March 03 2018, 21:09

High Rise

I read several Ballard books in the late nineties — my mid-twenties — starting with short stories, before being entranced by the shiny silver paperback cover of Super-Cannes. I thought I’d read High Rise, but I quickly realised on starting it that I hadn’t. There was the usual Ballardian sense of society being on the edge of primal chaos, but I’d read so many blurbs on the backs of his books they were blurring together.

Robert Laing is a newly divorced medical academic moving in to high-rise block in London. He’s hoping for a life of comfortable anonymity. We also meet Richard Wilder, a television documentary-maker on the second floor, and Anthony Royal, the building’s architect, in the penthouse. The high-rise is portrayed as a mixture of designed technology and living organism—a social experiment designed by Royal and embraced by the residents.

Laing is a social chameleon who wants to make a safe place for himself in the building, whereas Wilder wants to conquer it and confront its maker. Each man tries to make the building serve them in their own ways, but it’s the women who ultimately make the place their own.

If the high-rise is a living thing, Ballard is its ultimate creator, and I like the idea of Laing, Wilder and Royal being different aspects of Ballard’s creative personality. The prose mixes an omniscient point-of-view with that of each character as Ballard moves between them. The omniscience could also be that of the building itself. It’s a little irritating how characters reveal chunks of backstory in their thoughts, but the descriptions are brilliant and unnerving, and Ballard finds endless ways to show the collapse and degradation of the initially modern and comfortable environment.

I was nervous about watching the film—I didn’t want to subject myself to two hours of disgust and misery. The film is quite different though. It’s directed by Ben Wheatley and adapted by his long-term screenwriting and editing partner Amy Jump who makes the main protagonist Laing. Wilder and Royal are still important, Laing is given far more agency. The film honours the book in how it portrays the dying building, but differnt chaacters come to the fore. It’s an impressive feat.

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