William Golding and Lord of the Flies have been mentioned several times in the early discussion of High-Rise here on the Reading group. This might be partly my fault, since I described the book detailing a “breakdown of society” and “descent from civilisation”. It’s also fair enough: there are clear parallels between JG Ballard’s marauding gangs of violent adults cut off from the world in their concrete fortress and William Golding’s wild children stuck on their island.

Yet while there are obvious similarities, it’s the differences between the books that really matter. They offer radically different views about the loss of moral norms. Implicit in Lord of the Flies is the understanding that even if the children’s descent into savagery is inevitable, it is not admirable. The narrative voice often seems outraged at the unfolding events, while Piggy and Ralph speak loudly for decency and sanity. Jack and his crew have clearly taken a wrong path and are questioned every step of the way.

High-Rise, terrifyingly, eschews such scruples. Indeed, it presents a world where it seems absurd even to ask if doing something may be morally wrong or right. It’s even misleading to talk about a descent from civilisation; the people in Ballard’s book don’t really fall at all. There’s no gradual undoing of propriety as there is in Lord of the Flies. The residents of the tower block flash into action without hesitation.

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There isn’t much destruction in the first chapter of the novel, but that’s only because everything is so new, people are still arriving, the machinery hasn’t yet been turned on. There is a symbolic flick of the switch when Wilder kills the dog in the swimming pool, signalling that chaos can start to do its work – but this doesn’t alter the moral state of the residents. It just gives them the impetus they need. To borrow a metaphor from later on in the book, it’s as if their cage doors have been opened and they are now free to act with no more thought for the morality of their actions than any other wild beasts.

This moral framework demands the easy acceptance of crude violence, sexual molestation and casual murder – making High-Rise a singularly challenging read. At times, it seems as if Ballard is inviting us to enjoy it all. Just as the narrator of the earlier novel Crash says “car crashes are good for you” and fondly advocates a death cult, so the characters in High-Rise accept and delight in the desecration of their homes and death of their neighbours. Their crimes are presented to us as natural and reasonable. All the questioning, the worrying and the outrage have to happen outside the book. This moral blankness is unsettling. And any alarm you might feel sounds all the louder thanks to the unique way in which Ballard presents his scenario. One of the ironies about the fact that “Ballardian” has become such a catch-all word in recent years is that really there is nothing like Ballard at all. The tone and register – especially of his mid-period classics like High-Rise and Crash – is never replicated. The prose is instantly recognisable, even if its characteristics include a certain plainness, a curious flatness of register, a crisp precision and curt simplicity:

Wilder stepped through the doors into the lobby, looking for somewhere to throw away his cartons of pet food. Crammed together shoulder to shoulder, the returning cost-accountants and television executives held tightly to their briefcases, eyes averted from each other as they stared at the graffiti on the walls of the car.

From the rhythms and vocabulary, you’d think that there was nothing amiss at all. The same matter-of-fact voice is maintained even in the next sentence, which reads: “The steel roof had been removed, and the long shaft rose above their heads, exposed to anyone with a missile casually to hand.”

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So it goes on, calmly describing horror after horror. Personally, I find it hilarious to read this neat, near-monotone documentation of chaos. The contrast between the careful, ordered sentences and the madness they describe is delicious. Ballard, too, said he was always keen to embrace the humour in his writing – but also that he doesn’t just strive for comic effect. His prose is the result of a series of careful decisions, which are well described in an interview he gave to Carol Orr in 1974, not too long before the publication of High-Rise:

Now I think the writer no longer needs to invent the fiction. The fiction is already there. His job is to put in the reality. The writer’s task now is to become much more analytic, especially the science fiction writer. He has to approach the subject matter of ordinary lives the way a scientist approaches nature, his subject matter.

“Ordinary lives” doesn’t exactly describe High-Rise, of course, but Ballard goes on: “You know, one devises some sort of hypothesis and then applies it to one’s own material, to one’s subject matter to see whether the hypothesis is correct.”

He provides the example of Crash, where he took the “apparently absurd” idea that car crashes might have a beneficial role, and tested this “against the reality that people were actually experiencing”. In High-Rise he appears to have done a similar thing – although the hypothesis is perhaps harder to define. That big buildings set their own rules? That neighbours are actually rivals and ought to indulge that rivalry to its fullest extent? That as soon as we become isolated from the rest of society, morality goes right out the window and that, given a high enough window, there will soon also follow wine bottles, domestic animals and luckless jewellers?

We strive all the more to work out what he is driving at precisely because of his sharp analytical tone. Because it feels like a lab report. Because there has to be some sort of sense behind such writing, doesn’t there? Ballard even said that he originally wrote out his scenario for High-Rise as a kind of social services review of the destruction of the building – and that he sometimes thought that this review would have made a better novel, if he’d decided to publish it.

Whatever the truth of that, High-Rise still retains enough of the tone of a report to make this inversion of reality and all human values seem like something we have to face up to. It doesn’t just tell us that we might, given the circumstances, start behaving a little wildly: it suggests we are wild and we had better start analysing what that means. Perhaps it’s more of a provocation than a cautionary tale – but it’s a provocation with a sharp point.