High Rise
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J. G. Ballard's 1975 novel High-rise, takes place in an ultra-modern, luxury high-rise building.
It was published in New York by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1977 with ISBN 0030206510.
Plot synopsis
The building seems to give its well-established tenants all the conveniences and commodities that modern life has to offer: swimming-pools, its own school, a supermarket, high-speed elevators. But at the same time, the building seems to be designed to isolate the occupants from the larger world outside, allowing for the possibility to create their own closed environment.
Life in the high-rise begins to degenerate quickly, as minor power failures and petty annoyances over neighbours begin to escalate into an orgy of violence. The high-rise occupants divide themselves into the classic three groups of Western society: the lower, middle, and upper class, but here the terms are literal, as the lower class are those living on the lowest floors of the building, the middle class in the centre, and the upper class at the most luxurious apartments on the upper floors.
Soon, skirmishes are being fought throughout the building, as floors try to "claim" elevators and hold them for their own, groups gather to defend their rights to the swimming pools, and party-goers attack "enemy floors" to raid and vandalise them. It does not take long for the entire building to abandon all social restraints, and give in to their most primal urges. The tenants completely shut out the outside world, content with their new life in the high-rise; people abandon their work and family and stay indoors permanently, losing their sense of time. Even as hunger starts to set in, many of the characters in the novel still seem to be enjoying themselves, as the building allows them a chance to break free from the social restrictions of modern society and toy with their own dark urges and desires. And as bodies begin to pile up and the commodities of the high-rise break down, no one considers alerting the authorities.
The tenants of the high-rise abandons all notions of moral and social etiquettes, as their environment gives way to a hunter/gatherer culture, where humans gather together in small clans, claim food sources from where they can (including the many dogs in the building, and eventually even the other tenants), and every stranger is met with extreme violence.
As he did in Concrete Island, and his controversial Crash, Ballard here offers a disquieting vision of how modern life in an urban landscape and the advances of technology offers the human psyche hitherto unexplored ways to play with our own deviant nature and innate perversities. And as is usually the case with his work, this book should not be taken literally. It does not require much of an analytic eye to realise that the high-rise building and its tenants are, in fact, a stand-in metaphor for Western civilization itself.