High Rise by J.G.Ballard
This is a brutally good and introspective book about a community left to it’s own devices and the speed at which life can unravel.
The residents of the 40-storey high rise are all well off professionals with decent jobs ranging from Airline hostesses, to school teachers, to doctors and lawyers and all the way up to the top floor where the architect lives. Within the walls of the building are schools, supermarkets, swimming pools and everything else a community might need to function. Shortly after the building reaches capacity tensions start to rise and resentment among the different floors smoulders until it is ready to burst into flames..
The bottom ten floors are divided from the middle twenty by the supermarket and liquor store, the same way in which the middle twenty are divided from the top ten floors, thereby creating a clear barrier between the classes. Those at the top get the best parking spots, the fastest elevators and tend to have dogs, while those at the bottom have kids and work in more blue collar professions, but no one is poor or struggling and that’s what makes the rapid fall from grace so interesting. A different character represents each of these three classes, Mr Wilder, Dr Laing and Anthony Royal, the Architect
Dr Laing lives in the middle of the building and one day a bottle from a party near the top floor crashes down on his balcony, After cleaning it up, and musing over the lack of consideration from those above him, he rebelliously tosses what’s left of the bottle of his balcony knowing full well it will crash somewhere down below. Soon the 9th floor loses power and during the black out a dog is discovered drowned in the swimming pool. Soon someone takes the express route to the ground floor and things go apeshit.
Mr Wilder lives in the bottom ten floors and when the façade or society begins to crumble he finds his only desire is to climb higher and higher. Prepared to leave his wife and children, he see’s his only chance of salvation or happiness lies in reaching the top.
This is the delicious irony. The behaviour that people see as ordinary or normal from their own ‘class’ is found to be abhorrent when that same behaviour comes from someone above or below you. There is also a terrible shame that stops anyone from calling the cops, a belief that if everyone on the outside sees the High-Rise working, it must be working as it is supposed to. Residents’ start skipping work, feeling an instinctive pull that tells them that what is happening in the building is far more important and representative of real life than anything like a job. The outside world starts to fade away.
High Rise is a fantastic commentary on the way we judge people around us for the smallest of things, how mob mentality can form and evolve and, at the end of the day, what is to be a human being living in a community. It is bleak and disturbing and a touch wistful and might well have set the tone for the dystopian novels that populate the bookshelves today.
Highly recommended.
