Arbieroo reviewed High-rise by J. G. Ballard
Review of 'High-rise' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
A forty storey high-rise apartment building stands surrounded only by it's tenants' parking spaces and then, other soon to be completed forty storey high-rise apartment buildings.
All is well, initially, as the building fills up with tenants who only need to leave to go to work - the building itself has gyms, swimming pools, supermarkets, hairdressers, restaurants and other shops and services. Soon after the last apartment is occupied, however, things take a strange turn. Services such as elevators, garbage disposal and electricity intermittently fail and soon vandalism and violence follow.
So far, so like the reality of numerous high-rise housing projects except that this one is full of medium to high income earners and luxuries rather than poor people. What happens next gets progressively more far-fetched. I never bought into it. The break-down of some microcosm of society into primitivism and violence is Ballard's staple and he at least …
A forty storey high-rise apartment building stands surrounded only by it's tenants' parking spaces and then, other soon to be completed forty storey high-rise apartment buildings.
All is well, initially, as the building fills up with tenants who only need to leave to go to work - the building itself has gyms, swimming pools, supermarkets, hairdressers, restaurants and other shops and services. Soon after the last apartment is occupied, however, things take a strange turn. Services such as elevators, garbage disposal and electricity intermittently fail and soon vandalism and violence follow.
So far, so like the reality of numerous high-rise housing projects except that this one is full of medium to high income earners and luxuries rather than poor people. What happens next gets progressively more far-fetched. I never bought into it. The break-down of some microcosm of society into primitivism and violence is Ballard's staple and he at least makes believable scenarios in my previous experiences with him but here I did not. I felt that the isolation of the high-rise community was largely unrealistic because everybody had jobs to go to and there was much less opportunity for exploitation by criminal elements i.e. the tenants of this high-rise are much less vulnerable than the typical range of people in a social housing tenement. We are expected to buy the idea that the folks in this luxury high-rise choose to isolate themselves and descend into violent anarchy, tribalism, scarcity and danger. I think that element of choice is the reason I was never convinced by this story. In an interview at the end of the book, Ballard talks about how his obsession with the frailty of the veneer we call civilisation stems from how it was ripped from Shanghai overnight by the Japanese invasion that put him in a POW camp when he was in his early teens - but that was coercion. There is no coercion in this novel. The book, whilst short by modern standards, is also too long. It becomes repetitive early and stays that way to the end. The use of several characters' view points doesn't help, making the story disjointed and the lack of any real plot to follow means there is nothing dragging the reader through the book. I have no doubt that a 50p story would have done the material justice. Maybe even 25p. Which leads me to...
The second star for this book comes from the short story of only 10p printed in the extras section along with the interview. It does what the whole preceding novel fails to acheive; sets up a weird social order and explains how it collapses (in miniature) whilst never becoming dull. I think Ballard was a much stronger short story writer tan novelist, despite such excellent novels as [b:Empire of the Sun|56674|Empire of the Sun|J.G. Ballard|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1338519188s/56674.jpg|55232] and [b:Rushing to Paradise|70273|Rushing to Paradise|J.G. Ballard|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1170723917s/70273.jpg|68090].
