Concrete Island

His writing is clean and powerful. It shines a light on ‘the human condition’ but some of it does seem really dated.

The breathless association of landscape and psychology looks a bit like a lava lamp. It’s quite interesting, but we’ve seen it already and it has been replaced by newer more interesting things.

Yet, he himself had almost deliberately created this situation, as if preparing the ground for his crash…

Most of the happier moments of his life had been spent alone

The grimy and crippled figure whose distorted reflection glimmered in the trunk lid exactly summed up his position on the island, marooned among these concrete causeways with almost no practical skills or resources. Few psychological ones, for that matter, Maitland reflected. These days one needed a full- scale emergency kit built into one’s brain, plus a crash course in disaster survival, real and imagined.

She stared at Maitland like a down-at-heel witch who by some confused alchemy had conjured an over-large victim into her lair and was unsure how best to exploit the possibilities of the cadaver.