As a trainee doctor J.G. Ballard used to dissect cadavers and his view was that this same clinical eye was also key to his fiction. “Novelists should be like scientists” he declared and in cutting through the surface of apparently respectable society he exposed truths most writers choose to shy away from.
His awareness of the fine line dividing order and chaos derived from Ballard’s experiences in Shanghai during the Second World War which taught him that “nothing is secure as we like to think it is”.
In his 1975 novel, High-Rise he dispassionately charts the breakdown of a fragile order in a 40 storey tower block containing 1000 apartments and 2000 tenants,: “Life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside – there were the same ruthlessness and aggression concealed within a set of polite conventions”.
Gradually any lingering normality erodes as humans regress to an animal-like state driven by the raw desire for food, security and sex.
The high-rise symbolises society in microcosm with the class structure represented by the floor levels. The “doomed and defeated” inhabit the lower floors, the middle-class occupy the apartments between the 11th and 35th levels and the privileged elite (“the last tribal unit”) live on the top five floors.
With facilities that include 2 swimming pools, schools, shopping concourse, bank and hairdressers there is no need to venture into the outside world. Within their private cells “boxed up into the sky” everyone watches TV with the sound turned down and live their lives of quiet desperation,
The story of urban decay shifts between three main characters: film-maker Wilder (2nd floor), Dr. Robert Laing (25th floor) and the tower’s architect Anthony Royal who resides on the top floor.
As lights flicker with “the harsh over-reality of an atrocity newsreel” life in the “vertical city” comes to be dominated by roving hostile gangs, brutal rapes, murder and a diet of dead cats and dogs, accurately described as a “malevolent zoo”.
With the heaviest of irony, Ballard notes towards the conclusion of the novel: “The reappearance of television in his life convinced Laing that everything in the high-rise was becoming normal again”.
Bleakly terrifying and subversively satirical, this novel remains as contemporary as when it was written.
