To the point that they find themselves eating dogs, as suggested in the opening sentence of the book:

As soon as they move in, all inhabitants “ forget their jobs in the outside world, cut contact with friends and relatives, and descend into a war of all against all“. In High-Rise, the tower block is more than just a setting for the novel. “ Perhaps more than any other writer, he focused on his characters’ physical surroundings and the effects they had on their psyches“, wrote journalist Chris Hall in The Guardian. As he always claimed, that experience was enjoyable and rather inspiring. When he was a child, Ballard became a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp. All these four experimental and dystopian books explore the psychological experience of living in gated communities. High-Riseis the final book in a quartet of novels including The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973) and Concrete Island (1974).

The tower block thus turns into a twisted adult mirror of William Golding‘s Lord of The Flies and Janne Teller‘s Nothing, with no resolution or moral principle. Yet, petty grievances among neighbours soon culminate in an orgy of irrational behaviour and unjustified violence, a warfare between floors. Life runs smoothly and seems to be perfect. They all live in this luxurious “vertical city” designed to provide any sort of commodity: a supermarket, a bank, a swimming pool, a hair salon and a school. The characters of Laing, Wilder and Royal are members of a so to speak “virtually homogeneous collection of well-to-do professional people – lawyers, doctors, tax consultants, senior academics and advertising executives”.

At the top of the building, there is the realm of Anthony Royal, the architect of the high-rise: an imperious, almost grotesque, penthouse, which is spacious enough to fit a small field and a horse. Almost twenty floors below lives Richard Wilder, a brutal and hot-headed documentary filmmaker, with his pregnant wife and their children. There is Robert Laing, a recently-divorced doctor and lecturer who moves in on the 25 th floor following his sister’s advice. Three characters are at the centre of High-Rise. When a building turns into a brutal jungle The book follows the abrupt escalation of violence, madness and psychosis of the two thousand residents of this modern – especially for the 1970s – forty-storey tower block. How do buildings influence human behavior? With his dystopian novel High-Rise (1975), English writer James Graham Ballard, known as ‘J.G’, tries to answer this question, focusing on a luxury high-rise on the outskirts of London, in present-day Canary-Wharf.

James graham ballard high rise