Novel
High-Rise
J. G. Ballard · 1975
Synopsis
A new forty-storey tower on former docks east of the City: a thousand flats, two thousand residents, and everything on site, swimming pools, school, supermarket, bank. Dr Robert Laing, a professor of physiology, lives on the twenty-fifth floor. The day the last flat is sold, a bottle thrown from a party on the thirty-first floor smashes on his balcony. The tower's architect lives on the top floor. Then power cuts begin at the shopping mall on the tenth floor, the lifts jam, and a drowned dog is found in the swimming pool.
Context
The novel appeared in 1975 and closes a trilogy that its author devoted to objects of modern life, the automobile, the motorway interchange, then the residential tower. The architect in the book very probably recalls a real man, Ernő Goldfinger, who had lived for two months on the top floor of his own tower, in the east of London, and gave receptions there to gather the tenants' opinions. Seven years earlier, the collapse of an entire corner of a tower in the east of London had dealt a decisive blow to high-rise housing.
Who it is for
About two hundred pages; only one French translation, by Robert Louit, reprinted in 2014 in a volume that brings together the trilogy.
Prizes and reception
Adapted for the cinema by Ben Wheatley in 2015, forty years after its publication, following a project that came to nothing.
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