High-Rise Paperback – 21 Aug. 1985

Cripes. This book really struck a chord with me. There's something fascinating about the brevity of the prose style, the method in which a familiar setting is rendered alien, and the depiction of a bunch of seemingly ordinary and (in literary terms, I suppose) boring characters, turning into a fascinating gestalt of suppressed primal urges. The animalistic behaviour that 'society' irons out of us is allowed to reassert itself, and nobody seems to want to stop it. Individuals become a mob on their own doorsteps.This book feels like it could have been written in the 21st century. There is a big focus on luxury developments of flats within the story. Since 1995, it has felt like wherever an estate agent's leaflet has been dropped, that's where a new 'development' (not tower block!) has sprung up.Living in a luxury penthouse flat is often held up as the pinnacle of success. I love the way that Ballard explores the ramifications of geographically divorcing one's self from society, based on a sense of superiority. I've always been fascinated by books that show how fragile our society is - how it can so easily breakdown. (Another favourite is The Day of the Triffids (Penguin Modern Classics)). In the recent England riots, one of the suggested causes for people running rampant and looting was that they were somehow 'disengaged from society'. In a similar way, the High Rise is a microcosm of that very effect.I have heard real life experiences of people living in modern, tall, luxury apartment buildings. Everything is fine until, one day, the lifts break down; or the people on the 8th floor are clearly chavs because they don't have balconies and they drop cigarette butts onto ours; or next door do karaoke until 3am on a school night; or they've drowned my dog in the luxury swimming pool. (OK, so the last bit was one of Ballard's).Fantastic book. Thought provoking, disturbing, entertaining and still relevant. And feels like it could happen in a luxury development of flats near you.

There is a great tradition of satire in English letters, from Swift to Orwell. Ballard is a worthy successor to these gentlemen. It was Orwell who pointed out that he was “lower-upper-middle class”. Ballard takes these subtle intra-class distinctions and gives us Lord of the Flies among the professional classes in 1970s London.The setting is a brand new, brilliantly architected high-rise residential building on the outskirts of central London. I could not stop myself from seeing Canary Wharf in my head, but it could just as easily be Battersea or Vauxhall. The building is the first of its kind, but several more are being built around a central lake.The selling point of the building is that the middle-class tenants will inhabit a self-contained universe with everything they need laid on inside the building - shops, sports facilities, schools, etc. They have no need to go outside except to go to their well-paid jobs, which they do securely insulated in their cars parked at the foot of the high-rise.There are two shopping malls in the building, on the 10th and 35th floors. These malls provide points of social inflexion between the tenants. The floors below the 10th floor are inhabited by younger, less senior middle and line managers, TV producers, air hostesses, etc. Being younger, most of the children in the building live at these levels. On the top five floors live a slightly older, more mature group of wealthy jewellers, surgeons, actresses and senior professionals, including the architect of the building. All that is missing here are the investment bankers and hedge fund managers, but this is 1975, eleven years before Big Bang in the City. In between live a layer of middle managers, stock jobbers, tax accountants and dentists.Things go wrong in the building infrastructure; there are teething problems. All too quickly the social order breaks down as the three groups of tenants start to resent each other. The children from the lower floors are banned from the upper floors, including from their schools and the playground built specially for them on the top floor. The dogs from the upper floors are terrorised in return. People throw rubbish and empty bottles onto the verandas and parked cars below.This is the genius of the book. Everyone in the building is a member of the professional classes and yet they still manage to find social distinctions enough to divide themselves into competing tribes. Soon it is every man for himself, as we follow the activities of a representative of each of the social strata – a homicidal social climbing (literally) former professional rugby player now TV producer, a physiology lecturer and the architect himself.The problem with the book is that there is not really enough plot to last the full 270 pages, so it does become a little repetitive. Nevertheless the satire is deadly and, although the book is set in the 1970s when brutalist architecture was at its height, it is still relevant today.In fact I would argue that it has become even more relevant today. Since Thatcherism and Reaganomics and the Big Bang in the 1980s, the upper-upper-middle have got richer and richer, while the rest of the middle classes have stood still or gone backwards. There may yet be hell to pay for this and do not just mean Donald Trump, UKIP and other political fringes. There is also the Boris Johnson inspired boom in high rise luxury apartments in London (I can see all the cranes out of my window as I type this.), most of which are currently being bought by foreigners as an investment. When this investment proves to be a sham and property prices collapse, there will be ugly partially occupied middle class slums all over London. Who knows what will go on in the corridors and lift shafts of these model homes? Who knows what teething problems these buildings will present to the brave few who actually move into these speculative rush-jobs?Read the book. Go see the film. Or stick around in London and wait for the real thing. Four stars for Mr Ballard for prescience.