For the next hour Royal continued his search for his wife, descending deeper into the central mass of the high-rise. As he moved from one floor to the next, from one elevator to another, he realized the full extent of its deterioration. The residents’ rebellion against the apartment building was now in full swing. Garbage lay heaped around the jammed disposal chutes. The stairways were littered with broken glass, splintered kitchen chairs and sections of handrail. Even more significant, the pay-phones in the elevator lobbies had been ripped out, as if the tenants, like Anne and himself, had agreed to shut off any contact with the world outside.
(Chapter 9, Into the Drop Zone)
This is a brilliant, visionary, compelling and terrifying vision of urban decay, psychological catastrophe mixed with the voyeuristic thrill of watching the reversion of the poshest and snootiest in society to feral barbarism.
High Rise is the third of Ballard’s so-called ‘urban trilogy’, following on from Crash and Concrete Island in being set resolutely in the present day, with realistic characters in realistic settings. Where the Ballard factor comes in is the way that these straight, upper-middle-class white men and women go completely mad.
Plot summary
Dr Robert Laing (if I had a pound for every Ballard protagonist who’s a doctor) is one of the last guests to move into an enormous 40-storey, 1,000-apartment, luxury tower block, complete with not one but two swimming pools (on the 10th and 35th floors), cinema, shopping centres, primary school and so on. The occupants are all well-off professional people, lawyers and doctors and TV producers and publishers and actors and so on, the impeccably bien-pensant, liberal chattering classes.
The book describes in compelling detail how little tiffs and squabbles almost immediately emerge among the 2,000 inhabitants, leading to pushes and shoves, and then acts of violence and revenge and, before anybody understands why, the entire huge complex has descended into violence and barbarism.
It starts with half-playful gestures like the dropping of empty wine bottles from the top floors onto the balconies below. Then, in rapid succession, violence breaks out in the halls and stairways, unruly children are threatened, someone’s Afghan dog is drowned in a swimming pool.
Occupants of the lower floors throw bottles and ice cream off their balconies to damage and deface the cars of the rich occupants which get to park their posh motor closest to the building. For reasons no-one can identify the electricity for entire floors starts simply switching off. The air conditioning becomes sporadic and then, as a result of sabotage by someone, starts spewing out cement dust into everyone’s apartments, forcing a general retreat onto the balconies. The hallways and lobbies of the building become slowly covered with graffiti, indecipherable codes and signs legible only to their authors but full of menace to outsiders. Unknown persons vandalise the schoolrooms, resentful of yapping children. Their parents decide it’s better to keep them in their apartments for the foreseeable future…
A turning point comes when a rich jeweller falls or is thrown to his death from his penthouse – not because of the death as such but because, as TV documentary-maker Richard Wilder discovers to his amazement on returning to the block after a three-day absence, no-one has reported it to the police. The occupants of the building know something is going terribly wrong but… feel compelled to keep it to themselves, to keep up appearances, to wait and see what happens…
We follow all this through the lives of three key occupants of the building:
- Dr Laing, on the rebound from a divorce, with his eye on one or two of the divorced eligible women in the building, who is among the first to realise what is going on, to study the slow spread of the malaise, observing it in himself
- the architect Anthony Royal who designed the building and lives on its top floor, recovering from a serious car accident, but always dresses in a white suit and is accompanied everywhere by his loyal Alsatian dog
- Richard Wilder, a TV producer from the bottom floor who, as the mayhem increases, settles on the increasingly irrational ambition of fighting his way to the top of the building
Laing and Wilder are only some of the many inhabitants who find it increasingly difficult to leave the building and report to their day jobs, which they find increasingly unreal. Only as they return to the block, through the growing piles of garbage bags and broken bottles, do they feel they’re returning to what matters in their lives, to what is important.
So it’s not the events as such, what makes the book so compelling and convincing is the way Ballard gets right under the skin, right inside the slowly dementing minds of these well-educated types as they jostle each other in the crowded lifts, or tell each other’s bloody kids to shut up, or carelessly toss wine bottles off their balconies, or harass anyone from the lower floors who has the temerity to go to the upper floors.
Hence the paradox that they continue with their lives in the world outside as if nothing is amiss, clinging all the while to the hope of making sense of the technological landscape they have helped to create, even as it crumbles around them
Sustained achievement
I think the most impressive thing about the book is the way he manages to sustain what is a one-line idea (‘occupants of a luxury high rise descend into barbarism’) over 200 pages. He does this by:
- very carefully creating incidents which are marker points, stepping stones along the timeline of decline
- and spreading these out between his three main protagonists, giving each of them different but overlapping characters and psychopathologies, so that their individual experiences shed light on the communal plight
A new type
Ballard is not backward in commentating on his own fiction, and here he is quick to editorialise, speculating that in these vast new impersonal high rises a new kind of human being is being forged:
A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but sit in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and wait for his neighbours to make a mistake… (Chapter 3, Death of a Resident)
And:
These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed.
Anomie – “in societies or individuals, a condition of instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals.”
The regular Ballard reader is tempted to point out that, far from being a new kind of person, these sound very much like the same kind of person that Ballard had been describing for twenty years, since his first story was published in 1956, alienated urban inhabitants who have lost all feeling and empathy for their neighbours and fellow citizens.
And also, just about everyone who writes about High Rise feels compelled to invoke the example of Lord of the Flies, published back in 1954. The basic idea of posh people going to pieces – or the way that just under the veneer of civilisation lurks the savage – is hardly a new one, it’s a central theme of 20th century fiction.
But in this novel Ballard treats it exceptionally well, with terrifyingly plausible insight, and in a previously neglected setting.
Freud
In my comments on Ballard’s Preface to the French edition of Crash I pointed out Ballard’s touchingly literal and naive interpretation of Freud. Freud is a fascinating teller of stories but a poor guide to actual life and real people. Relying too much on glib psychoanalysis can lead Ballard to give rather shallow backstories and psychologies to his characters.
This is most obvious in the characterisation of the burly TV producer Richard Wilder who, we are told in several pages of digression, was molly-coddled by his mother far beyond the end of childhood, and so acquired his invincible sense of self-confidence. It is then explained how his confidence ran into trouble when he married a smart and sassy TV Production Assistant who wouldn’t slot into the role created by his mother i.e. adoring devotee, and how their marriage foundered. Later there’s some cheapjack psychology explaining why Wilder is ascending the building so steadily and determinedly; it is to have a final confrontation with Anthony Royal who has become a father figure to him.
This feels like psychology-by-numbers. Maybe it’s necessary to use these shallow psychologisations for Ballard to organise and think through his characters and plots, but they’re the bits I tend to skip, in order to enjoy more the uncanny, eerie and weird way he can get inside the minds of his increasingly deranged characters and make their descent into mania seem believable and right.
‘It’s a mistake to imagine that we’re all moving towards a state of happy primitivism. The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our un-innocent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet-training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection — obviously a more dangerous mix than anything our Victorian forebears had to cope with. Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse…’ (Chapter 11, Punitive Expeditions)
Three stages of barbarism
1. Constant parties
The inhabitants have been consumed for months with loud socialising, but with the arrival of the last occupant a new level of hysteria kicks in, drunken shouting, chucking around of bottles and then screams down stairwells which may be from drunken pranks or something darker.
2. Three tribes
In the middle phase, as more people start to get beaten up, as a gay man is urinated on by a gang, after Wilder is set upon by a group of men with baseball bats, as the women increasingly cower in their apartments terrified – slowly there emerge three groups divided by floors i.e. a lower, middle, and upper floor tribe, each represented – the reader comes to realise – by the characters Wilder, Laing and Royal. This evolves into a clan system in which warlords or clan chiefs lord it over their serfs, pushing people about, organising harems of women. Our threesome aren’t necessarily the leaders – the leader of the mid-floors is TV newsreader Paul Crosland who – bizarrely – still goes off to work each day, reads the evening news – then returns to the high rise-cum warzone to lead his men in raiding parties on the lower floors.
3. Nomadic cannibalism
In time even this much system collapses, giving way to smaller groups based around near neighbours. That’s to say of the survivors or those brave enough to come out of their barricaded apartments. In this final phase society breaks down utterly into solitary individuals achieving mental states of total dissociation and who, like animals, are focused entirely on security, food and sex.
Random details
Laing’s apartment is on the 25th floor. He bought it on the rebound from his divorce.
Like many Ballard stories High Rise starts at the end, with Laing squatting on the balcony of his studio apartment over a fire made from telephone directories roasting the body of a dead dog – in other words, an image of a man reduced to primitive savagery – and from t his beginning then cuts back three months to when he first moved in to the city in the sky, in order to tell the story of that three month descent into the inferno.
The high rise is the first of five planned to be built on derelict dockland. It was designed by architect supremo Anthony Royal. The shells of the other four can be seen slowly being built, the nearest four hundred yards away across the concrete car park.
It’s striking how things go wrong right from the start of the text, right from the word go there are tensions and jostlings, leading quickly to the discovery of a drowned pet dog in one of the swimming pools – because the presence of the dogs, mostly owned by upper floor inhabitants, vexes lower floor inhabitants. A class division was implicit right from the start between uppers, who are regarded as snooty and fair game, and downers – including three recurrent air hostesses – who have loud parties. In other words, we are thrown into the helter-skelter descent almost immediately. It’s one of the factors that makes it so compelling.
In chapter 5 the TV producer Wilder envisions a 60-second camera zoom starting with the entire building in shot and then slowly zooming in till the camera is focusing on just one apartment. This was to be the subject of The Sixty Minute Zoom.
Thoughts
The setting Pre-fabricated concrete high rises weren’t new. Councils had been putting them up to replace demolished slum terracing for at least twenty years (the first tower block in Britain was opened in Harlow, Essex, in 1951) and Ballard mentions some of this along with the way that, as they decayed, tower blocks had become victims of urban blight i.e. vandalism, people pissing in the lifts.
The mutiny of these well-to-do professional people against the building they had collectively purchased was no different from the dozens of well-documented revolts by working-class tenants against municipal tower-blocks that had taken place at frequent intervals during the post-war years… (Chapter 7, Preparations for Departure)
But the idea of luxury apartments, containing all mod cons and inhabited solely by the professional and chattering classes was more of a new thing, as was situating the story in Docklands which was only just beginning its transformation from heart of working class terraces to the playground of international bankers it was to become in the 1980s.
The prose strategy For me High Rise marks Ballard’s turn away from experimental to more traditional bourgeois writing.
1. Backstories One sign of this is the way the narrative drifts away from action to give digressions about each of the characters. Thus:
- When early on Laing is having lunch with a divorcée he fancies, Charlotte Melman, the narrative drifts away, first to give us background about Charlotte and her marriage and divorce, and then to a reminiscence about Laing’s own ill-fated marriage, before the text finally returns to where we are, at lunch in Charlotte’s apartment.
- As mentioned above, before Richard Wilder makes his first attempt to battle through the growing picket lines to the top of the building on a weird, personal, quixotic quest, we are treated to a lengthy explanation of how his strong-willed mother molly-coddled him to produce this burly, self-confident man.
- And, as things become increasingly fraught and Anthony Royal prepares to leave the tower block with his wife, Anne, we are subjected to a lengthy disquisition about her childhood, pampered daughter of a provincial industrialist who raised his family in ‘finicky copy of a Loire chateau’ along with servants and maids (!)
The point is – I don’t care. This fill-in-the-background stuff is the strategy of conventional bourgeois literature which is mostly concerned with people’s lives and family relationships and feelings and so on. In earlier Ballard fiction we didn’t get people’s boring backstories, we got their weird psychic experiences described in the here and now. So it feels like a shift in technique for Ballard to give this much backstory.
2. Posh They’re all so posh! Raised in a copy of a Loire chateau? Then we learn that Royal was himself a champion tennis player. We are entering the world of later Ian McEwan where everyone is a fabulously successful surgeon and a senior civil servant with a brilliant career and a top lawyer with an international reputation blah blah blah.
3. Class Thus the story takes place entirely among the London chattering classes: the narrator makes a point of emphasising how the high rise is inhabited solely by professional classes, lawyers, tax consultants, doctors, TV producers and so on. Somehow in his earlier novels and stories the characters had a kind of 1960s classlessness. It seems to me, reading his stories in sequence, that social class becomes an issue in his stories from about this point onwards.
I know they’re as unlike as chalk and cheese, but this new focus on class and class demarcation reminded me of the cartoon strips of Posy Simmonds, which I summarised in great detail a few months ago. One of the interesting things about her comic strip from the 1970s was the way that a nouveau riche class of self-satisfied professionals keen on fine wine and holidays in France and private school for the kids and buying a nice holiday home in the West Country, had appeared in English society before the election of Mrs Thatcher i.e. much earlier than I’d realised.
Mrs T was just encouraging a trend which was already well underway. High Rise is a satire on this new kind of with-it, smug, managerial middle class which didn’t seem to exist in the 1960s. Before this period Ballard’s writing had been about lots of things, weird and wonderful: from about this point onwards, it seems to me, Ballard’s writing becomes more about that great English obsession, class, in both style and content, and becomes less and less sympathetic or interesting.
4. Drunk And the way all these rich privileged people – TV producers and presenters, film critics and theatre designers – are drunk all the time doesn’t feel radical, it just feels corrupt and, worst of all, boring. They are drunk all the time like Kingsley Amis characters are drunk all the time.
Wildly deranged
At least those were my impressions from the first half or so of the book, but they are soon swamped in the violence and savagery which explodes and goes on to give a vivid and relentless portrait of complete psychological and social collapse. As things fall apart the book fills up with unforgettable images.
Behind the barricade a second figure appeared. A young woman of about thirty, probably the daughter, peered over the old woman’s shoulder. Her suede jacket was unbuttoned to reveal a pair of grimy breasts, but her hair was elaborately wound into a mass of rollers, as if she were preparing parts of her body for some formal gala to which the rest of herself had not been invited. (Chapter 17, The Lakeside Pavilion)
He waited as Steele calmly smothered the cat, destroying it under the curtain as if carrying out a complex resuscitation under a hospital blanket. (Chapter 11, Punitive Expeditions)
The gynaecologist was in high excitement, waving the last stragglers up the staircase like a demented courier. From his mouth came a series of peculiar whoops and cries, barely articulated grunts that sounded like some Neanderthal mating call but, in fact, were Pangbourne’s rendering of the recorded birth-cries analysed by his computer. These eerie and unsettling noises Royal had been forced to listen to for weeks as members of his entourage took up the refrain. A few days earlier he had finally banned the making of these noises altogether — sitting in the penthouse and trying to think about the birds, it unnerved him to hear the women in the kitchen next door emitting these clicks and grunts. However, Pangbourne held regular sessions in his own quarters at the opposite end of the roof, where he would play through his library of recorded birth-cries for the benefit of the women crouching in a hushed circle on the floor around him. Together they mimicked these weird noises, an oral emblem of Pangbourne’s growing authority. (Chapter 15, The Evening’s Entertainment)
Cannibalism
Wilder’s long drawn-out quest to reach the top of the building sounds ridiculous but becomes utterly compelling, as his mental state deteriorates, as he takes shelter in various boarded up apartments along the way, dodges attack by armed gangs, all the time carrying the cine-camera with which he initially intended to make a jolly BBC documentary about the high rise and has, by the end, become a meaningless talisman of a forgotten world, strapped to his almost naked body which he has, by this stage, covered in painted bars and stripes denoting his warrior status.
In the climax, Wilder stumbles out onto the roof of the high rise, originally the preserve of the upper classes who held elite cocktail parties here. Then, as the chaos kicked in, it became the private fiefdom of Anthony Royal who tethers all the dogs of the block to the railings around the children’s playground he built there, long since abandoned by any children. And then it becomes the roost of hundreds and hundreds of gulls, savage pecking animals which allow Royal to walk among them but occasionally rise in great flocks and fly down into the building to attack the unwary venturing among the long wide mezzanines.
And now, as a bewildered and considerably psychologically damaged Wilder finally emerges onto the sunlit rooftop, after the long arduous trek which we have followed every step of the way, it is to discover the ground of the children’s playground and the railings around it wet, wet with… he pulls his hand away… blood. He sees little naked children running in and out of the playground, their bodies covered with blood red markings and up ahead a couple of women wearing long medieval gowns building a fire. As he walks towards them he becomes aware of other women dressed identically appearing on all sides of him and slowly converging, and forming a circle. And then they pull out the razor sharp knives from their gowns.
We realise that they are some kind of coven, that they are all of one mindset, that they are bringing up the children communally, and that they are cannibals. What makes it a moment of peculiarly entrancing horror is Wilder’s reaction. He is so far gone, so exhausted, and has travelled so far back into some kind of psychotic pre-zone that he isn’t at all frightened.
In front of him the children in the sculpture-garden were playing with bones. The circle of women drew closer. The first flames lifted from the fire, the varnish of the antique chairs crackling swiftly. From behind their sunglasses the women were looking intently at Wilder, as if reminded that their hard work had given them a strong appetite. Together, each removed something from the deep pocket of her apron. In their bloodied hands they carried knives with narrow blades.
Shy but happy now, Wilder tottered across the roof to meet his new mothers. (Chapter 18, The Blood Garden)
‘To meet his new mothers’. Wow. This sends a genuine frisson of horror down the reader’s spine. It’s the same genuinely demented mood in which we return to that opening scene, of Laing sitting on the balcony of his 25th floor apartment, completing the roasting of the dog over a home-made fire of telephone directories. The dog is Anthony Royal’s. As he had arrived at the penthouse, Wilder had been confronted by his father figure Anthony Royal who threw his silver topped cane at him in fear, prompting Wilder to shoot him in the chest, before stepping over his dying body and out the penthouse door to meet his fate among the sharp-knived mothers.
It was by chance that Laing had met Royal on the 25th floor where he was scavenging for firewood. The architect had staggered all the way down from the 40th floor and Laing goes to help him. There is a terrible stench and Royal points to the former swimming pool which, we now see, is piled high with skulls and bones, a Khmer Rouge swimming pool.
Laing naively thinks they must be the bodies of the older occupants who passed away of natural causes and have been savaged by dogs. But we have just been up on the roof with the mothers. We know these the swimming pool is full of the bones of eaten people. He tries to help him towards the next set of stairs but Royal insists on going and sitting in a cubicle by the pool, and there Laing leaves him, relieving him of his dog which he proceeds t kill and is now roasting over the open fire. He presents the food to the two malnourished women who are now living with him, who bicker and kvetch at him all day long, but whose company Laing now enjoys.
And here’s the Ballard touch: as he sits there, half naked and emaciated, a born again savage living in a kingdom of cannibalism – Laing reflects how now, at last, ‘everything was returning to normal.’ Maybe he’ll go back to the medical school and take up his teaching post again. Only we know how demented that idea is, but it’s testament to Ballard’s brilliant insight to realise that that’s how the mad think, pondering banal and ordinary questions while they try to fly or murder someone.
In the book’s brilliant final paragraph, he looks over at the next of the four remaining high rises to have been completed and to have slowly filled up with occupants while his one went berserk.
Dusk had settled, and the embers of the fire glowed in the darkness. The silhouette of the large dog on the spit resembled the flying figure of a mutilated man, soaring with immense energy across the night sky, embers glowing with the fire of jewels in his skin. Laing looked out at the high-rise four hundred yards away. A temporary power failure had occurred, and on the 7th floor all the lights were out. Already torch-beams were moving about in the darkness, as the residents made their first confused attempts to discover where they were. Laing watched them contentedly, ready to welcome them to their new world. (Chapter 19, Night Games)
Is this science fiction? Or the bleakest of black satire? Or plain horror?
Credit
‘High Rise’ by J.G. Ballard was published by Jonathan Cape in 1975. Page references are to the 2014 Fourth Estate paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.
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