To the island come latter-day crusaders, environmentalists hell-bent on protecting the breeding-ground of the endangered albatross; reclaiming Saint-Esprit from the French camera-towers, concrete sentinels built to oversee nuclear tests. Sixteen-year-old Neal is shot during an initial landing and suddenly world attention focuses on the tiny nature reserve. At their next attempt the veteran Dr Barbara Rafferty and her team successfully establish camp and are inundated with help and equipment from the international community.

But gradually Dr Barbara's commitment mutates, shunning assistance and visitors as eccentricity blossoms into full-fledged insanity. Suddenly the birds are a distraction from her real purpose - to establish a safe-haven for the planet's most threatened species. Women.

"Guaranteed to ruffle the feathers of environmentalists, animal-rights activists and feminists" proclaims a truly half-arsed publisher's blurb. This is Ballard's first totally-fictional novel since The Day of Creation back in 1987 and like so many others is a book not about specific motivation but dominant extremism. It's filtered through the teenager, whose own motivations are more obscure than a simple ecological ego-trip; there is a sexual fixation on the older woman, but also (with a Ballardian flourish) the hope of fulfilling youthful dreams of seeing the mushroom clouds he thinks caused his father's cancer.

Ballard identifies himself with the boy and his admiration for Rafferty, although tempered - curiously unlike Neal - when the third act descends into a dangerous violence and bigotry born of ideology. The book, therefore, is a kind of cross between Empire of the Sun and William Golding's Lord of the Flies. There squalor and ambiguous allegiances unleashed forces beyond anyone's control, while here the disciples give free-rein to an inexorable logic that can only lead back to Rafferty herself.

This is all realised in typically spare, airless Ballard prose (Dr Barbara's hair "flying from her forehead like a battle pennant"; mosquito nets drift like discarded shrouds) with all the attendant imagery that implies - the potency of a nuclear explosion, the desertion of the camera-towers and ruined runway, a drowned aircraft beneath the lagoon; at 63, Ballard has lost none of his magnificent vision, the strange and unique otherness of his fiction. Rushing To Paradise is literally set on the island to which most of his fictions allude.