![]() ![]() But in trying to flag down a ride, Maitland sustains an injury, which prevents further attempts at the steep embankment. ![]() ![]() The novel begins with a car crash that maroons an architect, Robert Maitland, on a parcel of disused land, enclosed by several motorways. Though less self-consciously lurid than its bookends, and nowhere near as violent, the middle entry in Ballard’s trilogy is perfectly cinematic: it places an accessible protagonist, due for his comeuppance, in peril - then introduces a series of complications. ![]() It’s baffling, then, that Concrete Island has never made it to screen. (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. (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. 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. 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). 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. ![]()
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