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Jul 15, 2015JimLoter rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
I read this book amidst a high-rise building boom in Seattle. The landscape is saturated with cranes and the downtown streets are becoming more and more cavernous as the complexes grow higher and higher around us. I didn't really know anything about this novel before I started it, and I was astonished to learn after I finished that it was written 40 years ago. The themes of social and human deterioration through stratification, structure, and artificiality are perhaps even more urgent today. I have no issues with the fact that the "war" that erupts inside the building is unrealistic. The book is absurdist (and deeply dark) satire and realism is not a yardstick with which to measure it. I also don't have an issue with the fact that no "reason" - no triggering event - is given for the breakdown in the high-rise society. In fact, the impact of the book would be significantly lessened if there were an external catalyst or worldwide cataclysm at the center of it. The perverse beauty of the book's conceit is that the capacity for the collapse is within the participants all along - Ballard demonstrates that all that is needed to tip humanity into savagery is a gentle push in our living environment away from nature. The world of the high-rise is meant to be self-contained - it is designed to take care of its residents' needs completely. This seemingly benign, even desirable, characteristic is enough to paradoxically kill the last shreds of civilization. In this way, High-Rise is the opposite of Lord of the Flies - the book it is most often compared to - in that it is a hyper-civilization that results in de-evolution and not a return to the jungle. The issue I do have with the book is that is stretches its point out far too long. There is no "plot," so to speak - no central mystery or puzzle to solve (as in Ballard's [title: Kingdom Come], for example), no goal for the characters to attain. The rapid breakdown of civility and the establishment of (and subsequent failure) of a clan system forms the entire story. The breakdown begins almost immediately and the subsequent disintegrations are all just variations on each other, so the book quickly becomes repetitive. Each successive step toward the end is just a more slightly more terrible iteration of the step before it. It could be that the strong central premise just isn't rich enough to fill a novel.