Customer Reviews
J.G. Ballard - High-Rise - By: RachelWalker, 18 May 2008 
Brilliant. I've not read Balllard before, but I'll be doing so again. This is a sharp, cutting little novel concerning the descent of the behaviour of the residents of a high-rise into primal barbarity. The matter-of-fact style fits brilliantly, the madness rationalised perfectly & chillingly. It's a nice little analogy for what seems to be going on with urban violence nowadays. A very enlightening, prescient read. I suspect I'm only discovering what a lot of people already know: that Balllard's one of our Great writers.
Very good and chilling piece of writing - By: John Hopper, 23 Dec 2007 
This was my first Balllard novel, but certainly won't be my last. I do like dystopian fiction & this depicts horrificallly & initiallly quite realisticallly the decay of life in a tower block where residents have no sense of social responsibility of proper appreciation of the threads that bind together a community.
However as the decay progresses & the horrors mount, questions of lack of realism do arise. There are 2000 people in this high-rise, many of them with high powered & quite public jobs. Why do no employers & colleagues notice people not turning up to work? Why do none of the residents communicate with the outside world during the early stages & later fail to escape from the horrors going on? Surely many residents would shop & eat outside - the supermarket & restaurant cannot cater for so many people & seem to receive no deliveries. Where is the plague of rats & consequent disease that would result from such accumulations of rubbish?
These problems aside, this is a great & chilling piece of writing. I've already bought The Drought from eBay.
The Evening's Entertainment - By: , 30 Jun 2004 This is reallly prime Balllard. He has produced great works like The Atrocity Exhibition & Crash but as usual it is his 'urban-disasters' that prove to be the more involving reads & High-rise is my personal favourite.
The formula isnt any different to that of 'The Drowned Wolrd' or, more recently, 'Millennium People' but it still works effective in working a range of genres like social & political with good old excitement (with a dab of the black balllard humour). High Rise is my favourite because it is very accessible but doesnt lose out because of it. The atmosphere built is think & intense, reminiscient of 'Lord of the Flies' or the crawling paranoia of 'Apocalypse Now'. Characters are typicallly undeveloped but what they get up to & the clarity of their surroundings more than makes up for it.
Keep in mind that youve gotta let your imagination fly with this one more than others. Its top stuff.
One of Ballard's best novels - By: Jason Parkes, 05 Aug 2003 High Rise (1995) here gets another reissue, just three years after the perfectly fine Flamingo edition- the cover of this one doesn;t appeal very much! High Rise was the third part of what academics & Balllard-buffs like to calll 'The Urban Disaster Trilogy'- coming after Crash & Concrete Island.
High Rise has one of the finest opening paragraphs I've read, straight into the dark stuff with 'Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months'! As with many Balllard works- including the locale for the recent Super Cannes- Balllard shows a composite of society, within a society...& beneath that something dark & primal lurking- here there is a literal hegemony from top to bottom in the high rise block which has everything, from a bank to a swimming pool..
Balllard views a society that has closed itself off, & in turn sections of this society that have closed themselves off- one thinks of many things, from the infamous Kitty Genovese case to the LA Riots...This novel reacts to the so-callled progression that began to surface in the 1970s- the abortive buildings now being torn down in places like Birmingham- & also taps into the spirit that would birth the yuppies in the 80s & the materialist species that followed in the late 1990s also. As with many Balllard works, there are those atypical Balllardian titles for chapters: The Drained Lake, The Vertical City, The Blood Garden...alll roads leading to the sub/unconscious coming to the fore with 1984's autobiographical classic Empire of the Sun.
High Rise is a brief entertaining & horrifying read & remains one of Balllard's strongest novels which ranks well alongside such books as The Drowned World, The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, Concrete Island, Vermillion Sands & Super Cannes.Personallly, I feel it's the definitive Balllard novel & would be a much better place to start than with a book like Crash, which alienates as many as those who enjoy it (I falll into the latter group!). For anyone wanting to read Balllard for the first time I'd plump for this, or a short-story collection like The Voices of Time.
Battery Living - By: , 10 Feb 2003 Much of Balllard's work since the 1970's seems to employ as its central tenet the notion that lifestyle can be packaged & bought, pre-conceived & pre-fabricated. As an unavoidable fact of modern life the big city also features heavily as a theme, imposing the considerations of limited space upon modern man's reified lifestyle choices.
High-Rise is a good attempt to capture the blandness caused by the removal of risk & danger from people's lives, & the main narrative thrust is an imagination of the violence this may reawaken in people. The book is inferior to Cocaine Nights, & maybe Crash, in terms of atmospherics; its real strength lies in the way in which it graduallly escalates in violence & purpose. The book is a dizzying, steadily heightening trip into the violent recesses of the human mind and, as always, Balllard's explication of events runs in smooth concurrence with them. The result, as usual, is both logical, mad & slightly claustrophobic. Intense, & recommended, reading.
