against humans, of the survival of barbarism in a world of mechanical efficiency, of ethropy, anomie, breakdown, ruin . . . The blasted landscapes that his characters inhabit are both external settings and states of mind."-Luc Sante -Fantastic!
I could not have said it better myself.
Rating:
Summary: Highly Overrated Twaddle
Review: So many people have recommended J.G. Ballard to me, that I finally broke down and read one of his books. Perhaps unfortunately, it was this one. I hated it. Above and beyond hating specific passages that read as if written by trained chimps with ADD, I hated the characters, or rather, lack thereof. There is not enough development of these characters for you to care about them as human beings. At the same time, they are given too much quasi-personality for them to work effectively as icons. If the intention was for the characters to represent a greater idea, the attempt failed. Far and away my biggest complaint, however, is that I feel cheated of a potentially great read. This book had everything going for it out of the starting gate; an interesting premise, a likely candidate for a good anti-hero, and the ticklish promise of a universally relevant allegory. It is really too bad this novel was pieced together so ineptly.
Rating:
Summary: What Dreams are Made Of
Review: This book was very dream like ,I kept expecting the main character to wake up from his accident with a concussion...like Dorothy on the Wizard of Oz. Actually it was more like a nightmare. Imagine being trapped on a motorway island for weeks and not having the strength to get off of it. Try THIS one on that "Survivor" show! The characters in the story were not very complex but the story moved along and there was enough going on to compensate for that. It showed exactly to what lengths one would go if faced with being marooned on a concrete island. It was just under 200 pages and a short read by anyones standards....a good book to take on a vacation. That is as long as you don't plan to spend time on any deserted islands! The ending to the book was a bit of a letdown, but it leaves things open for a sequel, but how interesting would these characters be in NORMAL situations? If you enjoy reading the likes of Chuck Palahniuk, and Alex Garland...then you'll probably like this one enough to give it 4 stars also.
Rating:
Summary: What Dreams are Made Of
Review: This book was very dream like ,I kept expecting the main character to wake up from his accident with a concussion...like Dorothy on the Wizard of Oz. Actually it was more like a nightmare. Imagine being trapped on a motorway island for weeks and not having the strength to get off of it. Try THIS one on that "Survivor" show! The characters in the story were not very complex but the story moved along and there was enough going on to compensate for that. It showed exactly to what lengths one would go if faced with being marooned on a concrete island. It was just under 200 pages and a short read by anyones standards....a good book to take on a vacation. That is as long as you don't plan to spend time on any deserted islands! The ending to the book was a bit of a letdown, but it leaves things open for a sequel, but how interesting would these characters be in NORMAL situations? If you enjoy reading the likes of Chuck Palahniuk, and Alex Garland...then you'll probably like this one enough to give it 4 stars also.
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