PRESENTATION NOTES ABOUT J.G.

BALLARDS HIGH RISE 1975

Underappreciated Masterpieces: J. G. Ballard’s 'High Rise'

I was sold on High Rise (1975) after the first ten words: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog…”

I didn’t care what the second half of that sentence would turn out to be; I was already there, sitting on the
balcony. It’s not that I don’t like dogs, really, but more that here was a book that clearly had no qualms
about its world, had the confidence to disarm probably half of its possible readers with the bleak and
unnerving image of a human casually eating a dog on a balcony. If this is where Ballard began, I knew there
would be hell to pay in what came after.

High Rise, as the title portends, concerns the lives of people living in a 40-floor high-rise apartment building
and sharing common areas such as a gym, grocery store, liquor store, pool, etc. The book follows several
different protagonists through the landscape of the building during a time in which something is wrong and
getting worse by the minute, though no one seems to know precisely what. When the book begins, the sound
of cocktail parties and jubilation fills the building’s halls; men and women conduct their lives under the
throes of daily work and casual sex; people come and go from the apartment into the larger world for work
and return at night alongside their neighbors. Ballard is very good at establishing an ambience of life among
people with an almost Victorian sense of exposition—each character has their daily manners and
conversations, amid which small interruptions begin to bleed in.

First, an unknown man gets into an altercation at the pool with a group of children. It is a strange and
restrained scene that lets the reader know there is something wrong with some of the people here. The next
night the electricity goes out on several floors for no apparent reason. In Ballard’s world, that bit of darkness
is all humanity needs to be pushed over the edge. Increasingly thereafter fights break out on various floors
throughout the apartments. Things are thrown from balconies onto the world below. Some elevators fail and
others are taken over, blocking access for the families on lower floors to the more expensive and exclusive
ones above. Tribes begin banding together to protect their territory, food, and valuables. By page 40,
violence and rape abound within the building, establishing in its confined territories a kind of survival-of-
the-fittest world of living hell.

Most gripping about Ballard’s portrayal of his isolated arenas is how even-handedly his characters report the
mania that surrounds them. No matter how high the boiling waters rise, the narrators remain logical, within
their means, progressing from one psychopathic act to the next, as if this dystopia were a fact of life, as if
there were no other choice but to continue. As the terrain gets darker, the stakes of life change, as do the
manners of survival and social norms.

It’s rare to witness such a balanced report within an environment where almost anything can happen, and
Ballard makes it seem natural, matter of fact. A swimming pool of skeletons feels comfortable alongside
men screening videos of their brutality in a theater covered in blood. The prose is bright and steady, like an
IV drip through which the reader continues feeding right alongside each character, delving deeper and
deeper into a world as it is ripped.

So, besides the violence, how does Ballard manage to make this book so unnerving? I've read a lot of novels
full of brutal descriptions of grotesque arenas, but there was something else to High Rise beyond its circus of
slow degradation. The book’s most central power seems to come not from how its world unravels but how
clearly and steadily the narration holds the reader as he descends. From the start, the conceptual framework
of the book (citizens within a communal living space gradually become unhinged unto total chaos) provides
the reader with a feeling of a laboratory experiment, less a narrative where we are supposed to change or
care, and more like a documentary through which we are made witness to a condition of the world amidst us
all. This isn’t a parable or even a nightmare; it’s a possible future. The narrators could be our children, their
children, or ourselves.

Equally unnerving is Ballard’s use of media to provide a kind of normalizing effect within the book’s world.
In a state of total chaos, people wander the trashed floors and hallways recording videos of people being
attacked, of women being made slaves by men hungry for power, of pets running rampant in the corridors.
One character records himself hiccuping and barfing as a woman moans for the sole purpose of playing it
back and filling the air with sound. Even though they have descended into complete perversion, the
building’s residents are desperate to continue documenting themselves. In the era of the selfie and Facebook
and Twitter, this dementia feels all too real.

Meanwhile, the world beyond the high rise goes on as if the terror inside did not exist. The narrators make
little effort to reach out for help, as if they love the new power structure. On the flip side, when cops show
up outside the building, they just park and do not enter. The contained hell is symbiotic with the peace that
walls it in. Perhaps the most compelling thing is how, in the face of all the awful shit that happens, the
narrators continue, searching abandoned rooms for liquor, television, sex. Even on the roof, where countless
birds wait for the bodies to become food, there is not a yearning for a return to normalcy or even survival as
much as to uncover what lies at the end of this one hall, what that person locked in his or her room alone
might be doing, how his or her shriveling body might soon feel. The inaction of humans is as unnerving as
any action.

In This Story

This story is excerpted and adapted from Phyllis Richardson’s House of Fiction: From Pemberley to
Brideshead, Great British Houses in Literature and Life, published in May 2021 by Unbound.
Housing in postwar Britain was anything but romantic. The necessity of building, and quickly, sheltering to
replace the 100,000 houses destroyed by the Blitz in London alone, meant there was little room for romance.
Coming to England as a teenager in 1946, after having been raised in the Shanghai International Settlement
and spending two years in a Japanese internment camp, novelist J.G. Ballard described it as “a shabby
place.” It was, he said, “locked into the past and exhausted by the war.”

In that aftermath, some architectural and planning theorists saw a clean slate on which to begin anew with
modern ideas and advances in technology and ways to create new towns and solutions to urban and
suburban housing. “Utopian modernists,” such as Le Corbusier, believed that advances in technology and
engineering could produce forward-looking architecture that would promote essentially socialist ideals of
offering beneficial housing to all. This attitude, combined with the need for high-density housing, resulted in
the construction of what is now called tower blocks in Britain: apartment buildings of multiple stories that
might also include other amenities, such as common space at different levels, with shared walkways and
stairs dubbed “streets in the sky.” Packing many more people into a smaller footprint and offering all the
modern conveniences, these models had great appeal for housing chiefs and a tremendous impact on postwar
buildings. The first tower block was built in London in 1954, and by the end of the 1950s, half a million new
flats had been built, many of which were in new “mixed” developments that included multistory blocks.
In 1975, Ballard published a novel that focused on these London developments, marrying consumerist ideals
of luxury housing with the social problems caused by crowded urban environments. High-Rise begins with
2,000 hopeful residents entering a 40-story apartment tower with smooth, modern design and high-end
conveniences, feeling that they have bought into a life of domestic ease. However, the novel ends with the
dwellings, halls, shops, and corridors being devastated by a brutalism that has less to do with architectural
design than with the human malevolence it has somehow inspired.

Ballard makes clear his antipathy for the development. The apartments are described as “cells” in the cliff
face. Rather than being a beneficent “machine for living in” (in Le Corbusier’s words), the building is “a
huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation.”
Its array of services—air-conditioning, garbage chutes, electrically operated features—were all things that “a
century earlier” would have required “an army of tireless servants” to provide. It is a pointed irony, then,
that the architect who dresses largely in white and lives in the penthouse at the top of the building, like some
“fallen angel,” is married to a woman who grew up in a country house and is at first uncomfortable in the
building’s automated and secluded lifestyle.

The flats in Ballard’s dystopia are occupied not by social housing tenants, as in the tower blocks that were
dotted around London and other U.K. cities by this time, but by “professionals,” who are nonetheless
grouped by wealth. The lower nine floors are “home to the ‘proletariat’ of film technicians, air-hostesses and
the like.” In contrast, the middle section, up to the 35th floor, is made up of “docile members of the
professions—doctors, and lawyers, accountants and tax specialists.” The top five floors contain “the discreet
oligarchy of minor tycoons and entrepreneurs, television actresses and careerist academics.” This last group
has access to the high-speed lifts, carpeted stairs and “superior services.” It is not difficult to foretell how
grievances might erupt in a building that is seen by its residents as both “a hanging paradise” and a
“glorified tenement.”

Robert Laing, a physiology lecturer, is one of the main protagonists of the story and has his first hostile
encounter involving a dispute over the shared rubbish chute. As he negotiates the social strata of the
building, he soon realizes that “people in high-rises tended not to care about tenants more than two floors
below them.” Glitches in the building’s electricity supply and malfunctions in some of the lifts servicing the
lower floors ignite an internal class war. Unpleasant confrontations in public spaces rapidly escalate into
physical violence. Like most of the residents, Laing becomes drawn in, rather than repelled, by the growing
depravity as tenants raid each other’s apartments and are reduced to the “three obsessions” of security, food,
and sex. Ballard describes clashes taken to surreal extremes, arguing that the building itself demanded this
behaviour, being “an architecture designed for war, on the unconscious level if no other.” The relentless
narrative catalogues scene after scene of primal beings battling through apartments that have been torn apart
and barricaded, where mounds of rubbish line every space, and where domestic animals are killed for food.

Ballard, who was no admirer of England’s “green and pleasant land” and was quick to embrace the cool
promise of modernity after the war, nevertheless found worrying portents in the high-rise tower blocks going
up in cities in the United Kingdom and United States. In London, the buildings that had promised so much
were proving to be problematic, attracting crime and vandalism and sometimes failing to function. The idea
of “streets in the sky” with amenities at different levels, moving living space into the vertical, had
demonstrated worrying cracks and earned swathes of vocal detractors. Ballard never cited these projects
directly, but he claimed to have carried out his own research into criminal behavior and concluded that a
“degree of criminality is affected by liberty of movement; it’s higher in cul-de-sacs. And high-rises are cul-
de-sacs: 2,000 people jammed together in the air.”

Although Ballard never made direct comparisons between the novel and the Brutalist towers that were going
up during the time he was writing, those buildings certainly can be seen as structures that are better off with
“man’s absence.” As pristine edifices, they can appear pleasingly sculptural but are less so when their
balconies are dotted with the detritus of everyday life, and further degraded by poor maintenance, graffiti,
and general neglect. Ballard’s environments of uniform luxury become dehumanizing, but rather than
engendering mindless conformity, as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, they result in “the regression of
middle-class professionals into a state of barbarism.”

The novel is often associated with Trellick Tower, a Brutalist 31-story block in Kensington designed by
architect Ernő Goldfinger, which by the time Ballard was writing High-Rise had had a series of problems
and a lot of bad press. Even before its opening, there were crises, both in its construction and in other
projects. In 1968, a fire in the Ronan Point tower block in London caused most of the 23 floors to collapse
and the deaths of three people. The disaster fueled popular agitation against tower blocks so that by the time
Trellick Tower was completed in 1972, it seemed doomed to fail. The “drying rooms” that Goldfinger had
designed in the ground-floor amenities block were vandalized before they were finished. These rooms were
his attempt to convince the tenants not to air their laundry on the balconies (and so ruin the appearance of
the tower), but they never functioned properly. Just before Christmas 1972, a fire hydrant on the 12th floor
was tampered with, causing flooding through the elevator shafts, which meant that the block had no water,
heat, or electricity during the holidays. The tower became so firmly linked with crime and social decay that
some council-housing tenants lobbied not to be housed there. (It should be noted that at least some of
Goldfinger’s assumptions were correct: In the 21st century, improvements in maintenance and security have
made the Trellick Tower a desirable address.)

Rather than making his fictional model a replication of social-housing schemes, or naming any of the
council-run tower blocks as inspiration, Ballard set his story in a deliberately upscale version, citing its
genesis in his experiences of luxury high-rise living in London and abroad. He described a complex of office
and residential blocks in his parents’ neighborhood near Victoria, which were, he said, mostly inhabited by
“rich business people” with “Rolls-Royces and immodestly appointed flats, huge rents.” Yet the residents,
he said, “spent all their time bickering with one another” over issues of “the most incredible triviality,” such
as who needed to pay for a potted plant display on the 17th-floor landing and whose curtains didn’t match.
He found similarly petty grievances rising among tenants in an upscale apartment block where he stayed on
the Costa Brava in Spain. Again, these were mostly occupied by educated professionals, but Ballard reported
“an enormous amount of antagonism between the people on the lower floors and the people in the top.”
Interestingly, Ballard placed the shops and amenities for his high-rise on an intermediate floor (the 10th), as
Le Corbusier had done in his ground-breaking utopian model, the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, which
becomes another cause of tension among the residents in the novel. Goldfinger felt that locating services up
inside the building would be detrimental to residents on lower floors, and so at Trellick Tower, he chose to
place these amenities—nursery, doctor’s surgery, laundry—at ground level.

Another immediate provocation for the high-rise setting of the book probably came from the development of
the London Docklands at about the time that Ballard was writing. Developers were attempting a
regeneration of land among the old warehouses and abandoned shipping yards of a long-desolate waterfront
district by introducing a scheme of high-rise towers for office and residential use. The first tower in this
development was finished in the 1980s, but plans had already been underway for ambitious building projects
in the disused ports since the early 1970s. Ballard specifically cites his fictional tower in a square mile “of
abandoned dockland and ware-housing” in London, so the Docklands development provides some ambient
background. But Ballard seems particularly keen to demonstrate that the luxury high-rise is as prone to
criminality as its less fortunate relations in subsidized estates. The professional classes in the world of
Ballard’s imagining become more deviant, relishing their descent into inhumanity as more buildings are
finished and occupied around them. The five towers in the fictional development overlook an ornamental
lake, which remains an empty concrete basin (a sign of promise unfulfilled), while the tenants of the first
tower fall into savagery reminiscent of the adolescent boys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, an
equally disturbing fable of human depravity.

Ballard’s more extreme scenarios may be in the realm of science fiction or fantasy, but his underlying
assertion that the vertical container for a living could have a serious social and psychological impact is not
so easily dismissed. His decision to focus on a luxury high-rise inhabited by the educated and the wealthy,
rather than on the typical tower blocks built for social housing, was perhaps to make the point clearly that it
was the design of the building, not the class of the residents, that brought about such a hellish downward
spiral of human behavior. It is a telling irony that in Ballard’s technologically advanced high-rise, warfare is
ignited largely by an everyday facility failure: the breakdown of the lifts.

As an adult and father of three children, Ballard himself lived most of his life in England, in “a little
suburban house” in Shepperton. He remarked that journalists who turned up to interview him were often
surprised, as they were “expecting a miasma of drug addiction and perversion of every conceivable kind.”
Instead, he found this “easy-going man playing with his golden retriever and bringing up a family of happy
young children.” The madness, it seems, was securely locked up in the high-rise.

Reconstructing High-Rise

By Rick McGrath

A night patrol creeps along a dark hallway past a barricade of desks; a flash of white birds leap into the air like a fluttering flag of
surrender; a dog lies drowned in the middle of a community pool... welcome to High-Rise, JG Ballard's deeply subversive study of
a society in transformation.

J.G. Ballard has often told interviewers that his characters all seek a kind of highly personal psychic salvation, and that they will, if
necessary, create their own self-defining mythologies and pursue them to their furthest logical ends, no matter how illogical it
seems, or what the cost.
The seeming irrationality of it all is, of course, just part of Ballard's modus operahndi. As he told Greame Revell in 1983, "I would
say that a lot of my fiction is, if you like, open-ended. I leave for the reader to decide what the moral and psychological conclusions
to be drawn from my fiction should be. For example, in the case of Crash, High-Rise and The Atrocity Exhibition, I offer an extreme
hypothesis for the reader to decide whether the hypothesis I advance (this extreme metaphor to deal with an extreme situation) is
proven."

In High-Rise, Ballard has created an isolated environment for the close study of how an ultra-modern apartment block can
transform its denizens into a new, aggressive society based on the premise that living in a motherly machine will allow your
neurons to re-wire into whatever psycho state you've been unconsciously repressing in the "real" world -- that place Ballard
believes is the ultimate fiction.

We have a story of transformation here, ladies and gentlemen, and aficionados of the bizarre and disaffected -- those looking for
obsessive, outlandish social mayhem -- will not be disappointed: High-Rise has 40 storeys of shock corridor ahead.

The premise is fascinating: just after the last property in a 1,000-suite tower is occupied, the first little signs of social change begin
to become public. A party is in progress. A wine bottle crashes and smashes all over a resident's balcony. Soon crazed, drunken,
mob-mentality parties are breaking out all over the building, and now we're deeply into the action, led in shocked wonder as
Ballard brilliantly describes the metamorphosis of group psychopathological desire into a new kind of childlike urban social model, a
twisted adult mirror of Lord Of The Flies, with no resolution to any kind of recognizeable reality principle.

The Low-Down On The High-Rise.

Variously described as a spaceship, or a "Pandora's Box whose thousand lids were one by one opening inward", this giant housing
structure is a marvel of technologies which Ballard credits for "freeing" its occupants. How can it do this? As a sort of giant robot
"mother", the building has been designed to cater to all the physical needs of its occupants. But what of their psychological needs?

It is basically an isolation tank for 2,000 people, and as in Concrete Island, this removal from "exterior" social reality unfetters
repression. Never one to worry much about scientific "proof", Ballard simply informs us, "the building took away the need to
repress anti-social behavior." Like a seatbelt perversely gives you the freedom to drive faster.

On the level of characterization the building is, in Ballard's oddly amoral universe, a mindless liberator, an assembly of services, "a
model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly free psychopathology". This is what Ballard means
by "extreme metaphor". No longer a simple building, it is in reality a "huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of
tenants, but the individual resident in isolation."

By opening up the necessary neural pathways to the reckless exploration of psychopathic desires, the high-rise allows this enclave
of competitive, middle and upper class worker bees to sucumb to the demands of their inner needs, which, in this case, is explored
in the physical acting-out of all the dark, driven activites of the lives of three of the high-rise occupants.

It is important to realize, however, that the building itself is the metaphor. High-Rise is a machine coddling a community, yet still
catering to each individual's every whim. How might you react if this urban eden suddenly rejected you and your fellow population?
The old social rules are quickly replaced, and individuals revert to inner cunning and extreme behaviour.

How do you understand High-Rise as an extreme metaphor? It could be tricky, because Ballard tends to be "open-ended" insofar as
specific meaning is concerned. High-Rise represents a wide variety of themes -- social, political, psychological. Is it society, just
waiting to regress, given the right circumstances? The state of politics, as the occupants divide themselves along class lines? Is it a
Skinner Box on end, as Ballard explores the depths to which obsessions will reach? Some twisted variation of Lunghwa Internment
Camp in Shanghai, where Ballard spent three years as a youth and witnessed unthinkable social upheaval while learning how to
survive in a suddenly hostile environment? Probably all of the above. It soon becomes apparent what really interests Ballard are
the abnormal antics of the high-rise inhabitants. Very quickly in the story the building becomes the landscape generated by the
fears and anxieties, aggressions and hates, schemes and capitulations of the dwellers within. Its condition and usefulness is
reflected the various mindscapes of the protagonists.

Q: Who Are These People?

A: "The Proletariat Of The Future".

Ballard, who usually likes to spice up his stories with wry sociopolitical commentary, does little to hide his initial disdain for the
repressed, blinkered denizens of these expensive vertical "caves". He purposely fills the high-rise with a wide range of successful
and unsuccessful professional and media types (perpetrators of The Fiction), those with "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". Prime examples of Ballard's obsession with the "death of affect" in modern society. Ballard smugly lumps them into what
he calls the "orthodoxy of the intelligent... a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future boxed up in these expensive
apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape" (emphasis mine).

As noted by one of the characters, TV Producer Richard Wilder, "Living in high-rises required a special type of behavior, one that
was acquiescent, restrained, even perhaps slightly mad". But there's more. According to the novel's only psychiatrist, Adrian
Talbot, "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."

Dangerous, and uncaring. And targets for Ballard's sarcastic arrows: "people in high-rises tended not to care about the tenants
more than two floors below them" is a typical aside, and he tosses in a new subspecies, called vagrants, just for good measure:
"bored apartment-bound housewives and stay-at-home adult daughters who spend a large part of their time riding the elevators
and wandering the long corridors... migrating endlessly in search of change or excitement". Most apartment-dwellers are also
insomniacs, we learn, and all of them in High-Rise are essentially the same, prisoners of an eventless world of solitary confinement
in a social structure nurtured by a live-in machine.

So Ballard gives us his benchmark: 1,000 apartments filled with overly-coddled, intelligent, wealthy, bored, socially-successful
tenants. As long as the building satisfies their needs, they're happy to mind their own business. This happy state lasts mere hours.
Then the high-rise begins to frown. Power outtages. Elevator malfunctions. Graffitti. Alcohol. Random violence. Add to this the
vertical division of the high-rise into a class system, and the stage is ripe for mayhem: "an apparently homogenous collection of
high-income professional people had split into three distinct and hostile camps". From floors one to nine live the "proletariat" of
film-technicians and air hostesses. The 10th floor is commercial, and from it to the restaurant and swimming pool on the 35th floor
is the domain of the middle classes -- "self-centred yet basically docile members of the professions... puritan and self-disciplined,
they had all the cohesion of those eager to settle for second best". Ouch. The top five floors house the upper class, "a discreet
oligarchy of minor tycoons and entrepreneurs, television actresses and career academics". Career Academics? Ballardian humour
there. Aside from the irony of including academics, this group sets the pace for the building... and kept the middle class in line by
offering the "carrot of friendship and approval". Some things never change. Or do they?

The Gang's All Here.

The novel's plot revolves around the activities of three major characters, all tainted with Dickensian names: Richard Wilder,
"television producer... a thick-set, pugnacious man who had once been a professional rugby-league player...", who lives with the
other proles on the second floor; Dr. Robert Laing, recently-divorced doctor of physiology looking for solitude, who hides in middle
class obscurity on the 25th floor; and Anthony Royal, wealthy architect who was part of the complex's design consortium, who
holds court in his opulent penthouse.

And although Laing, the observer, is the novel's only surviving male character – no doubt Ballard himself, as he has publically
stated that High-Rise was in part driven by his attempt to explain the cruel ways of God to himself in the years following his wife’s
sudden and senseless death -- the other two points of the triangle are thematically and structurally necessary, as Wilder and Royal
inhabit the extremities of the vertical world of High-Rise. Stuck in their grooves, unable to evolve as the new society evolves,
Wilder and Royal dance inexorably to their long-anticipated, desired ends.

As Ballard has often said, the modus operandi for all his characters is to first survive, then to adapt and ultimately to control and
dominate their severely-altered landscapes. This desire to "self-create to success" is expressed in the various survival strategies of
Laing, Wilder and Royal, and their ultimate doom is foretold in their more various forms of self-expression -- Wilder is political,
violent and cunning, but his "real needs might emerge later"; Royal is an artsy-intellectual snob facing the results of his own social
"experiment"; Laing is clever, detached, lazy, boring and practical. Let the lessons begin.

Wilder: A Camera For A Gun.

There is a telling moment halfway through High-Rise when Richard Wilder, the id-like former pro rugger player, reflects before his
final assault up the war-torn building. He "hoped to be a midwife to a new society forming", that his actions, "had given people a
means of escaping into a new life, and a pattern of social organization that would become a paradigm of all future high-rise blocks".
These, of course, are the obsessive dreams of the man whose anger and frustration starts the whole seismic social shift when he
drowns an afghan hound in the 10th floor swimming pool during a power outage.

Wilder, the TV producer, early on reads the signs of impending change and decides to shoot a documentary himself on the trials
and tribulations of life cramped into such a singular structure. More Ballardian irony. A resident of the lowly 2nd floor, Wilder is
afflicted by a phobia in which he feels the weight of the building crushing down on him. His desire to "shoot" the building with his
camera becomes part of a "calculated attempt to come to terms with the building, to meet the physical challenge and to dominate
it". Sounds like this character is right on track.

As the first waves of escalating violence ebbs, Wilder is caught up in his delusion of fate, and decides to make his assault to the top
of the building. By doing so, he severs all ties with his withdrawn wife and children, and by so doing reveals his deeper, more
sinister pathology: "By leaving Helen he would break away from the whole system of juvenile restraints that he had been trying to
shake off since his adolescence". Needless to say, the psychic conversion experienced by Wilder as he breaks away from his
"restraints" will escalate as he rises through the building.

In his last rôle, Wilder becomes a sort of Green Beret hunter/stalker, strategy-smart and using a trained dog as a partner. He
successfully clears the last hurdle of resistance on the 37th floor, and escapes into the now-deserted upper levels. Just before the
final assault, and armed with a pistol (and his ever-present cine camera), Wilder pauses for a rest. When he awakes, he has
regressed from purpopse-driven adult to play-acting child, and completes the irony of his liberation by darting with his gun through
the empty corridors and apartments, playing a shock trooper in door-to-door fighting. By chance he stumbles into Royal's
refurbished apartment. "He wandered round the refurbished rooms, almost expecting to find his childhood toys, a cot and a
playpen laid out for his arrival". Spooky. But hey, he's "happy". After accidentaly meeting with, then playfully shooting Royal on the
last steps to the roof, Wilder steps over the prostrate body and into the sunlight at the top of the building. Naked, small children
are playing in the sculpture garden, and Wilder strips off to join them. He is soon surrounded by a coven of women -- all of whom
he knows -- and then recognizes his wife, tending the fire below an empty spit. The women move in. "In their bloodied hands they
carried knives with narrow blades. Shy but happy now, Wilder tottered across the roof to meet his new mothers". What a good
litttle boy.

Royal: Architect Of The Isolation Machine.

Anthony Royal is the de facto "king" of High-Rise, an object of desire and fear, although Ballard treats him more like some kind of
mad scientist, toddling around his laboratory and waiting for his social Skinner Box to reveal its data. Ballard is cagey about Royal,
and only drops the most subtle of hints about his true agenda. "He was all too aware of the built-in flaws" of the high rise, and his
imperial manners reveal, "he seemed to be checking that an experiment he had set up had now been concluded". Enigmatic as
always, Ballard doesn't let us in on the nature of Royal's "experiment", but one might assume it has to do with some fantasy of
control and dominance. Or, like Wilder, something more subversive... an act of violence as the precipitant for a new order. A snob,
full of prejudice and yet fascinated with the antics of those who live "downstairs", Royal is Ballard's most ethereal character in the
novel, a successful, self-made man who "always wanted his own zoo", and who sketched many designs of zoos, one -- ironically --
a high rise whose birds could fly...

Royal's birdman proclivities are emphasized by Ballard, who introduces a flock of predatory seagulls as part of Royal's ongoing
symbolism. Gulls, of course, are scavengers and are associated with death as well as the the liberating aspects of flight. A
metaphor for the novel? The gulls are on the roof of the high-rise because they've been attracted to all the garbage tenants are
throwing out of their windows, but Royal mythologizes them, "they had flown here from some archaic landscape, responding to the
same image of the sacred violence to come".

But for all his posturing and anticipations, Royal suffers an ignoble ending. After being shot by Wilder, he somehow manages to
descend to the 10th floor, where he is discovered by Laing. Taken into the swimming pool area, which now doubles as a
graveyard/dump, Royal slowly shuffles off to die: "he was moving towards the steps at the shallow end of the swimming pool, as if
hoping to find a seat for himself on this terminal slope". Experiment completed.

Laing: Cause Without A Rebel.

I've already suggested Laing may be Ballard in disguise, as his little cave in the wall does have Shepperton written all over it, but...
he could also be an ironic takeoff on R.D. Laing, the radical Scots psychiatrist. Laing is the least exciting, but perhaps the most
mentally deviant of the novel's trio of main protagonists.

While Royal and Wilder come to us bearing the burden of their "class", Laing is Ballard's invisible man -- a tenant who wishes
anonymity in the crowd. In fact, he only buys his apartment on the advice of his sister, who points out that the high rise is perfect,
as Laing can easily hide in a group of social clones. Laing immediately likes life in the high rise, and once in its embrace he begins
to disassociate from his past: "London belonged to a different world, in time as well as space". Safely ensconced within the
building, he felt he "had travelled 50 years forward in time", and, as a result, his "life in the high-rise was as self-contained as the
building itself".

Like Royal, but unlike Wilder, Laing rarely leaves the building once the social changes begin, although he does leave once to
examine the unfinished lake in the centre of the five-high-rise complex. It is not a pleasant journey, as "The absence of any kind of
rigid rectilinear structure summed up for Laing all the hazards of the world beyond the high-rise". In fact, as Laing forces himself
down the steep gradient of concrete into the center of the oval lake, he felt as if he was descending into a "forbidden valley" -- all
of which "helped to expose a more real vision of himself".

Of the three protagonists, Laing is the most self-obsessed with the creation of a new, isolated world which he can control and
dominate. Near the end of the novel, when the worst waves of violence have passed, and those who still remain in the building
were well on their way to completing their transformations, he slips even further away: "Laing had decided to separate himself and
his two women from everyone else... he knew he was far happier now than ever before... he was satisfied by his self-reliance...
above all, he was pleased with his good sense in giving rein to those impulses that involved him with Eleanor and his sister,
perversities created by the limitless possibilities of the high-rise". Is it surprising to discover that the two women treat him like "two
governesses in a rich man's ménage, teasing a wayward and introspective child"? His power is complete.

Funky stuff, but just a taste of the more sinister ending Ballard only hints at: "all this, like the morphine he would give them in
increasing doses, was only a beginning, trivial rehearsals for the real excitement to come". And the pathologies concur. Already the
building is beginning to "heal" as everything is beginning to return "back to normal" -- a classic overstatement. The transformation
is complete; the stage is set for the next step. And Laing, now truly in control of his two "patients", will look forward to a new
future with a truly free life, rather than a free lifestyle. Quest completed. Heckuva neighbour.

The Women of High-Rise: Low Concubines And High Priestesses

While the action of High-Rise is dominated by the men, the women play a very real role as indicators of the "post-Freudian" state of
the building's politics. By the end of the story, after suffering through as ignored wives or casual sex partners, two of the women --
Laing's sister, Alice Frobisher, and a hard-drinking TV critic, Eleanor Powell, have gravitated to Laing's side and appear to be happy
to take on the role of "women" to the solitary doctor in his rectilinear desert. Polygamy and incest -- are these guys mormons? By
the end of the story the rest of the women, including Charlotte Melville (mistress of Wilder), Helen Wilder, Anne Royal, and Jane
Sheridan, have occupied the top floors and have started refurbishing it for their own uses, which appears to be a group home for a
coven of canniballistic babes intent on dealing with the male competition by eating it. Or were they merely large white birds that
Wilder imagined were women?

The Never-Ending Circle: Beginning At The End.

Ballard tempts fate in High-Rise by setting the story up as a flashback, which means we actually start at the end (so much for
suspense), and then Ballard muddies the waters slightly by extending the second ending to a sister building. High-Rise may have
one of the best introductory sentences (and paragraph) in all of Ballard’s novels. Like the dread that accompanies Orwell’s opening
"clock struck 13" sentence in 1984, Ballard sets the story on edge in the first sentence when he calmly intones: "Later, as he sat on
his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment
building during the previous three months." Only Ballard could offer us the image of a doctor eating a dog on a balcony and calmly
reflecting on events. Yes, one could casually say, "unusual events", and it is with this curious bit of understatement that Ballard
then proceeds to tell the twisted tale of Laing and his neighbours as they embark on a perverse logic of freedom extended very,
very far into the surreal. And this opening paragraph closes with Laing, "on this balcony where he now squatted beside a fire of
telephone directories, eating the roast hindquarters of the Alsatian before setting off to his lecture at the medical school". Wow.
Reminds me of a few of my profs at university.

The Reality Of Fiction: The Paradox Of Freedom.

As the sociology of the inhabitants moves up the uncivilized spinal column to increasingly violent levels, Laing, Wilder and Royal
dream and plot, observe and partake in the events as they unfold, while Ballard spices the pot with a veritable encyclopedia of
perverse and forbidden activities, including random acts of senseless violence, torture, cannibalism and incest, mostly drug- and
hate-fuelled, and described in what by now has become Ballard's patented, meticulous realistic style, with liberal use of irony and
black humour to "flatten" out the jaw-dropping antics of the relentless action.

In fact, it's almost as if Ballard had set out to confound the sensibilities of those ultimate voyeurs, his readers, with a purposefully
dry and logical account of what any "right-thinking" reader would consider to be outrageously anti-social behavior. Unlike the
middle-class of Millennium People, who run amok in self-indulgent destruction, the tenants of High-Rise seem to be caught in a
vortex which has no apparent beginning, and which escalates along a relentless geometry of violence until the new order, the new
freedom, roughly forms itself from the ashes of the old. The horror of meaningless acts piled high with Ballard's trademark
detatched omnipotent narrator. High-Rise can both shock and exhilarate its reader, and its insistence that the “ends justify the
means” reinforces Ballard’s geometry of violence: personal salvation is a lonely, harsh, and demanding mistress, whose lonely logic
is impeccable and implacable, no matter where it leads.

Where it leads me is to the power and paradox of High-Rise. Brilliantly described, seemingly insane, yet strangely compelling and
appealing, High-Rise has the unsettling effect of being attractive and repulsive at the same time. If freedom is a paradox insofar as
the rules of society mean we all live "free" in a self-regulated prison of civilization, then what is the freedom that the tenants
of High-Rise so actively desire? Is it, as Ballard describes, the freedom to act as a self-centered individual in a violent society based
on the power of force and strength? Is it the pleasure-seeking pathology of the Id now supplying reality to the Ego? Is it designed
to destroy the media fiction of normal society and reveal our inner feelings as the ultimate reality?
As a novel, High-Rise is more of a cool description of fact than an exercise in moralisms or social predictions. These people do not
devolve from being professionals, with their "cool, unemotional personality", into noble savages. As in all Ballard novels, the action
resolves into the fate of one protagonist -- in this case, Laing. Laing survives because his driving psychic force is self-preservation
through isolation and passivity. Mentally shattered by his divorce, seeking to withdraw from human contact, Laing's psychic state is
what we see in his landscape of experience. Wilder, the extrovert, clashes with the cerebral Royal and they both perish. Our
suspension of disbelief is that we accept no one ever tries to leave the place. High-Rise explores and reveals Ballard's ideas about
the quick mutability of reality, and the kind of mental state most likely to adapt and succeed in times of extreme and rapid change
in an isolated environment.

Is High-Rise one of Ballard's greats? It certainly appears to have fulfilled its challenge: it is a highly successful metaphor for an
extreme situation. Given an opportunity to re-enact Ballard's vision, would a hi-tech building have this effect on today's
professionals? Probably not, but High-Rise is eerie, not realistic; it finally becomes a symbol which exists on its own terms, and
adds an interesting extension to the themes of social withdrawal explored in Concrete Island and Crash, which form Ballard's trilogy
of urban "techno-disaster" novels. If you haven't read High-Rise for awhile (or at all), read it... for three hours you'll get to
vicariously act out pretty well every anti-social impulse anyone has ever had... and do it in the company of professionals.

Rick McGrath
© May 2004

High Rise by J.G. Ballard (1975)

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:

1. very carefully creating incidents which are marker points, stepping stones along the
timeline of decline
2. 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)

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?

Commodity fetishism is an important concept in Marx's philosophy. In his writings, he thinks that people
in capitalist systems are too focused on the end product people buy (a commodity) and forget to think about
the processes that helped the commodity come about.

For example, a ballpoint pen must go through material

sourcing, designing, prototyping and manufacturing before it can be shipped and delivered to customers.
Many people, including workers, took part in the production of the pen, and Marx believes that capitalist
thinking takes people away from those processes and relationships which result in a commodity.

You pretty much got it. Commodity fetishism means we just see the money and commodities in front of
us. When you go to the supermarket to buy lettuce, you see your money, you see the lettuce, but you
don’t know who picked the lettuce, if they’re happy, or anything else about them.

Thousands and thousands of people have worked all across the world to produce the computer/phone
you’re typing on, but you don’t have a clue who they are, or why we have apparently determined that
exactly this amount of people should be working on phones, as opposed to anything else.

And how do you afford the phone? If you work, you likely produce some sort of commodity for
someone else, who also doesn’t know you exist. And you work because we’re all in this interdependent
web and someone has to do your job as well as the job of making phones. But we don’t think about this
web, we just think about the money and the phone

Not familiar with the argument for why it makes us consume things we don’t need. Gonna spitball and
say that it could be because we’re not aware of the social costs of these things, because they’re just
items in a marketplace

But that’s the idea, and should be enough to get by if you’re not reading capital. If you are reading
Capital I’d recommend reading David Harvey’s companion, which is where I cribbed my explanation
from.

You pretty much got it. Commodity fetishism means we just see the money and commodities in front of
us. When you go to the supermarket to buy lettuce, you see your money, you see the lettuce, but you
don’t know who picked the lettuce, if they’re happy, or anything else about them.

Thousands and thousands of people have worked all across the world to produce the computer/phone
you’re typing on, but you don’t have a clue who they are, or why we have apparently determined that
exactly this amount of people should be working on phones, as opposed to anything else.

And how do you afford the phone? If you work, you likely produce some sort of commodity for
someone else, who also doesn’t know you exist. And you work because we’re all in this interdependent
web and someone has to do your job as well as the job of making phones. But we don’t think about this
web, we just think about the money and the phone

Not familiar with the argument for why it makes us consume things we don’t need. Gonna spitball and
say that it could be because we’re not aware of the social costs of these things, because they’re just
items in a marketplace

But that’s the idea, and should be enough to get by if you’re not reading capital. If you are reading
Capital I’d recommend reading David Harvey’s companion, which is where I cribbed my explanation
from.

In "High-Rise" (1975) by J.G. Ballard, commodity fetishism is a pervasive theme that manifests
in various ways throughout the narrative. Here are some solid examples of commodity fetishism
in the novel:

Luxury Apartments:

The apartments within the high-rise are not merely places to live but status symbols coveted by the
residents. The higher the floor, the more prestigious the apartment, with those on the upper levels
reserved for the wealthiest inhabitants. These apartments are fetishized as symbols of social status and
success, with residents vying for the most desirable living spaces.

Consumer Goods:

Throughout the novel, characters obsess over consumer goods and luxury items as symbols of their
status and identity. For example, Anthony Royal, the architect of the high-rise, is depicted as a
connoisseur of expensive wine and art, surrounding himself with lavish possessions to affirm his elite
status. Similarly, the protagonist, Dr. Robert Laing, acquires high-end appliances and gadgets to assert
his social standing within the community.

Exclusive Amenities:

The high-rise offers a range of exclusive amenities, including swimming pools, gyms, and shopping
facilities, that serve as status symbols for its residents. Access to these amenities is restricted based on
social class, with the wealthiest inhabitants enjoying the most privileges. Residents fetishize these
amenities as symbols of luxury and exclusivity, reinforcing their sense of superiority over others.

Branding and Advertising:

Brand names and logos feature prominently throughout the novel, reflecting the characters' obsession
with consumer culture. Residents proudly display designer clothing and accessories adorned with
recognizable logos, viewing them as badges of honor that signal their membership in the elite social
stratum. Advertising also plays a role in shaping the characters' desires and aspirations, influencing
their purchasing decisions and reinforcing their attachment to material possessions.

Degradation and Violence:

As the novel progresses, the fetishization of commodities escalates into violence and chaos, as residents
compete for scarce resources and vie for dominance within the high-rise. The obsession with material
possessions becomes all-consuming, leading to acts of vandalism, theft, and brutality as residents fight
to protect their prized belongings and assert their status over others.