Susan Budd's Reviews > High-Rise

After reading Concrete Island, I was confident that even if I read everything Ballard ever wrote, nothing could top it. Then I read High-Rise.

Like Concrete Island, High-Rise depicts the psychological dangers inherent in modern life. But unlike Concrete Island, it has a large cast of characters. This difference is necessitated by the settings of each novel. The traffic island of Concrete Island is a place that is normally uninhabited, so when Maitland crashes there he becomes its sole occupant ~ at least for the first half of the novel. A high-rise condominium is a place that is normally densely populated. As much as I like a novel that explores the psyche of a single character, I think High-Rise rises slightly above Concrete Island in narrative power and scope.

Both novels also feature the themes of isolation and alienation and both use metaphors that present the outer world as a manifestation of the inner world (traits these novels share with The Drowned World ~ the other of the three Ballard books I’ve read so far). But unlike Concrete Island, High-Rise begins almost as a farce, which serves to highlight the deadly serious events that will unfold later in the novel. As the absurdity grows, the comic touches become more and more unsettling.

There are also structural similarities between Concrete Island and High-Rise. In Concrete Island, two characters are introduced in the second half of the novel and the resulting trio represents the three different responses the characters have to the island, and symbolically, to modern society. High-Rise has many characters, yet the drama is focused on three: the main character, Robert Laing, and two other symbolically named characters, Richard Wilder and Anthony Royal. Together they represent the three social classes: Wilder representing the lower class, Laing the middle class, and Royal the upper class.

While the movement of the story parallels the upward movement of Wilder, a literal social climber who spends half the novel climbing from his second floor apartment to Royal’s penthouse at the top of the building, the central character is Laing who, Royal observes, was probably the high-rise’s “most true tenant” (91).

The story begins and ends with Laing. When he is introduced to us, we are told that “everything had returned to normal” (13), but a few sentences later Ballard casually mentions that Laing is roasting dog meat over a fire of telephone directories. The story that follows tells of the events of the past three months that led to this distinctly abnormal scene.

Laing came to the high-rise to avoid relationships. Newly divorced, he seeks isolation. Like Maitland, he has issues with his mother and his wife and would rather have superficial dealings with other people than become emotionally involved. The high-rise is highly suited to this lifestyle. And this is ironic. The high-rise houses hundreds of families. It includes a supermarket, a children’s school, swimming pools, and other amenities. On the surface, it would seem to be a place that fosters community, yet it does just the opposite. The residents drink heavily, suffer insomnia, and watch their televisions with the sound turned down.

Thus the high-rise represents Laing’s inner state as well as the state of modern society. Ballard’s metaphors forge the link between the physiologist and his surroundings. Professionally, Laing studies the workings of the body. He teaches his medical students to dissect bodies. Symbolically, the high-rise represents his mind and the world around it is the body. When he views the landscape from his balcony, he sees “the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis” (16). The building itself is “the unconscious diagram of a mysterious psychic event” (34). The curved sides of the empty artificial lake are “as menacing as the contours of some deep reductive psychosis” (126). Ballard’s Dr. Laing must surely be named after R. D. Laing, the existential psychologist who analyzed the schizoid mind in The Divided Self.

As conditions in the high-rise break down, the mental state of the residents breaks down too. The changes that occur in Laing and the others are symptomatic of mental illness. At first, when the building services begin to break down, they complain to the management, but as time passes they just give in to the gradual decline in functioning. They lose interest in the outside world. They neglect their hygiene. And they live in a perpetual fog ~ which is a literal fog composed of the effluvium of the decaying garbage that litters the building. It is a “surrender to a logic more powerful than reason” (75).

As Ballard analyzes the inner state of the residents he also makes a statement about the outer world: “life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside” (176). This analysis of life in the microcosm of the high-rise calls to mind another psychological analysis of modern society: Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. The residents rebel against the artificial restraints imposed by modern life. As civilization breaks down, they increasingly give in to their repressed impulses. By the end, their priorities have reverted to the most fundamental urges: food, sex, and violence. Royal, who perches at the top of the building and the hierarchical structure that the building represents, is relieved to see this rebellion taking place. He relishes the destruction of the artificial social order to which the residents too easily conformed.

As usual with a Ballard novel, the descriptive imagery is vivid and powerful and the narrative style befits the story. In the beginning, the contrast between the wealthy professionals and their deteriorating environment is comical.

“Garbage lay heaped around the jammed disposal chutes. The stairways were littered with broken glass, splintered kitchen chairs and sections of handrail...” (107).

“... Fire safety doors leaned off their hinges, quartz inspection windows punched out. Few corridor and staircase lights still worked, and no effort had been made to replace the broken bulbs. By eight o'clock little light reached the corridors, which became dim tunnels strewn with garbage sacks” (107).

“... the swimming-pool, now barely half full. The yellow water was filled with debris, the floor at the shallow end emerging like a beach in a garbage lagoon. A mattress floated among the bottles, surrounded by a swill of cardboard cartons and newspapers” (108).

Residents are typically referred to by their profession and floor number. The building takes on the appearance and atmosphere of a crime-ridden inner city. Residents patrol the corridors like gang members protecting their territory. Garbage piles up as services break down. Graffiti defaces the walls. Women are unsafe. Vigilantes dispense justice. Vagrants roam the secret recesses of the building. Vandalism is rampant. And all of this becomes increasingly normalized as evidenced by the characterization of appalling acts of violence as “trivial.”

“During the previous hour a few trivial incidents had occurred—the middle-aged wife of a 28th-floor account-executive had been knocked unconscious into the half-empty swimming-pool, and a radiologist from the 7th floor had been beaten up among the driers in the hairdressing salon—but in general everything within the high-rise was normal” (112).

The residents organize themselves into clans and tribal units and it soon becomes apparent that a confrontation between Wilder and Royal is inevitable. Royal is the architect who designed the building and he identifies himself with the building. While he waits in his penthouse, literally looking down on all the other denizens of the high-rise, Wilder fights his way upwards. What has he got to lose? As an occupant of the lowest level of the hierarchy, there is only one way to go. By the same logic, the occupant at the top likewise has only one way to go. And this is why the battle will be between the lower and the upper levels.

Wilder is a television producer. Early in the story he is working on a documentary on prison unrest. For him, the high-rise becomes increasingly oppressive. He sees his apartment as a prison cell, specifically, a cell in “the psychiatric wing of the prison” (57). The other high-rise buildings that are still under construction are likened to “Alcatraz” (65). It’s no wonder he develops a “phobia about the high-rise” (61).

But a regression is taking place and it doesn’t end with clans and tribes. Eventually even this structure breaks down. The era of “clubs and spears” (153) gives way to an even more primitive way of life. Solitary hunters replace tribal units. It is the era of the caveman, of “Neanderthal” grunts (169). The lapse in personal hygiene characteristic of mental illness is now a point of pride. Laing likes being dirty. He stinks and he relishes the odor emitted by his unwashed body.

“The sweat on Laing’s body, like the plaque that coated his teeth, surrounded him in an envelope of dirt and body odour, but the stench gave him confidence, the feeling that he had dominated the terrain with the products of his own body” (130).

As in Concrete Island, “dominating the terrain” is dominating himself. Laing is becoming more himself as he sheds the last vestiges of civilization. The discontent that was a necessary consequence of civilization is fading as Laing gives in to his primitive instincts. As his false self gives way, he no longer suffers from a divided self. Royal, on the other hand, can only wait to be dethroned as Wilder urinates, defecates, and rapes his way to the top.

By the end, a complete social restructuring has occurred. No longer are deviant impulses repressed. Human nature, in all its primitive brutality, flourishes. What happens next, what the new normal will look like, is uncertain. Perhaps it will be wildly beautiful like a flock of predatory birds rising from their nest on the roof of the high-rise. Perhaps it will be as depraved as a freed harem of cannibalistic mothers roving the building unchecked. But whatever it is, it will not be false. It will not be artificial. It will not be meaningless.