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]
