Product Description

From the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Cocaine Nights comes an acclaimed backlist title -- the unnerving tale of life in a modern tower block running out of control -- now reissued in new cover style. Within the concealing walls of an elegant forty-storey tower block, the affluent tenants are hell-bent on an orgy of destruction. Cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on 'enemy' floors and the once-luxurious amenities become an arena for technological mayhem!In this classic visionary tale, human society slips into violent reverse as the inhabitants of the high-rise, driven by primal urges, recreate a world ruled by the laws of the jungle.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6980 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Review
'Ballard's finest novel! a triumph.' The Times 'Another eerie glimpse into the future. A fast-moving, spine-tingling fable of the concrete jungle.' Daily Express 'A gripping read, particularly if you like your thrills chilly, bloody and with claims to social relevance.' Time Out 'Harsh and ingenious! High-Rise is an intense and vivid bestiary, which lingers unsettlingly in the mind.' Martin Amis, New Statesman

About the Author
JG Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. His most recent novels include the bestselling (and critically acclaimed) Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.

Customer Reviews

A surreal and chilling study of social degeneration
I have just finished reading High Rise, JG Ballard's surreal and chilling study of social degeneration within the walls of a 40 storey apartment block populated by an ascendant order of professional classes. The novel makes for compulsive reading as Ballard propels his complicit characters through an apocalyptic gallop towards their primordial origins. The author fills the margins of his fiction with the accumalitive waste of modern existence, and its encroachment is so powerful that the reader can almost smell the rotting garbage and faecal climate of this surrealist tower block. The intoxicating violence and the strange allure of a human community radically re-ordering itself somewhere outside of the technological frontier make this a must for committed Ballard fans and new readers alike.

The Evening's Entertainment
This is really prime Ballard. He has produced great works like The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash but as usual it is his 'urban-disasters' that prove to be the more involving reads and 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 and political with good old excitement (with a dab of the black ballard humour). High Rise is my favourite because it is very accessible but doesnt lose out because of it. The atmosphere built is think and intense, reminiscient of 'Lord of the Flies' or the crawling paranoia of 'Apocalypse Now'. Characters are typically undeveloped but what they get up to and 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.

Paradise Towers.
The theme of High-Rise should be familiar to anyone who has read the author before, as Ballard once again plays with the ideas of how a physical setting can affect a characters internal psychological landscape. Unlike Ballard's earlier novels however, which featured one characters immersion and eventual acceptance of his surroundings, here the narrative is equally divided between three main protagonists representing the tenants of the lower, middle, and upper floors of a high-rise block. As the situation inside the high-rise becomes more dislocated from reality, so the building becomes more ingrained in the tenants psychology. As one character climbs the high-rise, he reverts to a childlike mentality - even losing the power of speech - mirroring the children's play area that awaits him at the summit.

The idea of violence as a form of recreation amongst a cloistered society is perhaps better explored in Ballard's later novel Super-Cannes, but this novel is still bursting with startling ideas and imagery, and the eventual emergence of the ultimate victors in this class war makes for an unexpected and satisfying conclusion. Highly recommended.