Absolution - Jeff VanderMeer

 Absolution is the fourth and final part of the Southern Reach Series, written ten years after the first trilogy came out - in one triple release - in 2014.

Southern Reach is the agency tasked with reclaiming the Forgotten Coast.   The problem is Area X, a space that has been sealed off beyond the Border, where bizarre things occur.   The first section of Absolution is the story of an early expedition in which biologists go to the Forgotten Coast to research alligators, some specimens of which they take with them.   In Area X they are plagued with carnivorous rabbits, each of which carries a camera.   The biologists cope with the rabbits, wiping them out the American Way, only for more rabbits to arrive with more cameras to munch up the dead rabbits.   Some of the cameras are captured.  They show videos of the the expedition members doing things they would never dream of doing.   Then one of their number goes rogue, morphing into something more than human, rampaging through the camp with one of the alligators as a sort of pet sidekick.

All this is gleaned by a longstanding agent known only as Old Jim, who is plucked off skid row and rehabilitated by the Central command of Southern Reach.   Part of his rehab involves puttting together the story of the expedition.   He becomes obsessed with the enigma "Rogue".

Next up, Old Jim is sent to the Forgotten Coast.  His cover is as the new owner of the local bar where expedition members drank twenty years before.   He is joined by his daughter Cass - only she isn't reeally Cass but another agent sent to spy on Old Jim.   They establish a real relationship and together get a long way into the central mystery of Rogue.   But at the last minute, after things have been getting increasingly weird for some time, the Border comes down.   How and where from are questions never answered.   All we know is that, one year later, another team is sent in to Area X to find out what happened and, perhaps, to recover Old Jim.

With this second team things start extremely weird.   We experience it all through the eyes of James Lowry, a foul-mouthed gung-ho action man, whose response is to shoot before thinking.  And with Lowry the last man standing - standing on the edge of the intestinal link with reality, discussing matters with his bio-hazard skin-suit - the tetralogy ends.

It is a powerful piece of work, perhaps best approached by reading the four novels in the intended order.  Nevertheless, VanderMeer dragged me in.   I genuinely couldn't stop reading, albeit I wasn't always enjoying myself.   Old Jim is a compelling character, Cass an effective mirror for him.   Lowry (Young Jim, ppssibly?) is less so and I didn't care much about his fate.   VanderMeer's writing is dense and sparky and I am definitely on the lookout for more.

The Hopkins Manuscript - R C Sherriff

A real rarity, this. One of very few novels by an established writer that has been published under three titles: first as An Ordinary Man, then as The Hopkins Manuscript, and finally as Cataclysm, presumably to cash in on the popularity of John Wyndham and Arthur C Clarke. I'm guessing hardcore sci fi fans were not convinced by the latter. There is a cataclysm all right but in this blend of English comic fiction and dystopia the former has very much the upper hand.


Retired teacher Edgar Hopkins is a member of the Lunar Society. One evening he and his fellow members are given news that world is probably going to end in a few months' time and sworn to secrecy for fear of mass panic among the less enlightened class. Hopkins, who has found himself a rural idyll where he raises prize-winning poultry, enjoys one last winter and a final, luscious spring. Inevitably, given the nature of the cataclysm, news can only be hidden so long. The government (very unlike our own) is determined to preserve the peace whilst preparing for the worst. A massive bunker is built in Hopkins' village. Hopkins, a bit miffed not to be in charge, nevertheless lends a hand because being part of ordinary life is what matters in a time of extreme crisis. He does not, however, go underground on the night the worst happens, but wakes next morning to find a sea-going ship stranded in his inland meadow.


It turns out he is one of the lucky survivors. He takes in a pair of youngsters and an elderly agricultural and begins the long, slow rebuild. Then - in a truly extraordinary twist which I really can't go into because it will give the game away - war breaks out between nations over the thing that caused the catastrophe. This - human fallibility - is what really ends the world. But still Hopkins survives, ending up in his uncle's house in Notting Hill, spending what are surely his final days working on his manuscript. He tells us on page one of Chapter One, "I am writing by the light of a piece of string which I have pushed through a fragment of bacon fat and arranged in an egg-cup." Now that is how you start an end-of-the-world dystopia!


R C Sherriff didn't write many books. He was best known as a playwright, though the simple phrase barely does him justice. His first proper play, Journey's End, was a huge hit in 1927, running at the Savoy for two years. It remains the defining play about World War I. It and Sherriff both went into the movies. He wrote films like The Invisible Man, Goodbye, Mr Chips, Odd Man Out and The Dambusters. And yet he is almost forgotten today. Outrageous. If the writing in The Hopkins Manuscript is typical of his output we are missing a master.

All Tomorrow's Parties - William Gibson

All Tomorrow's Parties - a title always guaranteed to snag the attention of a Velvets' fan like me - is the third part of Gibson's late-90s Bridge Trilogy. The others are Virtual Light and Idoru. I haven't read either of those but I'm certainly going to now.


I love Gibson and I loved this book. The bridge in question is the Golden Gate, which has been taken over by interstitial settlers since the long overdue earthquake made it unsafe for vehicles in the early 21st century. People there live in small re-purposed containers and sell stuff to tourists. Meanwhile in Tokyo, Colin Laney lives in very similar conditions in a subway station. There he immerses himself in the net in search of nodal points and his idoru Rei Toei, a seductive holograph. Laney sends ex-cop Rydell to collect the projector carrying Rei Toei. Rydell's next port of call is the bridge where he encounters his former girlfriend Chevette, also returning to the bridge where she lived with a previous lover.


From there on in, it's the beginning of the end of the world as bridge-dwellers have come to know it. I won't reveal any more because the plotting is so wonderfully tight. The dialogue is sharp, the prose sizzles with cyperpunk connectivity. Nobody but nobody does it better than Gibson, the Elmore Leonard or Stephen King of near-contemporary dystopia.

Crash - J G Ballard

Ballard's fiction sprouted from ideas, not character. His characters tend to by cyphers, even when - as here - they are actually called James or Jim Ballard. The idea here, in 1973, is that cars have become fetishes, the greatest fetishes ever because we build endless motorways and parking facilities to accommodate them.

James has an accident and while in hospital he becomes peripherally aware of Vaughan, a former TV star who lost his career when he lost his looks in a crash of his own. Vaughan has become something of an iconoclast. The only way he can get sexual arousal from the car-fetish is by crashing. He has devised elaborate sexual fantasies about the death-by-car of the film star Liz Taylor, who is in Shepperton, the ultimate Ballard location, filming some rubbish of the kind that propped up the British film industry in the 1970s.


James has a modern marriage. He and his wife are both besotted with Vaughan and his scars. James goes further and has complicated sex with Gabrielle, who has been crippled in her accident, in her specially adapted invalid car.


The book is profoundly offensive and is meant to be. After a while you come - as intended - to view the car-sex in the same way you might skim through a list of the latest features on the car you were always going to buy anyway. For most of the book Ballard uses exactly the same language - blunt, functional, technical - for sexual orifices that he uses for buttons and switches on the cars. Things liven up when Vaughan and Ballard have wild sex on acid outside a breaker's yard.


Crash is a technical exercise rather than a novel. It achieves its purpose and I'm glad I read it. I won't be reading it again.

The Four-Dimensional Nightmare - J G Ballard

Short stories were never going to be the driving force of Ballard's fiction. They were just something he wrote to get into print and build a readership. This 1977 Penguin collection is an oddity even for Ballard. Two of the stories in the version originally published by Gollancz in 1963 have been replaced. To be fair, one of the replacements, "Thirteen to Centaurus", is one of the standout stories here. The other, "The Overloaded Man", is however completely forgettable.

As for the rest, time is a recurring theme. "The Voices of Time" and "The Garden of Time" rather speak for themselves, and "Chronopolis" isn't exactly oblique in its subject matter. I actually enjoyed all three. The length of the first allows for complexity and ambiguity, which I find Ballard always does rather well, whereas the shortness and simplicity of the second tilted it more towards fantasy, which Ballard does hardly at all. "Chronopolis" would be a classic short story in any collection with its brutal, sardonic twist.

Both "Chronopolis" and "Thirteen to Centaurus" feature clever and lonely young boys as protagonists. Empire of the Sun, which I consider Ballard's masterpiece, of course tells the tale of young Jim. I really wish he had used the young boy character more often. You can forgive a teenager his or her obsessions, whereas the grown men of High Rise and Kingdom Come can be downright unpleasant.

Two of the three remaining stories, "Cage of Sand" and "The Watch-Towers", share the abandoned city setting of "Chronopolis". I preferred the former, which is set on Mars, where a handful of hangers-on gather to watch the regular orbit of the capsule with a dead astronaut in it.

My favourite in the collection, though, has to "The Sound-Sweep". The over-developed world has become so noisy that people are employed to sweep away extraneous noise. The mute Mangon has a particular gift for tracking down and erasing the slightest lurking murmur. In his spare time he pays court to the forgotten operatic diva Madame Gioconda. No one listens to live music now. The fashion is for

Ultrasonic music, employing a vastly greater range of octaves, chords and chromatic scales than are audible by the human ear [which] provided a direct neural link between the sound stream and the auditory lobes, generating an apparently sourceless sensation of harmony, rhythm, cadence and melody uncontaminated by the noise and vibration of audible music.

Now that is exactly the sort of fiendish construct that gets the very best out of Ballard!

The Man Who Japed - Philip K Dick

One of three early novels collected here, The Man Who Japed was written in 1956. It is set in the second decade of the 22nd century but it looks and sounds a lot like 1956. What Dick is doing is satirising the homely, apple-pie culture of the American Fifties and preserving its worst aspects - the sanctimonious self-righteousness, the fetish of the upwardly mobile, and above all the hysterical dread of infiltration by the unclean outsider.
Armageddon devastated the Western World in the 1970s. A hero arose from the ashes, Major Streiter. Unfortunately Streiter was a South African major at a time when the Boer state was not exactly known for its liberality. The society that Streiter created in his own image was called Morec - Moral Reclamation. Provided they remained moral, a family could aspire to rise over the generations, winning leases on one-bedroomed flats ever closer to the omphalos, the statue and spire honouring the New World Patriarch in Newer York.
Allen Purcell is one such high-flyer. In his late twenties, he has his own agency providing 'packages' for the state broadcaster Telemedia (TM). One morning Purcell is offered the ultimate promotion - director of TM. There's just one problem: earlier in the week Purcell spent the night in Hokkaido, drinking wine with two outsiders of his acquaintance; on the way home he passed through the park and 'japed' the statue of Major Streiter. That is to say he vandalised it. Big time. His unauthorised absence has been noted. A couple of days later he is seen with an attractive young woman who is not his wife.
The young woman is in fact the sister of Dr Malparto, a key figure in the flip side of Morec, the side polite society doesn't like to talk about - the Resort, where Morec sequesters the ne'er-do-wells, the artistic, the antisocial, the morally unreclaimable. The Malparto siblings kidnap Allen Purcell, try to psychoanalyse him, but Allen escapes, takes the job at TM, and ends up committing the ultimate jape.
Like so much of Dick's work this is satire but not as we generally think of it. Allen Purcell is by no means the archetypal Star Wars freedom fighter. His weapon of choice is not a laser gun but mockery. Yet he is a rebel, he has a cause, and in the end he turns his back on the easy solution. He is, unusually for a Dick hero, quite likeable. I liked him anyway.

Kingdom Come - J G Ballard

Kingdom Come, from 2006, was Ballard's last novel. It ploughs his usual field - suburban dystopia, As usual, his principal characters are mundane men and women offered just a glimpse of something higher. In High Rise the driving force was class division, the castes rigorously separated by floor, In Kingdom Come everyone is the same class - the amorphous middle class that inhabits the soulless, faceless dormitory towns around the M25. The totem to which they aspire is the shopping mall, the giant Metro Centro which dominates the fictional township of Brooklands. Even as our outsider, Richard Pearson (a typically anonymous name) pitches up, the dream is beginning to sour. Some lunatic opened fire on the mall shoppers thronging the atrium, Richard's estranged father, a retired airline pilot, is among the dead.

Richard has nothing better to do - he has just lost his job in adverstising alongside his marriage - so he stays on in Brooklands. He stays to settle his father's affairs there but ends up moving into the old man's flat. He gradually gets drawn in to suburban life. He meets various locals - solicitor, doctor, policewoman, He meets David Cruise, the minor celebrity who helms the Metro Centre's cable TV channel. He worked with Cruise in the old days. Richard has ideas for making Cruise's onscreen persona more compelling...

Ballard's problem is that his vision of the near future is already out of date. He thought that consumerism was rotting the public psyche whereas it was always unrestricted credit that made us sick. The banks were allowed to count debt as profit on the fatuous premise that it would someday be repaid. Only two years after Ballard published - a year or less before he died - the truth was revealed to the world. Malls like the Metro Centre were built on foundations of sand and how the economists and entrepreneurs wish we could be seduced back through the doors.

The other problem is that Richard Pearson is not really an outsider. He is a member of the glitzy London elite with his fancy flat in Chelsea and his classic Jensen car. Brooklands is the creation of people like him, the place where they decant the people they don't want to live next door. For people like Pearson the M25 isn't how the poor folk get into inner London, it's how the residents of inner London bypass the suburbs. Pearson virtually drips contempt and we can't avoid the conclusion that it's a contempt entirely reflecting that of his creator. Take the opening para:

The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world...

The plot, such as it is, is predictable, the twists predictable. Ballard is concerned not with his story but with his thesis and as such both suffer. The odd thing is, you can't stop reading, a measure of Ballard's deceptively prosaic style. In that sense Kingdom Come is a fitting coda to a fifty-year career, however it brings nothing new to the table.

 

1Q84 Book Three - Haruki Murakami

OK, not the best idea to read book three of a magnum opus with no knowledge of the first two.  But there we are.  This is what I did - and it didn't matter.  Murakami's dystopian world is so similar to the 'real' world as it was in Japan in 1984 that it makes no difference. His big concept is self-explanatory and does not subsume the three main characters, Aomame, Tengo and Ushikawa,  Aomame has crossed into this world and killed the Leader of the Sakigake sect.  She is being hidden by the Dowager but it obsessed with finding Tengo, briefly a schoolmate twenty years ago.  Tengo is a part-time teacher who has ghost-written the sensational bestseller Air Chrysalis for the teenaged prodigy Fuka-Eri, real name Eriko Fukada.  Air Chrysalis is ostensibly science fiction but actually it is an expose of the Sakigake cult.  In this world - which no one has noticed is different, even though the main difference is two moons - the air chrysalis and the Little People who make them are real.  Ushikawa is the profoundly ugly investigator who has been hired by Sakigake to track down Aomame.  He goes to great lengths because he feels responsible, as he was the one who vetted her when she started work for the cult.  Unable to breach the Dowager's elaborate security he decides to track down Tengo instead.

It is an intriguing book, which keeps rumbling on in the mind long after you've put it down.  The Little People, when they appear, are jaw-dropping.  Who is the unseen fee-collector for the national TV service who keeps banging on people's doors - even when they haven't got TVs?  What is his relationship to Tengo's comatose father?  What difference does the smaller, greenish moon make and why has nobody noticed?

Murakami's cool, understated prose makes the bizarre instantly acceptable - and, when the truly bizarre things happen, gives them double the impact.  By focusing on the three main viewpoint characters, and giving them each a chapter in turn, he builds an appreciation of their personalities by sheer accumulation.  Their linking characteristic is a patient stoicism - it doesn't matter how long Ushikawa has to stake out Tengo's apartment; Aomame cannot and will not leave Tokyo for a safer location until she has found Tengo, even though she has no reason to believe he has thought about her since they were ten years old; and Tengo is content to sit by the bedside of the father for whom he has no feelings whatsoever, using his spare time to plod away at his novel.

Superb.  I will be happy to read the other two books (published in a single volume in the UK) but what really appeals to me is Murakami's earlier international successes, Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore. 

Transition - Iain Banks

The problem with sci fi is that there is a balance needs to be struck between big idea and human interest.  So far as I am concerned Arthur C Clarke never found it, albeit his ideas were admittedly huge.  Transition isn't officially sci fi, in that Banks hasn't used his middle initial, his usual sci fi signature.  Perhaps he considered it more of a dystopian novel.  If so it is a multiverse dystopia.  His polished narrative skills just about got me through the 450 pages, and there were many passages of great interest, but there was no human interest, absolutely none, and that was a huge disappointment.

The crux of the matter is there are too many central characters spread across too many parallel Earths, none of them emotionally engaged with any other.  None have any engaging human traits and all are, to a greater or lesser extent, servants of the all-powerful Concern - the ubiquitous future-Nazis of far too many similar works.  Their means of travel - the titular transition - is trite, a device for getting them out of any peril at the speed of thought.  The consequences of the device are blithely ignored by Banks whereas for me that would have been the key to human interest - what does the non-transitioner make of the fact that their loved one's body has evidently been taken over by someone from a parallel world?

I can't deny Banks' narrative gifts but Transition has put me off any of his overt sci fi and I shall carefully check the nature of any of his straight novels before taking the plunge again.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - Philip K Dick

Stigmata is Dick at the height of his powers, in the early Sixties, when he was knocking out books at the rate of at least two a year.  It appeared a year or two after The Man in the High Castle, which I reviewed here a couple of months ago.

The setting is the late 21st century.  The world has become an uncomfortable place to live, with temperatures fatal by lunchtime.  Capitalism has progressed to the inevitable stage, where a few monopolies control the world.  The elite pacify the plebs with the drug Can-D and the miniature world of Perky Pat, a Barbie-type doll with every conceivable accessory to collect, forming a perfect self-contained picture of the world as society's romantics would like it to be - essentially, smalltown America circa 1968.  Indeed, Perky Pat (and Can-D) is the only thing that keeps conscripted colonists sane on the dust-bowl that is Mars.

Can-D is a social drug; it allows users to enter the Perky Pat world as a group.  But then the renegade capitalist entrepreneur Palmer Eldritch returns from exploring the outer reaches of the solar system.  He brings with him a new drug, Chew-Z, which threatens the monopoly of Can-D.  Any threat to Can-D is a threat to P P Layouts, miniaturists of Perky Pat and her world.

P P is where our keys characters work - the pre-cog Barney Mayerson, who assesses the viability of objects offered to be 'minned', and Chairman of the Board Leo Bulero.  The story begins when Richard Hnatt, current husband of Mayerson's ex-wife Emily brings in a selection of her hand-made ceramics for minning.  Mayerson cravenly rejects them.  His fellow pre-cog and current squeeze Roni Fulgate disagrees and tells Bulero.  Bulero fires Mayerson and, with no real alternative employer to take him on, Mayerson volunteers for Mars.

Actually there is another option, a rival for P P.  A strange example of humanity called Icholtz strikes a deal with Hnatt and offers Mayerson a job.  Bulero responds by offering Mayerson his old job back.  But Mayerson is determined to go to Mars and the best Bulero can do is persuade him to become his eyes and ears in the colonists' hovels.

Bulero is a bubblehead, one of the elite who pay Dr Denkmal (of the Eichenwald Clinic) to artificially evolve their frontal cortex.  Hnatt, suddenly in possession of a wodge of truffle skins (the only acceptable cash in the late 21st century) signs himself and Emily up for the full programme, although she is reluctant and fearful of the occasional glitch which is accidental regression.  For the proles, like Mayerson, who are not so low in the pecking order that they have to subsist on drugs and dreams, but who can never put together a sizeable stash of liquid funds, there is Dr Smile, the pyschoanalyst in box, who is probably a simulation because he never gets your name quite right.

Palmer Eldritch, too, might be a simulation or simalcrum.  Many times when we encounter him, he turns out to be a projection.  He is known everywhere that mankind lives by his three stigmata: the artificial mechanical arm, stainless steel teeth and wide-vision artificial eyes.  The downside of his challenger drug Chew-Z is that people who appear in your visions often display the three stigmata, as do people who are themselves under the influence.  Chew-Z is antisocial drug; you go into your inner self, a world which consists of you and simulcra of Palmer Eldritch.

Mayerson figures this out:

It's an illusory world in which Eldritch holds all the key positions as god; he gives you a chance to do what you can't really ever do - reconstruct the past as it ought to have been. [SF Masterworks edition, p. 176]

It is not so much a question of which reality is real as which reality does the least harm?  Yes, it's a genre work but The Three Stigmata is also a novel of serious intent and genuine insight.  On the one hand it forecasts the future we now have - are Can-D and Chew-Z Facebook and Twitter?  is Palmer Eldritch a simalcrum of Richard Branson?  On the other hand, it is a vision of its time and a mirror of our time.  I highly recommend it.

The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick

I have long been aware of Philip K Dick, but the only book of his I had hitherto tried was complete and utter rubbish.  Unfortunately I cannot remember what it was called.  All I know is, it read like it had been knocked up late at night on an unhelpful cocktail of caffeine and amphetamines.

Yet I was still interested enough to give The Man in the High Castle a try.  It seemed a safer bet, having been written early in Dick's career and having won the Hugo Award in 1963.  The cover art on this Roc paperback was also an inducement.

And how taking the chance paid off.  This is not only a good dystopian novel, it is a good novel, many-layered with rounded characters and a cunningly contrived writing style.  The action is set in San Francisco in 1962, but California is the Japanese part of North America, the East Coast being part of Germany.  Thus Japanese people are high status and the indigenous population converse with them in a form of pidgin shorthand.  Yes, the Axis of Japan and Nazi Germany won World War 2.  Baldur von Shirach has drained the Mediterranean to provide extra farmland and Lufthansa runs a rocket service that can cross the Atlantic in under an hour.

The Japanese are much more easy-going than the Nazis.  The Reich is run by Bormann, Goebbels, Goering and Heydrich are all still active, though Adolf himself is in an asylum.  Genocide is still very much the order of the day (presently concentrated on the African continent) but the Japanese consider such policies subhuman.  The Japanese collect prewar American artifacts, like Colt pistols and Mickey Mouse watches.  Rickshaws ("pedecabs") thread their way through downtown traffic. The Nazis meanwhile are exploring space.

The current bestseller on the Pacific Coast (it's banned in the Reich) is The Grasshopper Lies Heavy by Hawthorne Abendsen, a dystopian novel in which the Allies overcame the Axis in 1945.  It is said the Nazis hate it so much that Abendsen has to live in a fortified tower to protect himself and his family.  He is the Man in the High Castle.

The book which everyone on the West Coast is obsessed with is the I Ching.  Everyone, irrespective of race or status, is casting hexagrams at every opportunity.

There are various narrative strands, loosely linked: the retailer of high-end Americana Robert Childan; Frank Frink, the secret Jew who actually makes some of the so-called antiques Childan sells; Frinks estranged wife Juliana, a judo instructor who takes up with an Italian trucker and sets off in a quest to find the man in the castle; Tagomi, who heads up the Home Islands trade mission in San Fransisco; the mysterious Baynes, who purports to be a Swedish businessman.  Everyone seems to have a position, but everyone has to review their position - usually in consultation with the yarrow stalks of I Ching - when the third Fuhrer, Martin Bormann, unexpectedly dies.

Unlike the other Dick book I tried, The Man in the High Castle is brilliantly constructed, the writing polished without ever toppling over into bland.  If the author of the first novel was fried with stimulants, this one has the focus and clarity of Sherlock Holmes on cocaine.  I am now willing to give any Dick novel a try.  Apparently The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is also available in Roc paperback (a Penguin imprint I had never previously heard of), so that seems like the perfect next step.

High-Rise - J G Ballard

Reading J G Ballard’s High-Rise (1975) quickly put me in mind of Golding’s Lord of the Flies from 1954.  The resemblance goes beyond mere dystopia.  Both are about civilised man’s predilection to run wild when deprived of his creature comforts.  For both Ballard and Golding, the veneer of social cooperation is tissue-thin.

I don’t want to labour the point because there are obvious differences between the books.  Golding wafts his schoolboys off to a tropical island whereas Ballard maroons his adult male protagonists in a suburban London tower block.  To begin with at least, both locations smack of the paradisiacal.  But, just as Eden had its serpent, so Ballard’s suburbia houses an underlying menace: 

The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape.  Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence....  The cluster of auditorium roofs, curving roadway embankments and rectilinear curtain walling formed an intriguing medley of geometrics - less a habitable architecture, he reflected, than the unconscious diagram of a mysterious psychic event. [Ballard 1975: 34-5]^[1]

For me, massive high-rise developments bring to mind the disastrous social experiments of the 1960s in northern cities like Sheffield and Manchester.  Streets of slums wiped away in favour of jerry-built slums in the sky.  Ballard’s London high-rise is very different.  This new-built development of a thousand apartments is for affluent buyers only; professionals at the very least (Laing, for example, is a lecturer at a medical school), preferably stockbrokers and above.  It remains a social experiment, though.  The size of the apartments, and naturally their cost, increases the higher up you go.  The architect himself, Anthony Royal, occupies the penthouse.  The utopian idea was for the residents at all level to come together in the communal areas like the shopping mall, the swimming pool, and the Royal’s rooftop sculpture garden.  In practice, even as the last of the residents moves in, the middleclass has subdivided itself into three - lower, middle, and upper - and never shall the twentieth floor, let alone the ground floor, aspire to the fortieth.  What was meant to be a single community has become an amalgam of a thousand islands.

These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth century life.  They thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed. [Ballard 1975: 46]

Royal has built himself a vertical kingdom, with courtiers and even courtesans.  To be able to be the top of the pile means that someone must be at the bottom, and the lower orders always have the potential to become unruly.

In many ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly ‘free’ psychopathology. [Ballard 1975: 47]

It begins with a fifteen-minute blackout on just three floors.  Residents isolated on the tenth floor concourse stampede.  Some are briefly marooned in the lift between floors.  Somebody, for reasons unknown, drowns a dog in the communal swimming pool.  From that point the veneer cracks, faultlines spreading from the centre like a spider’s web.  Inhibitions slip, the garbage disposal shutes become clogged, people smear dog shit, parties run on for days, a man dies.

Class turns against class, floor against floor.  People defend their territory to the death.  No one leaves the high rise.  No one calls the police.  Their world turns in on itself, becomes self-contained.

The true light of the high-rise was the metallic flash of the polaroid camera, that intermittent radiation which recorded a moment of hoped-for violence for some later voyeuristic pleasure. [Ballard 1975: 133]

The Aerodrome - Rex Warner

The most striking thing about Warner's dystopian classic is the date of its composition.  The Shape of Things to Come and Brave New World were both written in the Thirties and allegorised the rising threat of Fascism,  Animal Farm and 1984 are both postwar Forties and reflect the perceived Soviet threat.  But The Aerodrome came out in 1941, when the war was well under way and Germany and Russia were still allied.  What threat is Warner dealing with here?

It seems to me he is dealing with a much earlier threat, one which never came to anything.  In the immediate aftermath of World War I, when Britain had faced airborne invasion for the first time, when millions had died for no apparent gain and millions more were dying from Spanish flu, spread by the returning survivors of war - back then it must have seemed that revolution was a real possibility and the most likely revolutionaries were the newly skilled servicemen, especially those masters of the newest war technology, airmen.

That is certainly what they are up to on the unnamed aerodrome outside Warner's unnamed country village.  The airmen are unaccountable - the Flying Officer shoots the Rector, by accident, at the fair and succeeds him as Rector in time for the funeral.  Then the Air Vice-Marshal, who attends the funeral, takes a shine to young Roy, who has only just found out he isn't really the Rector's son, and persuades him to join the Air Force.  The Air Vice-Marshal has a plan; it seems to involve taking over; but we never find out what it is because---

And underneath all this is the question who is actually the child of whom?  It's not just Roy.  No relationship in this neck of the woods seem to be what it really ought to be.  It doesn't help that only three characters are referred to by name - Roy, Bess and Dr Faulkner.  Everyone else is the Rector's Wife, the Squire's Sister, etc.

It's all very enigmatic, almost deliberately obscure.  Take, for example, the subtitle, 'A Love Story'.  Oh no it isn't.  Yet it is constantly entertaining and beautifully written.  Chapter Twelve, in which the Air Vice-Marshal addresses his new recruits, is a masterpiece of dystopia in its own right.  This Vintage edition also has the bonus of an excellent introduction by Michael Moorcock.  Well worth checking out.