High Rise, by James Graham Ballard
Title: High Rise
Author: James Graham Ballard
Publication date: 1975
Edition: ISBN 978-0-586-04456-8
Publisher: Harper Perennial
No. of pages: 173
Source: Amazon.com ($7.02 + $3.99 S&H)
Back of the book: "Within the walls of an elegant forty-storey tower block, the affluent tenants are hellbent on an orgy of destruction. Cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on 'enemy' floor and the once luxurious amenities become an arena for technological mayhem.
"In this visionary tale from the bestselling author of Crash, Empire of the Sun, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, society slips into a violent reverse as the inhabitants of the high-rise, driven by primal urges, recreate a world ruled by the laws of the jungle."
JG Ballard wastes no time establishing a grisly tone for High Rise.
He opens by describing of tenant of a huge apartment building casually roasting the hindquarter of a neighbor's dog over a fire of telephone directories on his balcony in the wake of certain "unusual events." According to Ballard, those unusual events emerge when the petty rivalries among a thousand affluent residents in an innovative apartment complex become amplified by a confluence of structural failures within the building. As the structure's automated electrical, water, air-conditioning, garbage-disposal, and elevator services break down with inexplicable frequency, the formerly professional collection of occupants degenerate with equal inexplicability into little more than marauding expressions of their own sociopathic ids.
As a giddy indulgence in a bit of the old ultraviolence, the novel evokes the dystopia of Anthony Burgess's Clockwork Orange from thirteen years prior, and succeeds as a celebration of the darkest impulses of human nature. As a literary endeavor, on the other hand, the book lacks in critical areas, and the story suffers for it. Ballard's cardinal sin is that he tells the vast majority of his story. And he tells. And then he tells some more.
"For some time now," we are told, Richard Wilder "had known that he was developing a powerful phobia about the high-rise." Fine enough, but we never get to see his phobia emerge. "Reluctantly," we are later told, Anthony Royal "knew that he despised his fellow residents for the way in which they fitted so willingly into their appointed slots in the apartment building." All well and good, but we never get to see his disdain arise. Long stretches of block-text include casual disclosures that tell us what these characters feel, and emotional developments that seem so central to the story never actually develop. And when Ballard mentions the tribal conferences held by Royal and his top-floor cronies, I found myself annoyed that I wasn’t shown what would have been a fascinating scene.
All of this telling results in another of the book's flaws: namely, that we don't get to know any of these characters well enough to really care what happens to them. They rove from room to room and floor to floor, ransacking and raping and wreaking havoc on one another, but they are as much set-pieces in Ballard's postmodern psychodrama as the shattered furniture that clogs the corridors and stairwells and lobbies.
For all of the guerilla warfare going on in the eponymous high rise, Ballard never actually offers a compelling justification for these tenants' descent into barbaric tribalism. Instead, he seems to start from a Hobbesian "war of all against all" perspective, though, to be fair, he implies as much early on when he tells us that "the high rise offered more than enough opportunities for violence and confrontation." I only would have preferred the chance to see this potential unfold rather than just being told about it in retrospect.
The book is in many ways Ballard’s pessimistic entry into a tradition of isolation narratives. High Rise was published 21 years after William Golding's Lord of the Flies, to which the novel is often compared. One goodreads reviewer aptly called High Rise "a vertical Lord of the Flies." But for me (who hasn't read Flies in so long that I might as well say I haven't read it), the book bears more similarity to Stephen King's 2009 novel Under the Dome, particularly since Dome actually began in 1982 as the Cannibals, a story "about these people who are trapped in an apartment building" who "all ended up eating each other."
The most obvious difference between the two is bulk: while King's doorstopper breaks the 1,000-page threshold, Ballard's work clocks in at a slender 173 pages. King is undeniably guilty of having become Too Big To Edit (or at least Big Enough To Indulge His Creative Whims), but when King’s narrative wanders off on a twisting unlit backroad, it is almost always in the service of his characters, and it is almost entirely shown.
Thirty-four years apart, King and Ballard present the same basic story of how people react in an environment that becomes separated from the external world. The disparity in page-count, however, is to me symptomatic of that essential difference between the two writers. King shows; Ballard tells. And the trade-off is that I cared about Dale Barbara and Julia Shumway and Rusty Everett because I saw them. King showed me who they were. Conversely, I didn’t much care about Richard Wilder or Charlotte Melville or Anthony Royal, because I know about them is what Ballard told me.
And unlike those of Lord of the Flies that came before and Under the Dome that came later, the characters of High Rise are not confined to their environment against their will. They can leave, but most choose not to, and many of those who do wind up returning. Where Golding's children are marooned and King's townspeople are imprisoned, those who remain inside Ballard's crumbling high-rise conspire by silent consent to effect their own seclusion from the rest of society. They tear out their own phonelines and watch their mail pile up and lie to their families about life inside the apartment.
They are not victims of their circumstances but self-immolating participants in them. At roughly two-thirds through the book, we learn that roughly a hundred of the thousand tenants had permanently abandoned the building, and I realized the high-rise had somehow attracted a set of residence of which 90% were incurable psychopaths. For all of their grievances with the building, the residents embrace a bizarre sort of Stockholm Syndrome as their psychological investment in their deteriorating environment deepens. Consequently, the only characters I felt any sympathy for turned out to be the pets of these barbarians. If there are any victims in this novel, is it the cats and dogs trapped inside the apartment complex and subject to the sadistic impulses of its tenants.
All of that said, the book is not without redeeming qualities. It does perhaps presage to some degree the ways in which technology manages to bring people closer together while simultaneously secluding them from one another. After all, the tenants of Ballard’s high-rise chose to live in such close proximity in part because the building’s automation should enable them to enjoy minimal contact with one another, just as generation after generation of smartphones allow us today to communicate with hundreds or thousands of people in an instant while eliminating the need to see any of them face-to-face.
A single throwaway line near the middle of the book also struck me as particularly prescient, when a resident informs her neighbors that “every time someone gets beaten up, about ten cameras are shooting away.” And while that seems ordinary enough to modern readers, Ballard wrote this line three-and-a-half decades ago, long before the age of ubiquitous camera-phones capable of capturing every event as it transpires, before the age of reality television, and YouTube and Facebook and the popularity of the Internet.
I really expected to like this book. My first thought when I read the summary was that this actually was a novel I might have picked up on my own had I stumbled across it at a yard sale. So maybe my disappointed was my own fault, and maybe I missed the point of the novel entirely. I won't pretend that's not distinctly possible. Maybe Ballard was making a statement about the thin veneer of academia and professionalism and affluence, or the inevitable failure of our own most elaborate ambitions. Maybe the reason Ballard that never gives a reason for the building’s inexplicable failures is his assumption that technology will, by its very nature, inescapably fail, and the specific reasons don’t actually matter. Maybe the apartment building is a metaphor for society, and the broken furniture represents each of the broken tenants of this "elegant forty-storey tower block."
I’m sure that whole litcrit theses could be and have been and will be written on such topics. But I’m not a litcrit student anymore, and I’m not writing a thesis on Ballard’s work (unless you count this review as a thesis, and maybe, at this point, you do). These days, I read for entertainment, and while I really do enjoy thought-provoking philosophy (I loved Jesus Arrabal's ruminations on miracles and John Nefastis' attempts to harness Maxwell's Demon in the Crying of Lot 49), even the most provocative ideas will fail to entertain if not delivered within a well-written story.
Verdict: Skippable. Read Under the Dome instead. It may take six times longer (though, strangely, each took me 19 days to read), but it will be far more worth the investment.
Now on to Michael Connelly's fifth Harry Bosch novel, Trunk Music, until I get my next B1001 assignment (which, because I seem to have somehow offended the pseudorandom number generator, turns out to be another Ballard book, The Atrocity Exhibition).
Author: James Graham Ballard
Publication date: 1975
Edition: ISBN 978-0-586-04456-8
Publisher: Harper Perennial
No. of pages: 173
Source: Amazon.com ($7.02 + $3.99 S&H)
Back of the book: "Within the walls of an elegant forty-storey tower block, the affluent tenants are hellbent on an orgy of destruction. Cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on 'enemy' floor and the once luxurious amenities become an arena for technological mayhem.
"In this visionary tale from the bestselling author of Crash, Empire of the Sun, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, society slips into a violent reverse as the inhabitants of the high-rise, driven by primal urges, recreate a world ruled by the laws of the jungle."
JG Ballard wastes no time establishing a grisly tone for High Rise.
He opens by describing of tenant of a huge apartment building casually roasting the hindquarter of a neighbor's dog over a fire of telephone directories on his balcony in the wake of certain "unusual events." According to Ballard, those unusual events emerge when the petty rivalries among a thousand affluent residents in an innovative apartment complex become amplified by a confluence of structural failures within the building. As the structure's automated electrical, water, air-conditioning, garbage-disposal, and elevator services break down with inexplicable frequency, the formerly professional collection of occupants degenerate with equal inexplicability into little more than marauding expressions of their own sociopathic ids.
As a giddy indulgence in a bit of the old ultraviolence, the novel evokes the dystopia of Anthony Burgess's Clockwork Orange from thirteen years prior, and succeeds as a celebration of the darkest impulses of human nature. As a literary endeavor, on the other hand, the book lacks in critical areas, and the story suffers for it. Ballard's cardinal sin is that he tells the vast majority of his story. And he tells. And then he tells some more.
"For some time now," we are told, Richard Wilder "had known that he was developing a powerful phobia about the high-rise." Fine enough, but we never get to see his phobia emerge. "Reluctantly," we are later told, Anthony Royal "knew that he despised his fellow residents for the way in which they fitted so willingly into their appointed slots in the apartment building." All well and good, but we never get to see his disdain arise. Long stretches of block-text include casual disclosures that tell us what these characters feel, and emotional developments that seem so central to the story never actually develop. And when Ballard mentions the tribal conferences held by Royal and his top-floor cronies, I found myself annoyed that I wasn’t shown what would have been a fascinating scene.
All of this telling results in another of the book's flaws: namely, that we don't get to know any of these characters well enough to really care what happens to them. They rove from room to room and floor to floor, ransacking and raping and wreaking havoc on one another, but they are as much set-pieces in Ballard's postmodern psychodrama as the shattered furniture that clogs the corridors and stairwells and lobbies.
For all of the guerilla warfare going on in the eponymous high rise, Ballard never actually offers a compelling justification for these tenants' descent into barbaric tribalism. Instead, he seems to start from a Hobbesian "war of all against all" perspective, though, to be fair, he implies as much early on when he tells us that "the high rise offered more than enough opportunities for violence and confrontation." I only would have preferred the chance to see this potential unfold rather than just being told about it in retrospect.
The book is in many ways Ballard’s pessimistic entry into a tradition of isolation narratives. High Rise was published 21 years after William Golding's Lord of the Flies, to which the novel is often compared. One goodreads reviewer aptly called High Rise "a vertical Lord of the Flies." But for me (who hasn't read Flies in so long that I might as well say I haven't read it), the book bears more similarity to Stephen King's 2009 novel Under the Dome, particularly since Dome actually began in 1982 as the Cannibals, a story "about these people who are trapped in an apartment building" who "all ended up eating each other."
The most obvious difference between the two is bulk: while King's doorstopper breaks the 1,000-page threshold, Ballard's work clocks in at a slender 173 pages. King is undeniably guilty of having become Too Big To Edit (or at least Big Enough To Indulge His Creative Whims), but when King’s narrative wanders off on a twisting unlit backroad, it is almost always in the service of his characters, and it is almost entirely shown.
Thirty-four years apart, King and Ballard present the same basic story of how people react in an environment that becomes separated from the external world. The disparity in page-count, however, is to me symptomatic of that essential difference between the two writers. King shows; Ballard tells. And the trade-off is that I cared about Dale Barbara and Julia Shumway and Rusty Everett because I saw them. King showed me who they were. Conversely, I didn’t much care about Richard Wilder or Charlotte Melville or Anthony Royal, because I know about them is what Ballard told me.
And unlike those of Lord of the Flies that came before and Under the Dome that came later, the characters of High Rise are not confined to their environment against their will. They can leave, but most choose not to, and many of those who do wind up returning. Where Golding's children are marooned and King's townspeople are imprisoned, those who remain inside Ballard's crumbling high-rise conspire by silent consent to effect their own seclusion from the rest of society. They tear out their own phonelines and watch their mail pile up and lie to their families about life inside the apartment.
They are not victims of their circumstances but self-immolating participants in them. At roughly two-thirds through the book, we learn that roughly a hundred of the thousand tenants had permanently abandoned the building, and I realized the high-rise had somehow attracted a set of residence of which 90% were incurable psychopaths. For all of their grievances with the building, the residents embrace a bizarre sort of Stockholm Syndrome as their psychological investment in their deteriorating environment deepens. Consequently, the only characters I felt any sympathy for turned out to be the pets of these barbarians. If there are any victims in this novel, is it the cats and dogs trapped inside the apartment complex and subject to the sadistic impulses of its tenants.
All of that said, the book is not without redeeming qualities. It does perhaps presage to some degree the ways in which technology manages to bring people closer together while simultaneously secluding them from one another. After all, the tenants of Ballard’s high-rise chose to live in such close proximity in part because the building’s automation should enable them to enjoy minimal contact with one another, just as generation after generation of smartphones allow us today to communicate with hundreds or thousands of people in an instant while eliminating the need to see any of them face-to-face.
A single throwaway line near the middle of the book also struck me as particularly prescient, when a resident informs her neighbors that “every time someone gets beaten up, about ten cameras are shooting away.” And while that seems ordinary enough to modern readers, Ballard wrote this line three-and-a-half decades ago, long before the age of ubiquitous camera-phones capable of capturing every event as it transpires, before the age of reality television, and YouTube and Facebook and the popularity of the Internet.
I really expected to like this book. My first thought when I read the summary was that this actually was a novel I might have picked up on my own had I stumbled across it at a yard sale. So maybe my disappointed was my own fault, and maybe I missed the point of the novel entirely. I won't pretend that's not distinctly possible. Maybe Ballard was making a statement about the thin veneer of academia and professionalism and affluence, or the inevitable failure of our own most elaborate ambitions. Maybe the reason Ballard that never gives a reason for the building’s inexplicable failures is his assumption that technology will, by its very nature, inescapably fail, and the specific reasons don’t actually matter. Maybe the apartment building is a metaphor for society, and the broken furniture represents each of the broken tenants of this "elegant forty-storey tower block."
I’m sure that whole litcrit theses could be and have been and will be written on such topics. But I’m not a litcrit student anymore, and I’m not writing a thesis on Ballard’s work (unless you count this review as a thesis, and maybe, at this point, you do). These days, I read for entertainment, and while I really do enjoy thought-provoking philosophy (I loved Jesus Arrabal's ruminations on miracles and John Nefastis' attempts to harness Maxwell's Demon in the Crying of Lot 49), even the most provocative ideas will fail to entertain if not delivered within a well-written story.
Verdict: Skippable. Read Under the Dome instead. It may take six times longer (though, strangely, each took me 19 days to read), but it will be far more worth the investment.
Now on to Michael Connelly's fifth Harry Bosch novel, Trunk Music, until I get my next B1001 assignment (which, because I seem to have somehow offended the pseudorandom number generator, turns out to be another Ballard book, The Atrocity Exhibition).