High-Rise is a 1975 novel by British writer J. G. Ballard. The story describes the disintegration of a luxury high-rise building as its affluent residents gradually descend into violent chaos. As with Ballard's previous novels Crash and Concrete Island, High-Rise inquires into the ways in which modern social and technological landscapes could alter the human psyche in provocative and hitherto unexplored ways. It was adapted into a film of the same name, in 2015, by director Ben Wheatley.
Plot
Following his divorce, doctor and medical-school lecturer Robert Laing moves into his new apartment on the 25th floor of a recently completed high-rise building on the outskirts of London. This tower block provides its affluent tenants all the conveniences and commodities that modern life has to offer: a supermarket, bank, restaurant, hair salon, swimming pools, a gymnasium, its own school, and high-speed lifts. Its cutting-edge amenities allow the occupants to gradually become uninterested in the outside world, providing them with accommodations and a secure environment. Laing meets fellow tenants Charlotte Melville, a secretary who lives one floor above him, and Richard Wilder, a documentary film-maker who lives with his family on the building's lower floors. Life in the high-rise begins to degenerate quickly, as minor power failures and petty grievances among neighbours and between rival floors escalate into an orgy of violence. Skirmishes become frequent throughout the building as whole floors of tenants try to claim lifts 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. The lower, middle, and upper floors of the building gradually stratify into distinct groups. It does not take long for the occupants to ignore social restraints, abandoning life outside the building and devoting their time to the escalation of violence inside; people quit their jobs, and families stay indoors permanently, losing all sense of time. As the amenities of the high-rise break down and bodies begin to pile up, no one considers leaving or alerting the authorities, instead exploring the newly-found urges and desires engendered by the building's disintegration. As Laing navigates the new environment, Wilder sets out to reach floor 40 — the top of the building — and finally confront the building's architect, Anthony Royal.
Legacy
High-Rise was known to be among Joy Division singer Ian Curtis's favorite books. The book has been cited as an influence upon the 1987 Doctor Who serial Paradise Towers. Hawkwind used the book as the basis for a song of the same name on their 1979 album PXR5. In a lecture on JG Ballard with John Gray, Will Self represented Withnail and I director Bruce Robinson's interpretation of the story which has "the unconscious, the car park of the building, penetrating the ego in the conquest of the super ego in the top of the building." He then stated that Ballard would have hated that interpretation, with Self preferring instead the interpretation that "Freudian ideas swirl and fail to coalesce," as they are "appropriated by individual mythomanes without actually reflecting an external reality."
