High-Rise review by Martin Amis, 1975

14 November 1975

High-Rise
J G Ballard

Jonathan Cape £2.95
Reviewed by Martin Amis on New Statesman

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Towards the end of Auden and Isherwood’s The Ascent of F6, Ransom, the Oedipal, megalomaniac hero, is about to scale the last heights of the mountain when he is told that the local demon will be awaiting him on the summit. Ransom climbs on alone, and as he reaches the summit unharmed – his great moment of personal and public triumph – he sees a small hooded figure on the crest, facing away from him. He approaches the demon, it turns – and it is his mother. Folding on to the ground, Ransom feels his life begin to drain away, as the demon sings him a tender lullaby which is also his dirge. J G Ballard’s High-Rise is a harsh and ingenious reworking of the F6 theme, displaced into the steel-and-concrete landscapes of modern urban life.

The high-rise, with its 1,000 overpriced apartments, swimming-pools and shopping concourses, is what Ballard calls “the vertical city”, and to begin with its residents observe conventional class and territorial demarcations (“upper”, “lower” and “middle” levels), showing resentment, expediency and disdain for their fellow citizens in much the same way as life is run in the outside world. Soon, though, the enclosed nature of the building has encouraged and intensified these aggressions beyond any clear analogy with external society. After various piracies and beatings-up, the class system within the high-rise deteriorates as readily as the building itself, becoming a filthy warren of violent, apathetic or paranoid enclaves. Drunken gangs storm through the blacked-out corridors; women are found raped and murdered in defused elevators; disposal chutes are clogged with excrement, smashed furniture and half-eaten pets. Eventually the high-rise takes on that quality common to all Ballardian loci: it is suspended, no longer to do with the rest of the planet, screened off by its own surreal logic.

Ballard being Ballard, though, High-Rise is no ordinary stroll down atavism lane. The mental journey undertaken by these colonists of the sky is not a return to “nature”; it is a return to the denurtured state of childhood: “For the first time since we were three years old what we do makes absolutely no difference,” enthuses one of the affluent anarchists. Ballard’s stranded characters have always been more than half in love with their lethal and unnerving environments, and the delinquents of the high-rise are soon completely defined by their new psychopathological “possibilities”. One of the most ghostly and poignant scenes in the book has a middle-echelon psychiatrist attempting to leave his barricaded slum and return to work at his medical college; he gets as far as the car-park before the shrill clarity of the outdoors sends him running back to the affectless and soupy warmth of the high-rise, satisfied that he will never try to leave it again. In the closing pages, as hauntingly wayward as anything Ballard has written, the retrograde logic of the high-rise is fulfilled, when the passive, derelict women emerge as the final avengers.

I hope no one wastes their time worrying whether High-Rise is prescient, admonitory, sobering and whatnot. For Ballard is neither believable nor unbelievable, just as his characterisation is merely a matter of “roles” and his situations merely a matter of “context”: he is abstract, at once totally humourless and entirely unserious. The point of his visions is to provide him with imagery, with opportunities to write well and this seems to me to be the only intelligible way of getting the hang of his fiction. The prose of High-Rise may not have the baleful glare of that of Crash or Vermillion Sands, but the book is an intense and vivid beastiary, which lingers unsettlingly in the mind.

Crash, o onde o bate-bate encontra a casa de burlesco.

“Crash – Estranhos Prazeres” (Max Prime, 22h15) talvez seja o filme certo para nossos dias (especialmente o dos paulistanos). Sua história gira em torno de um grupo de pessoas para quem os carros não são feitos para andar, e sim para trombar. É um prazer semelhante àquele que temos na infância, brincando nos carros bate-bate dos parques. De certa forma, todo mundo sabe que os carros não foram feitos para andar. Eles foram feitos para impressionar garotas, para deixar os vizinhos com inveja e os sócios desconfiados. Os automóveis são a quintessência do progresso -o problema é que já não se faz progresso como antigamente- e o signo da liberdade. Mas a liberdade nunca será tal se vigiada, se não trouxer embutida a hipótese de autodestruição. É a isso que se dedica esse grupo de malucos do filme de David Cronenberg: a produzir ferro retorcido e corpos retalhados. Isso não é, claro, a única função dos carros. Mas andar, simplesmente, pelas ruas também não.

Ballard loves Chandler and Penguins

“Public Lending Right: A Symposium” _New Review_ vol. 2, no. 21 (December 1975): 17-18

 [...] If you’ve worked in a library, you know that a large amount of borrowing is indiscriminate. People come in wanting a book for their wife, or aunt, or grandmother. You see it in any library. Someone returning what they’ve just read, hardly even knowing its title, saying ‘I want another like this one.’ [...] I remember doing my little bit, which sounds pompous but it isn’t. They’d come in with a thriller, wanting another one, and I’d give them a Raymond Chandler.

  “My First Penguin Paperback…” _The Times_ ["Penguin Festival of Fiction" section] (February 23, 1995)

 My first really is too far away now to remember the title, we’re talking about 50 years ago. There was so little competition in those days that I think almost every paperback I read was a Penguin. Raymond Chandler was among the first authors I bought — that was when I was about 17, and I still think he is absolutely brilliant. I remember the green jackets they had on their crime titles, and I must have a couple of those Chandlers around even after all this time.

“A Little Night Reading” _Sunday Times_, 18 November 2001, p 42 “What J. G. Ballard has on his bedside table”

 Bed is a place for treats: romps with the children, a large snoring dog, a few hours of peaceful sleep; and, for me, books that open the doorway to the dream. [...] Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles is another imaginary land that hovers between dream and waking. Recently, I read through the whole of Chandler; my favourite is _The Lady in the Lake_ (Penguin). Moody and tightly plotted, perfect for the small hours.

Thanks to David Pringle.

Slipstream literature canon

Some literary critics and authors held a little reunion to define the “slipstream canon,” whatever “slipstream” is. The result is a list, posted by Paul DiFillipo, that makes little sense. I’m sure it must have been fun to have a little people over, hand them some paper and feel like you’re doing something important, like defining a canon. Hey, I wish I was doing that. But at the same time, I have no idea what good it does having books we’ve been reading for decades now being touted as “slipstream,” whatever that is. It’s not like we need new categories. “Slipstream” seems really broad and probably encompasses everything that’s not realism but not blatantly fantasy, horror or science fiction. Paul Kincaid responds.

One of the more elaborate and well-buttressed panels I participated in at Readercon this past weekend involved an attempt to create a “canon” of Slipstream literature. The panelists involved, besides myself, Paul DiFi, were John Kessel, Cat Valente, Dora Goss, Brett Cox, Ron Drummond, Victoria McManus, and Graham Sleight. Con organizer Eric Van participated heavily as well.

Here’s the document we came up with, after the break.