In October 2013 the Guardian reported that everything had gone a bit High-Rise in a new housing development in Hayes, west London. The 600 flats at High Point Village, about half an hour up the M25 from J. G. Ballard’s former home in Shepperton, are a mix of ‘luxury’ and ‘affordable’. The two sorts are divided by gates. ‘Tension came to a head in August after a disruption to the water supply left some residents in affordable homes without water for nearly two days. Some residents found an emergency hosepipe existed for the private homeowners only to be told it could not be used to temporarily supply affordable homes. Families claim that at one point they were reduced to filling up bottles from a decorative fountain at the entrance to the luxury housing area.’
To the disappointment of committed Ballardians, the feud didn’t escalate any further. No one, as far as we know, was barbecuing Alsatians on their balconies. High Point Village cannot quite validate the Guardian’s original comment on High-Rise, which blares from the front cover of the 1975 paperback edition: ‘A hideous warning.’ Today, that would feel like an odd way to sell the book. Ballard’s prescience is extraordinary – tipping Ronald Reagan for President in a 1967 short story, inventing Facebook in a 1977 Vogue essay – but a novel’s predictive power is almost never the most interesting thing about it. I want to propose two readings of High-Rise here: the book is all about architecture; the book is not about architecture at all. And according to the latter, High-Rise is no more a ‘warning’ about barbarism in tower blocks than 1966’s The Crystal World is a ‘warning’ about the African jungle freezing into crystal.
Yet it’s true that this novel, more than any other of Ballard’s early career, draws on what was actually going on in England at the time – the concrete tendencies, so to speak, of that country in that decade. In an interview with Jon Savage, Ballard connected the unnamed high-rise of High-Rise – which from now on I’m just going to call the High-Rise – to Hulme Crescents in Manchester, the gargantuan housing development that had been ruled unfit for family occupation only two years after its construction. And Ballard’s character Anthony Royal, the architect of the High Rise, surely has his basis in Ernő Goldfinger, the architect of Balfron Tower in Poplar and Trellick Tower in Kensington. Like Royal, Goldfinger anointed his own building by moving into its penthouse (although he quit Balfron Tower for a terraced house in Hampstead only two months later). And like Royal, Goldfinger was immanent in his creations, the man and the monument almost merging in the public imagination, to the extent that an urban legend developed that Goldfinger had thrown himself from the top of Trellick Tower in despair at its failure.
Royal, Goldfinger and the more anonymous designers of Hulme Crescents are, of course, all intellectual descendants of the French architect Le Corbusier, champion of the ‘Radiant City’ of high-tech modernist ‘habitation units’. Le Corbusier promised a utopia, and in High-Rise Ballard gives us a dystopia. But it would be a mistake to set Ballard and Le Corbusier entirely in opposition, because in fact they agree on a fundamental premise: that a new architecture can transform the moral and sentimental lives of human beings. As Ballard’s character Robert Laing observes, ‘a new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life.’
Forty years after Hulme Crescents, in our modern technocracy of think tanks and taskforces and ‘nudge units’, we tend to take this as a presupposition – that the place you live can change the way you behave. But it’s important to remember that most novelists are willing to permit this only within strict limits. In traditional literary fiction, you may be shaped by your worldly circumstances, but your fundamental moral soul remains intact and diamond-hard from your first breath to your last, and in the end it is this moral soul, good or evil or somewhere in between, that will guide your actions and determine your fate. If you’re too pliant in the grip of larger forces, then you certainly can’t be the protagonist of the story, because resisting larger forces is what protagonists are there for. Yet even the three main characters in High-Rise are perfectly happy to acknowledge that the responsibility for most of their actions lies with the building itself – this ‘huge animate presence, brooding over them and keeping a magisterial eye on the events taking place’ – or, in a broader sense, with high-rise living as a modern trend. Ballard’s casual deflation of human agency is one of his fiction’s most singular qualities. He told the Paris Review that his initial outline for High-Rise was ‘written in the form of a social worker’s report on the strange events that had taken place in this apartment block, an extended case history. I wish I’d kept it; I think it was better than the novel.’ A social worker’s report would allow for no protagonist, and perhaps no named individuals at all – the ultimate antidote to the conventional humanist chronicle.
Does the place you live really change the way you behave? A 2007 meta-study by Robert Gifford concluded that ‘children who live in high-rises have, on average, more behaviour problems. Residents in high-rises probably have fewer friendships in the buildings, and certainly help each other less. Crime and fear of crime probably are greater in high-rise buildings. A small proportion of suicides may be attributable to living in high-rises.’ So Laing may be correct that ‘people in high-rises tended not to care about tenants more than two floors below them’; take the example of High Point Village. And yet this is where we run up against the limitations of regarding High-Rise as a dispatch on twentieth-century urban life. When Ballard linked his High-Rise to Hulme Crescents, he must have been perfectly aware that there was a basic difference between the two: the former is intended for the rich, the latter for the poor. By setting his novel not in a council estate but a desirable, middle-class high-rise – regarded almost as a contradiction in terms in Britain at the time he was writing – Ballard was deliberately severing his tale from the reality of the Corbusian project.
‘The mutiny of these well-to-do professional people against the building they had collectively purchased,’ Royal claims, ‘was no different from the dozens of well-documented revolts by working-class tenants against municipal tower-blocks that had taken place at frequent intervals during the post-war years.’ Really? When a cheaply-constructed and badly-maintained ghetto for downtrodden families begins its collapse into squalor, no one can be too surprised. When a luxury condominium goes feral, that’s another story. Next to reality, High-Rise is like the account of a scientific experiment with a control group. The High-Rise and Hulme Crescents are comparable architecturally, but only Hulme Crescents is a locus of social neglect. If the High-Rise succeeds where Hulme Crescents fail, this proves that social neglect is the problem, not architecture; on the other hand, if they both fail in just the same way, this proves that the architecture is the problem, not social neglect. Is Ballard expecting us to find in the events of High-Rise a plausibility, even an inevitability? In which case we don’t have to wait for the High-Rise to be tested out in real life, because we already have such an irrefutable prophecy, a ‘terrible warning’, of what these rotten towers will do to us? Or, on the other hand, is he expecting us to recognise this case study as inherently preposterous? In which case we can stop wringing our hands about the architecture, because our attempt to imagine how it might warp different social classes in identical ways has been enough to make vivid the impossibility of such an outcome?
Let’s stop there. Clearly, even to pose such pedantic questions about this fangy and umbrous masterwork is to demonstrate the narrowness of reading it as a contribution to a specific debate in a specific time. As I said, High-Rise is all about architecture, but it’s also not about architecture at all.
‘In a sense,’ Laing muses, ‘life in the high-rise had begun to resemble the world outside – there were the same ruthlessness and aggression concealed within a set of polite conventions.’ These things are universal. The inhabitants of the High-Rise descend into barbarism with such unbridled willingness – are we really to believe the same would not have happened if they’d all been living in nice maisonettes? In an interview with Travis Elborough, Ballard said that when he spent three years as a teenager in a Japanese internment camp he got ‘a tremendous insight into what makes up human behaviour’ when he saw the adults around him ‘stripped of any kind of defence … humiliated and frightened’. Arguably, High-Rise could just as well have been set in an internment camp, or for that matter a cruise ship or a medieval convent or any other self-contained community. Perhaps the bare corridors of the High-Rise are appropriate not so much for their specifically modernist quality, but – quite the opposite – because they’re so generic, so placeless, like a black box theatre. Throughout the book we have the sense that the concrete musculature of the building is beginning to dissolve, leaving behind only a sort of oneiric grid, ‘less a habitable architecture … than the unconscious diagram of a mysterious psychic event’.
On this reading, the High-Rise finds its closest analogues not in the housing developments of London and Manchester but rather in the existentialist purgatories of Samuel Beckett, whose great short story ‘The Lost Ones’ was first published in English in 1971, four years before High-Rise. ‘The Lost Ones’ describes, with the neutrality of a social worker’s report, the nightmarish facts of daily life inside a fifty-foot cylinder so densely populated that there is ‘one body per square metre of available surface’, each inhabitant ‘searching for its lost one. Vast enough for the search to be in vain. Narrow enough for flight to be in vain.’ Just as the forty floors described in High-Rise are divided into three sections for ‘the three classical social groups’, the cylinder has ‘three distinct zones separated by clear-cut mental or imaginary frontiers’, and is ‘doomed in a more or less distant future to a state of anarchy given over to fury of violence’ when the social order breaks down.
I’m not proposing ‘The Lost Ones’ as a direct inspiration for High-Rise; my point is only that the latter novel could be stripped of all context, all names, all ‘social comment’, and it would be just as persuasive an account of the savage competition and futile endeavour that take up so much of our time on this earth. High-Rise is not a ‘warning’ of what could happen; it’s an account of what does happen, everywhere, all the time. We aren’t literally drowning each other’s dogs and ransacking each other’s flats, so instead we wage quiet wars with fake smiles, or just repress and sublimate and fantasise. Ballard’s novel externalises all that. In 2014, high-rise living is no longer a novelty in the UK; Londoners will read this book beneath a skyline sheenier than ever with notched glass, 500-foot test tubes ready for the admixture of volatile chemicals. And so this book might seem to take on a renewed relevance. But in fact its relevance has never wavered and never will. Any time in human history that two or more households have tried to share the same space, they have lived in the High-Rise.
New York, 2014