High-Rise
First edition, 1975
High-Rise (1975) is J.G. Ballard's most concentrated study of social collapse, set entirely within a luxury forty-story apartment block on the outskirts of London. The building has everything its residents need: supermarkets, swimming pools, a school, a bank, a restaurant. Within three months it has devolved into tribal warfare, its two thousand inhabitants organized by floor level into warring factions, its corridors barricaded, its infrastructure abandoned. The novel opens with its protagonist eating a roasted dog on his balcony and reflecting, with some satisfaction, that things have returned to normal. Often described as an urban Lord of the Flies, it is the final volume of Ballard's Urban Trilogy, following Crash and Concrete Island. The novel was adapted into a 2015 film directed by Ben Wheatley, starring Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, and Elizabeth Moss
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, dark blue paper covered boards, with gilt lettering on spine. London: Jonathan Cape, 1975. Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (76). ISBN: 0224011685. #10496.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, dark blue paper covered boards, with gilt lettering on spine. London: Jonathan Cape, 1975. Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (76). ISBN: 0224011685. #10496.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
High-Rise was published in 1975 and is the third novel in Ballard's loose Urban Trilogy, following Crash (1973) and Concrete Island (1974). All three examine what happens when the systems of modern life fail or are stripped away, but High-Rise is the most contained and in some ways the most disturbing of the three, because the building that serves as its setting is not a hostile environment. It is a utopia.
The high-rise is a forty-story luxury apartment block on the north bank of the Thames, newly completed, self-contained, and occupied by roughly two thousand residents drawn almost entirely from the professional classes: doctors, lawyers, television producers, academics, architects. They are, by income and education, nearly identical. The building has been designed to make leaving unnecessary, with a supermarket, bank, swimming pools, a school, and a restaurant all built in. Ballard establishes this very deliberately. The high-rise does not produce the collapse. It enables it.
The novel follows three residents whose positions in the building reflect the class structure within it. Anthony Royal, the architect who designed the tower, lives in the penthouse and regards the building as his private experiment. Robert Laing, a medical lecturer, occupies the middle floors and observes the deterioration around him with a detached, clinical interest that gradually morphs into participation. Richard Wilder, a television producer from the lower floors, becomes increasingly aggressive, driven by a barely articulated desire to climb the building and reach the top. The three perspectives together cover the full vertical range of the tower, from below to above, and each man's trajectory reflects a different relationship to the violence that unfolds.
The collapse begins with small frictions: noise from parties above, garbage thrown from higher balconies, competition for elevator space and parking. The building's services are never quite adequate. Residents discover that their neighbors, though financially identical to themselves, are social rivals rather than allies. What gives the novel its particular quality is Ballard's insistence that the escalation is not accidental or reluctant. The residents adapt to the new conditions with suspicious ease. They stop going to work. They withdraw from the outside world. They organize raiding parties with something approaching enthusiasm. The violence, when it becomes serious, is not resisted by most of those who witness it. It is watched.
Laing, the most fully realized of the three protagonists, is a useful guide to this. He is not a violent man, but he is a passive one, and his passivity transforms steadily into complicity and then into something colder. By the novel's end he is eating a dog he has roasted over a fire made from telephone directories, planning to introduce the two women dependent on him to morphine in increasing doses to maintain their reliance on him, and looking out at an adjacent tower where the lights have just gone out, ready, as Ballard writes, to welcome them to their new world. He is content. The collapse has given him what he could not find in ordinary life.
This is Ballard's central argument, and what separates High-Rise from straightforward dystopian fiction. The building does not impose barbarism on its residents from outside. It accelerates tendencies already present in them, the status anxiety, the need for dominance, the relief of abandoning responsibility, the appeal of a world with simpler and more legible rules. The high-rise, Royal reflects near the end, is not a failed utopia. It is a completed one.
The novel has been frequently compared to Lord of the Flies, and the comparison is not wrong, but Golding's boys are children whose fragile attempt at civilization collapses under pressure they are not equipped to handle. Ballard's residents are educated professionals who choose, with growing awareness of what they are doing, not to resist. That distinction makes High-Rise seem all the more chilling.
The high-rise is a forty-story luxury apartment block on the north bank of the Thames, newly completed, self-contained, and occupied by roughly two thousand residents drawn almost entirely from the professional classes: doctors, lawyers, television producers, academics, architects. They are, by income and education, nearly identical. The building has been designed to make leaving unnecessary, with a supermarket, bank, swimming pools, a school, and a restaurant all built in. Ballard establishes this very deliberately. The high-rise does not produce the collapse. It enables it.
The novel follows three residents whose positions in the building reflect the class structure within it. Anthony Royal, the architect who designed the tower, lives in the penthouse and regards the building as his private experiment. Robert Laing, a medical lecturer, occupies the middle floors and observes the deterioration around him with a detached, clinical interest that gradually morphs into participation. Richard Wilder, a television producer from the lower floors, becomes increasingly aggressive, driven by a barely articulated desire to climb the building and reach the top. The three perspectives together cover the full vertical range of the tower, from below to above, and each man's trajectory reflects a different relationship to the violence that unfolds.
The collapse begins with small frictions: noise from parties above, garbage thrown from higher balconies, competition for elevator space and parking. The building's services are never quite adequate. Residents discover that their neighbors, though financially identical to themselves, are social rivals rather than allies. What gives the novel its particular quality is Ballard's insistence that the escalation is not accidental or reluctant. The residents adapt to the new conditions with suspicious ease. They stop going to work. They withdraw from the outside world. They organize raiding parties with something approaching enthusiasm. The violence, when it becomes serious, is not resisted by most of those who witness it. It is watched.
Laing, the most fully realized of the three protagonists, is a useful guide to this. He is not a violent man, but he is a passive one, and his passivity transforms steadily into complicity and then into something colder. By the novel's end he is eating a dog he has roasted over a fire made from telephone directories, planning to introduce the two women dependent on him to morphine in increasing doses to maintain their reliance on him, and looking out at an adjacent tower where the lights have just gone out, ready, as Ballard writes, to welcome them to their new world. He is content. The collapse has given him what he could not find in ordinary life.
This is Ballard's central argument, and what separates High-Rise from straightforward dystopian fiction. The building does not impose barbarism on its residents from outside. It accelerates tendencies already present in them, the status anxiety, the need for dominance, the relief of abandoning responsibility, the appeal of a world with simpler and more legible rules. The high-rise, Royal reflects near the end, is not a failed utopia. It is a completed one.
The novel has been frequently compared to Lord of the Flies, and the comparison is not wrong, but Golding's boys are children whose fragile attempt at civilization collapses under pressure they are not equipped to handle. Ballard's residents are educated professionals who choose, with growing awareness of what they are doing, not to resist. That distinction makes High-Rise seem all the more chilling.
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