#high-rise

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High-Rise (1975) by J. G. Ballard

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The last (and first) Ballard I read was The Drowned World—an imperfect novel in many ways, but one with a sensory atmosphere that I'll never forget. The humidity, the bugs, the lizards, the jungle flora, the old towers reaching out of the murky water into the glint of a blinding sun, and the ancient memories hidden in their flooded depths, I remember it all so vividly. Ballard's sense of place is just so visceral, but he is specifically good at crafting tight-knit dialectic environments that are layered vertically rather than horizontally, often extending beyond the physical realm into the cerebral.

Ballard's characters become reflections of their environment just as much as their environment becomes a reflection of them, and in High-Rise, he really narrowed in on this concept by creating a gigantic concrete pressure cooker for people to go insane in. That is literally the plot of the book. The last tenant moves in, the forty-story apartment building hits critical mass, and tension begins to rise out of thin air. Subtle acts of aggression (the kind any urban commuter is familiar with) quickly escalate into dead pets, ransacked apartments, broken elevators, and power outages, and next thing you know, the entire building is engaged in tribal warfare for no real reason other than instinct.

As society in the tower breaks down, the exterior of the building also reflects the inner chaos—garbage and bodily excrement are readily flung from the balcony, smashing the windows of cars below and streaming the concrete walls with piss, but the residents in turn feed off of the filth, wallowing in it until they become animals again, devolving into primal hierarchies built upon violence and territorial control all while trying to hide their total collapse from outside authority, as if their lawless disorder is something sacred to protect. It's a wild ride, and at the center of it all is the psychological probing of three characters from different levels of the apartment as they either crack or harden under the pressure of the building.

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