Order HIGH-RISE here
* a suggestion by Blake Butler *
No book review can make you fall in love. They are a mean to an end for a customer looking to wisely invest the little money he has to spend on literature. Sometimes, a book is so good and trying to break it down in words is so frustrating, it makes you want to put it into a blender, mix it and shove it down somebody's throat, so that they can consume it as viscerally as you did. I'm going to try and tell you how much I loved HIGH-RISE by J.G Ballard, but I don't believe anything can top the experience of actually reading this terrifying and visionary piece of fiction. The incoming movie adaptation will eventually vindicated the novel and the author, but nothing can top the experience of spending a couple days with this all too vile and realistic narrative steamroller.
Dr. Robert Laing has recently moved into a 40 floors high-rise building after a brutal separation with his wife. The hyper-modern facility offers shelters over a thousand households, offers several perks to its resident and is almost self-sufficient like a small town. The high-rise is a world away from the world though and it has nothing to offer to its people except chaos and lack of social structure. Dr. Laing, Richard Wilder and architect Anthony Royal are all prisoners of the building as people start to turn against one another, society collapses and a new world emerges. Could the worst thing that have happened to human beings be absolute freedom? Don't fall for easy comparisons, HIGH-RISE is nothing like William Golding's Lord of the Flies and nothing can prepare you for it.
I try not to use this term lightly, but this is a case where it applies: J.G Ballard's HIGH-RISE is a literary masterpiece. I don't know how else to put it, really. It was published 40 years ago and yet its vision of the future is clear and accurate. We don't live in Utopian existential slaughterhouses today, but we do fight over whatever clashes with our lifestyle. Ballard illustrates it vividly and pertinently in HIGH-RISE by pitting people with dogs against people with children. The brilliance of this seemingly banal image is symbolizing something as nebulous as the professional class, career oriented, slightly self-centered people who are wealthier but lonelier against the more traditional middle class, who constantly feels cheated and entitled to an intangible condition upgrade. HIGH-RISE is one big battleground, but almost nothing in it can be taken at face value.
My favorite character in HIGH-RISE was by far Anthony Royal, the conceiving architect of the building, living on top of it like a disinterested God. The religious metaphor is a tad obvious, but it's what J.G Ballard does with his God that is beautiful and haunting. As the uproar is gaining the upper floors of the building, Royal descends into his creation to become a part of it. The image of God as a powerless architect who created a world that services the individual, yet pits communities against one another is profoundly disturbing, because there is no one left to pray to. In the world of HIGH-RISE, only cold, clinical logic will help you survive.
In psychoanalysis, it is said that a children needs a father in order to enforce limits on him and shape his understanding of right and wrong. He symbolizes the law. In the self-sufficient high-rise building, there is no law aside the logical access to commodities designed by its creator and soon its inhabitants turn into packs of lawless children. The police is barely mentioned, it might as well have been on another planet. HIGH-RISE is a contemporary masterpiece because it's original and tremendously written, but also because it's pertinent and closer to reality than we would feel comfortable to admit. No other author than J.G Ballard could've come up with such a savage and transcendent vision and that is why it sucks he is not immortal and still writing novels today.
BADASS
