I was walking to work recently and I was thinking about J.
G. Ballard, I’m not sure why. For some reason J. G. Ballard popped into my
head, and I had a hankering after reading something by him, something I hadn’t read
before. I was thinking about islands, books about islands and what motivates
them and the themes they engender: survival, breakdown or absence of social
structures, limited resources, enclosure, isolation. I had started to write a
novel about a woman cast adrift on an island and was finding myself
dissatisfied with the setting, with the cliché of it, the inability to write
anything new on the subject. Then I thought about Ballard.
Ballard writes about islands. This thought hit me with an
unexpected force. I have read a few books by Ballard: The Drowned World, The
Unlimited Dream Company, Empire of the Sun, Crash. All these books involve
islands of sorts, even Crash in which the ‘island’ is the motor car and within
it and surrounding it a new kind of social order emerges. I had heard about
Concrete Island – a story of a man who crashes on a traffic island and becomes
trapped there – and, of course, High Rise in which the story takes place
entirely within a tower block. All these are islands. I realised that reading
Ballard could inform my work. Of course, thinking about Ballard and his
personal history this island theme is no surprise, and perhaps rather than
islands it is more that Ballard focuses on enclosed environments in which the
normal rules of social order are shattered – and knowing his early childhood
spent in a Japanese prison camp in Shanghai, that this subject is the primary
fodder for his work is perhaps not too surprising.
They had High Rise in my local library, so that’s where I
started. The story focuses on three men: Robert Laing, a doctor (there is often
a doctor in Ballard’s novels – reflecting his training as a doctor which he
abandoned); Anthony Royal an architect responsible for some of the building’s
structure, a man who was injured in a car crash (yes!) and who Laing has been
aiding in his recuperation; Richard Wilder, a TV journalist and some time
friend to Robert Laing. The men are connected, and each live in distinct
hierarchies within the high rise: Wilder on the lower floors, Laing in the
centre, Royal in the penthouse suite on the roof. At the beginning of the novel,
the last tenant of the high rise has just moved in and the building is now
complete, self-contained. Within the high rise is everything the tenants might
need: supermarket, liquor store, school, swimming pools, hairdresser. Almost
immediately, Ballard sets up the sense that the high rise takes over from the ‘natural’
environment, and its design is somehow key to the events which then take place
therein:
“The high-rises seemed
almost to challenge the sun itself – Anthony Royal and the architects which had
designed the complex could not have foreseen the drama of confrontation each
morning between these concrete slabs and the rising sun. It was only fitting
that the sun first appeared between the legs of the apartment blocks, raising
itself over the horizon as if nervous of waking this line of giants. During the
morning, from his office on the top floor of the medical school, Laing would
watch their shadows swing across the parking-lots and empty plazas of the
project, sluice gates opening to admit the day. For all his reservations, Laing
was the first to concede that these huge buildings had won their attempt to
colonize the sky.”
This is, perhaps, another pre-occupation of Ballard’s work:
the way in which the environment shapes the people within it. At the point of
completion, a change takes place within the high rise. Almost immediately, the
social order begins to break down. There are parties which become increasingly
wild, bottles thrown from windows damaging the cars parked in the car park
below. Aggression towards women and children, a sense of violence in the air,
breakdown of shared resources – elevators, waste disposal, air-conditioning.
There is an aura of insomnia, with noise and parties going on until the early
hours of the morning. Yet life continues almost as normal. People go to work in
the morning in a civilised manner, and no one talks about what is happening in
the high rise.
Prescience is a word which is often associated with Ballard,
and this is no less true in relation to High Rise. I was stalled out of the
book when I read the following paragraph, written in 1975, which seems to
predict the world of social media and which reflects the polarisation of life
within the high rise of the book, the point at which the building splits into
three: the lower classes in the lower floors – the first to lose their lights
and air-conditioning -, the middle classes in the centre playing the lower and
upper floors off against each other, the upper classes at the top maintaining
their semblance of civilisation whilst being the first to commit atrocious acts
of violence. But before I go on, here is Ballard, ever prescient:
“Perhaps the recent
incidents represented a last attempt by Wilder and the airline pilots to rebel
against this unfolding logic? Sadly, they had little chance of success,
precisely because their opponents were people who were content with their lives
in the high-rise, who felt no particular objection to an impersonal steel and
concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government
agencies and data-processing organisations, and if anything welcomed these
invisible intrusion, using them for their own purposes. These people were the
first to master a new kind of 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.”
Scary.
What follows is a descent into violence, sexual violence,
degradation, starvation. Someone intentionally drowns a dog. The building turns
into a free-for-all battle zone, with stairwells turned into war zones,
barricaded against the ‘enemy’ being anyone from a different floor. The three
men: Royal, Laing, Wilder become representatives of their zone. Wilder becomes
obsessed with the idea of reaching the upper floors, confronting Royal who he
perceives as the ‘king’ of the high rise. He reaches it once, only to be
violently slung back to the ground with the rest of the waste. Yet he doesn’t
give up. Laing hovers in the middle, cementing his territory, collecting his
women and hunkering down. Royal is waiting for Wilder on the roof, anticipating
the violence to come with a sick relish. As he describes here:
“Royal stepped down on
to the roof deck. He enjoyed the hostile gaze of the birds sitting on the
elevator heads. The sense of a renascent barbarism hung among the overturned
chairs and struggling palms, the discarded pair of diamante sunglasses from which
the jewels had been picked. What attracted the birds to this isolated realm on
the roof? As Royal approached, a group of the gulls fived into the air, soaring
down to catch the scraps flung from a balcony ten floors below them. They fed
on the refuse thrown into the car-park, but Royal liked to think that their
real motives for taking over the roof were close to his own, and that they had
flown here from some archaic landscape, responding to the same image of the
sacred violence to come. Fearing that they might leave, he frequently brought
them food, as if to convince them that the wait would be worth their while.”
There is always an edge of violence, the descent into chaos
and pure will in Ballard’s work, quite probably informed by his experiences in
the prison camp. Whilst the unwillingness to talk, the unwillingness to escape
from the high rise seems implausible, I couldn’t help feeling that it is this
very fact that Ballard is seeking to warn us about. His own experiences have
shown how the breakdown of the social order to which we cling – the ideas of
justice, of civilisation, of honour and righteousness – are a thin barrier
holding back our inherently violent nature, in which whatever we want is there
for the taking if only we are powerful enough, violent enough, depraved enough
to grab it. Yet though they may be seemingly mere sexual pawns in the men’s
violent game, Ballard never underestimates the women and, in the end, they may
become the ultimate rulers of the high rise…
