High-Rise: A Novel

High-rise is a dystopian near future story about a new series of high rises that are built to be a self-sustaining community. Here, classes range from working class on the lower levels to the highest of the upper class towards the top. The building is equipped with pools, grocery stores, and even schools. The only reason the tenants leave is to go to work. Then, the new building starts experiencing power outages and other issues that spark animosity between the upper and lower tenants, and soon becomes an uncontrollable battle of supremacy. The story is a social commentary on how the animosity between classes can fester until it explodes into chaos, and when pushed far enough, people can easily revert to their baser instincts for survival. Filled with unsettling interactions and grotesque desires, this story keeps you entertained as you watch the characters you thought you understood devolve into something else entirely.

(Spoilers? Be warned.)
(TL;DR, This book is amazing, and comes highly recommended. Don’t take it *too* literally.)

I’ve read other reviews of this book stating how pointless the violence and “degradation fiction” is, and how that makes up a significant part of the book. Never-mind the fact that the characters, even our own narrators, are often paper-thin at best; stating their most tightly held beliefs and secrets for the reader rather than letting the story tell itself.

That’s a load. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read. The violence does reach a point of utter pointlessness; a point where the reader themself goes, “Well, here’s another paragraph of viciousness, maybe I’ll just skim over that…”; near-perfectly mimicking the experience of a resident of the so-named High Rise slinking around a corner when they see someone they barely know getting savagely beaten. The same goes for the descriptions of conditions in the High Rise; good lord, I’ve never expected to read the words “dog excrement” as I begin a new chapter so often.

And yet, despite the utter depravity going on in Ballard’s vertical sandbox, he never loses that utter detachment from his descriptions, like he were a news reporter from another dimension. The terrifying ease with which he writes about an armed man breaking into an occupied apartment, terrorizing the residents, and pissing all over the bathroom gives me the jitters; and makes me want to check the locks on my doors even now.

And the characters… good god, the characters. Here is likely where I lose a bit of the surrounding context, given that I know of the place and time Ballard was writing in from a removed perspective. Still, I can see the tread-marks; a society on the brink of an infinity of technological bounds made commercial; residential; pedestrian, even, and the slough of social problems inundating the people ‘lucky’ enough to receive those technologies. Ballard never out and out says all this; but just read the book, and tell me that the entire thing doesn’t stink to high heaven of it.

Even the High Rise itself gains humanized qualities, becoming a living character under the noses of both the reader and the occupants. As we unwittingly witness the progression/regression of this place like an alien fungus, we are introduced to our stand-in humans; the ones we are meant to see ourselves in; even just a bit. Despite perhaps missing the “stay-at-home wife” POV, Ballard manages to make the (admittedly, male) cast work for the story, and lures the reader in with moral traps and failings following plenty of time to bond with our new friends, each overwhelmed by their surroundings, much as we are. The working man, providing for his children. The salaryman, having just flown the nest. The executive, the man with just enough power over his own life to not know what to do with it. Even externally, more views of the world poke their way through, finding space to rent in our heads.

You see, each of the characters is not meant to undergo some “Hero’s Journey”. There is no grand plot to be thwarted, here. No true villain. Not even the High Rise itself could be called that; it’s just a building, and one designed if for any reason, to care for its residents. Yet, without maintenance, it becomes worse than the jungle. Can the same be said for us who, lacking social maintenance, may simply revert to being the most dangerous animal of all?

Buy the book. Read it once, and you’ll find a character that your empathy sticks to, like a fly to paper; or more fittingly, like the ape to a clan. Read it again, here in a couple years. Which character are you, this time?