High-Rise by J.G. Ballard (1975) (read in 2016)
Published by marco on
Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I’m happy for you.
This is another of Ballard’s novels that seems to rage against our technological society. In ways, it critiques the same facets of modern, western life as Heller’s Something Happened, which also finds nothing to love about modern society or the humans that people large swaths of it. The book documents the potential effects of living in a self-contained vertical village.
The story follows the life of a doctor Laing who, rather than setting up private practice, teaches at a local medical school. In this we already see his satisfaction with middling success rather than a stretching for limits. He is recently divorced, but not unhappily.
He is one of the first tenants of a gigantic new high-rise building, with 50 floors. He quickly begins to enjoy life in the building, leaving only for work. Things go sideways relatively quickly, with almost all residents avoiding outside contact, preferring to stay in the building, associating only with “their kind”. Their kind being people who live in what they consider to be an acceptable striation of the building’s floors.
The residents all drink quite a lot, fool around quite a lot and grow increasingly violent and confrontational. Allegiances change, tribes form and split and re-form. They adopt their own signals and tags and signs and language. Elevators and power break down, water is sporadic, toilets block up, food is scarce. The upper floors fare better than the lower. It doesn’t occur to anyone to leave. Not just the building’s halls and lobbies and apartments, but also the parking lot is littered with garbage and half-destroyed cars.
The story culminates in the triumph of a group of women over architect and self-crowned “king” of the building, Anthony Royal, as well as Richard Wilder, a burly ex-rugby player who fancied himself a believable pretender to the throne. All the while, Laing looks on and is satisfied with a kingdom over a tribe of two women further down the building.
The descriptions of destruction and degradation of societal norms invite comparisons to Hard to Be a God, Blindness and Lord of the Flies.
Citations
“No one approached the crushed car, or the body embedded in its roof. Seeing the burst tuxedo and the small patent-leather shoes, Laing thought that he recognized the dead man as the jeweller from the 40th floor. His pebble spectacles lay on the ground by the front wheel of the car, their intact lenses reflecting the brilliant lights of the apartment building.”
Page 53
“The further down Royal reached, the greater the damage. Fire safety doors leaned off their hinges, quartz inspection windows punched out. Few corridor and staircase lights still worked, and no effort had been made to replace the broken bulbs. By eight o’clock little light reached the corridors, which became dim tunnels strewn with garbage sacks. The lurid outlines of lettered slogans, aerosolled in luminous paint across the walls, unravelled around him like the decor of a nightmare. Rival”
Page 107
“leaving behind the quiet encampment and the young woman beside her yellow lake.”
Page 192
“novels as The Drowned World and Cocaine Nights, but he is most well-known for Crash (1973) and his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984), both of which were made into movies and became box office hits.”
Page 208