High Rise by J. G. Ballard

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…

High Rise is a short whirlwind of a novel, hard to read at times and heavily violent. The words ‘rectilinear’ and ‘chromium’ appear perhaps a tad too often, but this is a signature Ballard flourish and forgivable in the wider context of the novel. Uncannily prescient, Ballard shows us how dystopias can arise in pockets even within the wider confines of a civilised society, and whilst the residents’ compliance makes little sense, any descent into violence is nonsensical. One might argue this is domestic violence on a macrocosmic scale. But sense doesn’t matter in a violent world, only the violence and those surviving it matter. It is a warning worth paying heed to. 

Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky (translator Christine Lo)

There is something about islands which captures the imagination, about which every person has an instinctive reaction. Perhaps that reaction is fear: a terror of being trapped or contained, a horror of being isolated or alone. Perhaps that reaction is exuberance: the prospect of forging your own destiny unhindered by wider society, the idea of being free and independent, self-reliant. Our reaction to the idea of an island may depend on mood. Perhaps in a good frame of mind we envisage our island as a paradise rich with bird and plant life, luscious blue seas and a cocktail bar on the beach. In more forbidding moods we may imagine our island to be tiny and desolate, edged by vicious rocks and a wild sea, a tempestuous wind. Even for those of us that live on an island, as I do, the islands of our imagination rarely match the real thing and it can be hard to conceptualise the idea that we are alone and isolated, cut off from the mainland, though ringed by seas that cannot be bridged without reasonably advanced technology.  There are so many of us here, after all. Yet something about this reminds me how once I became trapped in an elevator, and the whole time I felt like a person abandoned on an island, isolated and alone. I quite enjoyed it, but the experience lasted only around 1 hour and 15 minutes and I was well provisioned. Surviving on a remote island may be a different proposition entirely.

“It struck me for the first time that islands are in fact small continents and that continents are in turn no more than very large islands. This clearly outlined piece of land was quite perfect and yet lost at the same time, like the loose sheet of paper on which it had been drawn. Every connection to the mainland had been lost. There was no mention of the rest of the world. I have never seen a lonelier place.”

Judith Schalansky explains in the detailed introduction to this book, tantalisingly sub-titled “Fifty Islands I have not visited and never will”. I often skip book introductions, impatient to get to the ‘meat’ of the story, but this introduction is well worth reading as though it Schalansky explains both the concept for this book and what the exploration, from the safety of her study or library, has taught her about what islands mean to people. “a land surrounded by water is perceived as the perfect place for utopian experiments” is one answer; “The attraction of a beautiful void” another. Perhaps more disturbingly “the island that has been the focus of so much yearning often turns out – as might have been expected – barren and worthless” or “a remote island makes a natural prison: surrounded by the monotonous, insurmountable walls of a persistent, ever-present sea”. Chilling just to think about it.

The fifty islands themselves are an eclectic bunch, and their stories are unique and, whilst brief, strangely satisfying. It is a book to read at leisure, taking time over each story to absorb its brief beauty. Organised by ocean, Schalansky devotes a page to text and a page for a map of each island. She shows us islands inhabited and uninhabited. Islands abandoned and islands claimed. Islands which are remote, inaccessible, frozen and lifeless. Islands with unusual and dying customs. Some islands are more familiar than others: Easter Island, for example, that monument to human folly; Iwo Jima representing folly of a different kind. But it is the stories themselves that fascinate, like here as Schalansky describes Lonely Island, a Russian island in the Kara Sea shaped, curiously, like a decaying leaf. Now abandoned, a record of the island’s history remains in the log book from polar observatory that had existed on the island and Schalansky draws our particular attention to its last entry:

“The final entry in red felt-tip pen spills over the confines of the columns: 23 November 1996: the evacuation order came today. Pouring the water out. Turned off diesel generator. The station is…The final word is illegible. Welcome to Lonely Island.”

But this book, whilst focused on the islands, is also a love letter to the art and adventure of cartography. Schalansky didn’t set out to find these islands, instead she traced them on dusty old rolls of paper hidden somewhere in an archive or the dark belly of the public library. What she learned of the islands, she learned through meticulous exploration of records and archives, old newspaper reports and notes from scientific journals. “It is high time for cartography to take its place among the arts,” she says, “and for the atlas to be recognised as literature, for it is more than worthy of its original name: theatrum terratum, the theatre of the world.”

I’m inclined to agree. I, too, have a love of maps. I remember, as a child, tracing the outlines of countries in my hand-me-down Australian encyclopaedias that had belonged to my brother and sister when they had lived on that rather larger, warmer island than the one I found myself growing up on. I remember my own drawings of islands: imaginary ones and those intended as representations of the real, taking care over all the tiny twists and turns of the coastline refining, perhaps, inaccuracy to something in the order of hundreds of miles. Even now I have a ritual when we go camping that I will always pick up the Ordnance Survey map of the area, and it is a small excitement unfolding the map, laying it out on the uneven ground and tracing the contours I can see if I only look up and around me. Finding the odd place names and trying to imagine how they came to be. The secret pleasure in being able to refold it properly, which always seems near impossible. My children, on account of this exposure, have inherited this love too, and this makes me wonder if the joy of map tracing is something of a dying art, as the world moves to a more ‘accurate’ and less romantic digital view. Perhaps as long as gorgeous books like this one exists, the art of cartography and the joy of map exploration on a damp Sunday afternoon will long continue. I hope so.