Algernon (Darth Anyan)'s Reviews > High-Rise

[7/10]

High-Rise is not an easy novel to fit into a specific genre. It's not exacly science-fiction because the time frame is contemporary England (cca. 1975). Yet the novel does try to use a scientific approach to the study of human behaviour - psychology. So, I guess you can call it 'soft' SF. You can also call it a dystopian novel, a horror novel or a thriller, but for me the best description is as an adult, x-rated version of "Lord of the Flies"

Now the new order had emerged, in which all life within the high-rise revolved around three obsessions - security, food and sex.

Like William Golding, Ballard isolates a sample of humanity into a closed environment, puts them under stress and then records the degradation of the social structures and of the moral compass of the group and of its individual members. The selection and the separation are achieved by making all the members of the group live together in a new high-rise building at the outskirts of London, first brought together by common interest and similar liberal jobs, later united by the traumatic experiences they are going through.

The two thousand tenants formed a virtually homogenous collection of well-to-do professional people - lawyers, doctors, tax consultants, senior academics and advertising executives, along with a smaller group of airline pilots, film-industry technicians and trios of air-hostesses sharing apartments. By the usual financial and educational yardsticks they were probably closer to each other than the members of any conceivable social mix, with the same tastes and atitudes, fads and styles.

The whys and hows of the setting felt contrived to me, but for the purpose of the psychological exercise of the author, lets accept them as stated here. For the first months of communal living, things worked pretty well, given the affluency and high education of most of the members. Two major forces though work against them: the infrastructure that was supossed to provide every comfort required by modern living is faulty both in design and in execution - elevators get stuck between floors, electricity comes and goes, garbage chutes are clogged, air conditioning is unreliable, parking places are distributed far from the entrances to the high-rise, etc. Secondly, even in such a homogenous professional group of tenants, there exists social tensions, clearly expressed through the actual vertical position of apartments in the high-rise: the 'blue-collars' mostly in the lower 10 floors, the 'bourgeoisie' in the middle 10 to 35 floors, and the 'aristocracy' in the top five floors and penthouses. Taken as a fable of modern living, the novel sets out to explode the myth of upward social mobility and underlines the exacerbation of selfishness over the needs of the community.

The high-rise was a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective bodies of the tenants, but the individual resident in isolation. Its staff of air-conditioning conduits, elevators, garbage-disposal chutes and electrical switching systems provided a never-failing supply of care and attention that a century earlier would have needed an army of tireless servants.

When the servants go on strike (repeated failures of electricity, garbage, water supplies), the first answer of the tenants is to start partying every night, like Nero singing and dancing while Rome burns around him. The parties are also the equivalent of circling the wagons and gathering together the tribe, organizing the resistance against the outsiders.
Who are these outsiders? The neighbors living on the floors under you, the dirty, promiscuous, lazy bastards that used to be your friends a couple of weeks before. As the services of the high-rise building continue to deteriorate, so does the thin layer of civilization melt away from the personalities of the tenants, leaving behind the animal instinct to violently protect the nest, to prey on the weak, to hoard food, to procreate. In the later phases of this terrible return to origins, even the tribal connections are severed and the individual is left alone with his fears, with his subconscious, with his 'eat or be eaten' simplified moral code.

This building must have been a powerhouse of resentments - everyone's working off the most extraordinary backlog of infantile aggressions.

For some reason, while I admired the intellectual exercise proposed by the author, I could not buy into the premise. The isolation of the tenants feels contrived: they give up on their jobs, they have no relatives visiting, there is no one from outside curious to check out what is going on inside the building. The switch from socially emancipated upper class professionals to wild animals also feels unnaturally accelerated. I personally believe that the instinct to help each other in a time of crisis is stronger than the impulse to grab whatever you can and run. Thirdly, I felt that the use of Freudian psychoanalysis was heavy handed, didactic. The tenants were treated as case patients with advanced phobias, not like regular, socially integrated adults. I know there are people with problems in any given group, but I find it hard to accept that they are a clear majority or than none of them is able to control his/her hidden urges.

The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our un-innocent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet-training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection - obviously a more dangerous mix than anything our Victorian forebears had to cope with. Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse ...

On the plus size, once you accept that, under very stressful circumstances, people do act under the influence of their subconscious, Ballard's exercise is not gratuitous, and the problems raised here form part of the alienation associated with modern life. Hyperbole, exaggeration is a valid artistic tool to get the point across. There is no denying the existence of a voyeuristic component in a population that lives a mostly routine, sheltered life. They get their thrills by vicariously living other people's tragedies, watching on their television screens for disasters and crimes and accidents. I believe this aspect will be the one that will stay with me the longest from the present book. One of the main characters, a TV producer, carries everywhere with a him a camera, planning to document the fast degrading situation in the high-rise, but in fact using it just as an excuse for prying into everybody else's affairs. Another character, the arhitect who designed the building and lives at the top of the food chain, takes a similar spectator view of the proceedings:

Without knowing it, he had constructed a gigantic vertical zoo, its hundreds of cages stacked above each other. All the events of the past few months made sense if one realized that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned to open the doors.

Which bring me to the conclusion of a conflicted review : I found the novel both interesting and repulsive, both insightful and contrived. I started by comparingthe story with "Lord of the Flies" and I arrived by the end at a giant version of the Big Brother Reality Show, with 2000 people locked together into a space filled with cameras and egged on to attack each other for the entertainment of a jaded audience. Recommended, with some reservations.

For an alternative read about what happens to humanitY in a crisis, try Blindness by Jose Saramago, which manages to be both bleaker and more hopeful than Ballard.