High Rise J G Ballard Read Online
J G Ballard's High-Rise, published forty years ago and soon to be seen on cinema screens in a film adaptation directed by Ben Wheatley, begins with ane of the virtually arresting beginning sentences in 20th-century literature: "Later, every bit he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken identify within this huge flat building during the previous three months."
High-Rise is the final part of a quartet of novels – the first iii are The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973) and Physical Island (1974) – with each book seeded in the previous one. Thematically High-Ascent follows on from Concrete Island with its typically Ballardian hypothesis: "Can we overcome fear, hunger, isolation, and find the courage and cunning to defeat anything that the elements tin throw at u.s.a.?" What links all of them is the exploration of gated communities, concrete and psychological, a theme that is suggestive of Ballard'southward babyhood experiences interned past the Japanese in a prisoner-of-war campsite on the outskirts of Shanghai in the 1940s. It was, he e'er claimed, an feel he enjoyed.
The congenital environment is not a backdrop, rather it is integral and distinctive in its recurring imagery – from abased runways, to curvilinear flyovers and those incessantly mysterious tuckered pond pools. Perhaps more than any other author, he focused on his characters' physical surroundings and the effects they had on their psyches. Ballard, who died in 2009, was also interested in the latent content of buildings, what they represented psychologically. Or, as he once obliquely put it, "does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?" – by which he meant that we project narrative on to external reality, that the imagination remakes the globe. In Ballard's fiction, nothing is taken at face value.
In High-Ascent and Physical Island especially, Ballard examines the flip side to what he chosen the "overlit realm ruled by advertizement and pseudo-events, science and pornography" that The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash mapped out. Under-imagined or liminal spaces, such equally multi-storey auto parks and motorway flyovers, act as metaphors for the parts of ourselves that we ignore or are unaware of. His characters are often forced to appraise the physical surround and, by extension, themselves rather than to take them for granted.
Ballardian space – what he called "inner infinite" to differentiate information technology from the science fiction that concerned itself with distant planets and infinite rockets – is in fact a fusion of inner and outer infinite. There is no "out there" totally separate from his characters; just every bit there is no exclusively private, isolated inner life. His most psychologically fulfilled characters look to transcend their concrete surroundings, however hostile, past embracing them.
The obsessive manner in which Ballard came to employ the built environment in this way began with his short story "The Last Beach" in 1964, in which a homo called Traven finds himself on an abandoned atomic testing site on a Pacific atoll after his wife and immature son have died in a automobile crash. The abstract lexicon in the story evokes a prison – in that location are mazes, blocks, bunkers, cells, corridors, aisles. His mind jumps from one fractured event to another in a kind of brusk circuit. Time becomes "quantal" merely similar the blocks on the island. There is no past, no future – merely an endless, eventless present. He chooses to stay there with the always intensifying hallucinations of his expressionless family rather than be rescued, and he hides from a search team when they come on to the island. Traven doesn't and so much embrace his surroundings as go them.
In Concrete Island, Ballard maroons the architect Robert Maitland, Crusoe-like, in a triangular interzone of a motorway intersection, armed only with "a tool-kit, some architectural journals and 6 bottles of white Burgundy". The situation he finds himself trying to escape is an extended metaphor for Maitland'south personal life, trapped in the dead infinite between himself, his wife and his mistress.
Ballard kept repeating his mantra that "In a totally sane society, madness is the simply freedom". In the chilling novella Running Wild (1988), set in a suburban gated community in Berkshire, the lives of the residents are a paralysing middle-form carousel of ordered sterility. Ballard details how this terminal colorlessness leads affectless children to impale their parents – and become away with it.
In High-Ascension, over the form of three months, a 40-storey tower cake housing 2,000 residents – "a pocket-size vertical city" – descends from civilisation to tribalism to hunter-gatherer savagery (there is even a suggestion of cannibalism), in a kind of mass psychosis where they retreat from the exterior earth. Though Ballard was non a political author in a narrow party sense, it tin can certainly exist read as a premonition of the selfish Thatcherite gild to come – a human being-eat-domestic dog gild also every bit a dog-consume-canis familiaris 1.
High-Rising has a clearly Freudian chemical element to its 3 main protagonists. Richard Wilder (played in the film by Luke Evans) represents the id; Dr Robert Laing (clearly referring to RD Laing, the author of The Divided Self , and played past Tom Hiddleston) is the ego and the edifice'south architect, Anthony Regal (Jeremy Irons), who lives in one of the penthouse apartments, is the super-ego. The tower block and the wider city are conceived of every bit living organisms, of having a consciousness of their own. "Like a huge and aggressive malefactor, the high-rise was determined to inflict every believable hostility upon them." The calming lines of the rectilinear tower contrast with "the ragged skyline of the city" which "resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crunch".
At this psychodynamic level the residents actually enjoy the breakdown of the building'due south services, and the growing confrontation between the floors. Simply this is no class war – the residents are all middle-class professionals – information technology'south territorial, atavistic. Defensible Space: People and Design in the Violent City (1972) by Oscar Newman, an American professor of urban planning, was a big influence on Ballard. Newman, like Jane Jacobs before him in The Death and Life of Corking American Cities (1961), argued that urban violence tin can exist mitigated by designs and layouts that exploit the natural surveillance of open spaces inside and outside buildings, something that high-rise buildings notably lack.
There were many architectural inspirations for High-Ascent РLe Corbusier's Cit̩ Radieuse in Marseille, the Montparnasse tower in Paris Рbut the closest model is probably the brutalist Balfron tower in east London, not far from where Ballard puts his cluster of v tower blocks (more or less in present-mean solar day Canary Wharf). Its architect, Erno Goldfinger, like Royal, lived in one of the penthouse flats before long after its completion but moved back home to Hampstead after only a few months. Not only did Goldfinger end upwardly as the sinister Royal in High-Rise, only as an arch Bail villain Рhis Willow Route neighbour Ian Fleming objected to his modernist firm, which was supposedly out of keeping with the street'south Georgian housing.
Loftier-Rise's producer Jeremy Thomas had been trying to go the novel filmed for nigh forty years. An early on Paul Mayersberg script fix it in the middle of the desert in Arizona, and a more than recent adaptation for the director Vincenzo Natali had information technology located on a floating Burj Khalifa-like megatower – all of which, curiously, was to miss the central indicate that the building is mentally, rather than physically, cut off from the urban center; the structure turns its back on the urban center by choice non circumstance.
For film-makers information technology's a challenge to convey Ballardian space not only considering of the technical difficulties in rendering "inner space" only besides considering all the author's fiction is in a sense gear up in the near future – what he called "the next 5 minutes". David Cronenberg's Crash (1997) has probably managed this best, successfully relocating the Westway, a dual carriageway in west London, to an bearding Toronto.
Encouragingly, Wheatley's new motion-picture show, scripted by Amy Jump, is set up in London in the 1970s (though filmed in Bangor, Canton Downwardly) when the book is gear up. "It'south a moment in blueprint that looked to the future and was still excited about it," he says. "At present nosotros mainly come across dystopia or a white, shiny iPod future. The thought of a book looking to a time to come that has already happened and making a film looking back to the past to bear witness a possible future was interesting."
The screenwriter and director Bruce Robinson, best known for The Killing Fields and Withnail & I, really went to town on the Freudian view of High-Rise in his little-known 1979 script, which he subtitled An Illustration. "I wrote it from the perspective of the building itself going insane," he says, "with the superego in the penthouses, the eye floors equally the ego and the id in the underground car park. The brain of the building goes nuts. Architecturally, the thing that interested me was the pre-stressing technique with cables. Every bit you put on each new floor, the weight and the stress on the cables gets more and more until by the final floor these cables are and so stressed that the whole edifice has a monstrous concrete migraine – information technology just wants to explode anyway."
Reading Robinson's script, it'southward interesting to see how the writer and director of Withnail & I, with its brilliantly manic colloquial, has dealt with Ballard'due south rather measured, abstract tone. "Ballard was such an innovative and interesting writer but his prose way wasn't something I loved," explains Robinson. "But High-Rise is an amazing piece of work, an boggling story."
In both Withnail & I and High-Rise the characters must adapt to their harsh new surroundings. When the two master characters of Withnail go "on holiday by fault", they arrive at Uncle Monty's cottage in the Lake District and have to improvise cooking a craven without a roasting tray, propping it upwards astride a brick. There are moments of culinary ingenuity in Robinson'south High-Rise, also, when Laing (here renamed Lovall) cooks his bacon past ironing it, and the guests at ane of the decadent penthouse parties constrict into seagull and gin.
These cloistered, cocky-enclosed environments such as the high-rise edifice were taken up over again at the end of Ballard'due south career in another tetralogy of books: Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003) and his final work of fiction, Kingdom Come (2006). Here, Ballard looked at gated communities and the "nerve tonic of violence" that he claimed was needed in order to shock his characters out of the boredom brought about by consumer capitalism, where our well-nigh difficult moral decisions involve choosing which color kettle to accept. These leisure complexes, concern parks and shopping malls were now not just self-enclosed but oft fortified, too.
Ballard argued that "people aren't moving into gated communities simply to avert muggers and housebreakers – they're moving in … to become away from other people. Even people like themselves." In this style, Ballardian environments actively select for psychopathic traits and it's the egocentric Laing who is best adjusted to the high-ascension who ultimately survives all the belfry tin throw at him. At the cease of the novel he finds delectation as all the lights get out in another of the five towers, "gear up to welcome them to their new world".
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/03/jg-ballards-high-rise-takes-dystopian-science-fiction-to-a-new-level
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