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High-Rise [Paperback]

J. G. Ballard
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
RRP: £7.99
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Book Description

4 Sep 2006

From the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Cocaine Nights comes an unnerving tale of life in a modern tower block running out of control.

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 riots and technological mayhem.

In this visionary tale of urban disillusionment from the renowned author of Crash and Cocaine Nights, society slips into a violent reverse as the isolated inhabitants of the high-rise, driven by primal urges, recreate a dystopian world ruled by the laws of the jungle.


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High-Rise + Concrete Island + The Drowned World
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Product details

  • Paperback: 176 pages
  • Publisher: Harper Perennial; New Ed edition (4 Sep 2006)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0586044566
  • ISBN-13: 978-0586044568
  • Product Dimensions: 13.1 x 19.3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 13,643 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

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

From the Back Cover

''an intense and vivid bestiary, which lingers unsettlingly in the mind.''
martin amis

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 visionary tale from the author of Crash, Empire of the Sun and Super-Cannes, 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.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 26 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
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.
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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Battery Living 10 Feb 2003
Format:Paperback
Much of Ballard's work since the 1970's seems to employ as its central tenet the notion that lifestyle can be packaged and bought, pre-conceived and pre-fabricated. As an unavoidable fact of modern life the big city also features heavily as a theme, imposing the considerations of limited space upon modern man's reified lifestyle choices.
High-Rise is a good attempt to capture the blandness caused by the removal of risk and danger from people's lives, and the main narrative thrust is an imagination of the violence this may reawaken in people. The book is inferior to Cocaine Nights, and maybe Crash, in terms of atmospherics; its real strength lies in the way in which it gradually escalates in violence and purpose. The book is a dizzying, steadily heightening trip into the violent recesses of the human mind and, as always, Ballard's explication of events runs in smooth concurrence with them. The result, as usual, is both logical, mad and slightly claustrophobic. Intense, and recommended, reading.
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18 of 23 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars One of Ballard's best novels 4 Aug 2003
By Jason Parkes #1 HALL OF FAME
Format:Paperback
High Rise (1995) here gets another reissue, just three years after the perfectly fine Flamingo edition- the cover of this one doesn;t appeal very much! High Rise was the third part of what academics and Ballard-buffs like to call 'The Urban Disaster Trilogy'- coming after Crash & Concrete Island.

High Rise has one of the finest opening paragraphs I've read, straight into the dark stuff with 'Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months'! As with many Ballard works- including the locale for the recent Super Cannes- Ballard shows a composite of society, within a society...& beneath that something dark and primal lurking- here there is a literal hegemony from top to bottom in the high rise block which has everything, from a bank to a swimming pool..

Ballard views a society that has closed itself off, and in turn sections of this society that have closed themselves off- one thinks of many things, from the infamous Kitty Genovese case to the LA Riots...This novel reacts to the so-called progression that began to surface in the 1970s- the abortive buildings now being torn down in places like Birmingham- & also taps into the spirit that would birth the yuppies in the 80s and the materialist species that followed in the late 1990s also. As with many Ballard works, there are those atypical Ballardian titles for chapters: The Drained Lake, The Vertical City, The Blood Garden...all roads leading to the sub/unconscious coming to the fore with 1984's autobiographical classic Empire of the Sun.

High Rise is a brief entertaining & horrifying read and remains one of Ballard's strongest novels which ranks well alongside such books as The Drowned World, The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, Concrete Island, Vermillion Sands & Super Cannes.Personally, I feel it's the definitive Ballard novel & would be a much better place to start than with a book like Crash, which alienates as many as those who enjoy it (I fall into the latter group!). For anyone wanting to read Ballard for the first time I'd plump for this, or a short-story collection like The Voices of Time.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars Like a 1960's B Movie
Starts off well but then you are led into a void of nothingness
in which the author regurgitates the theme of the high rise mechanical functions over and over and over until... Read more
Published 1 month ago by P.James Flynn
4.0 out of 5 stars Typically excellent dystopian novel by Ballard
The second Ballard novel that I have read (after Kingdom Come), and equally thought provoking.

Marred only by the atrocious proofreading and multiple, unforgivable... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Samuel J Hooper
2.0 out of 5 stars Pointless and tries too hard to make that point
Starts off well and goes rapidly downhill - much like life for the residents!

Characters not well drawn and rather too much random non-explained incest and cannibalism... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Carla Prid
3.0 out of 5 stars Arrived in good time
The main reason for getting the book was to read it. Though the reason I bought it second hand was to get this particular cover. Read more
Published 6 months ago by John Jeffery
5.0 out of 5 stars A disturbing and visionary classic
This is an excellent, disturbing and visionary novel which shows Ballard on absolute top form. The residents of a tower block - the `High Rise' of the title' - find that within the... Read more
Published 7 months ago by F.R. Jameson
5.0 out of 5 stars unlike anything you have ever read
Alienation is JC Ballard's theme & forte - this book is startling and shocking - dog lovers beware - people should beware too - could this happen. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Enid Irving
5.0 out of 5 stars A Brutalist environment?
"High Rise" begins with the observations of Robert Laing, a medical man and academic living in a select apartment block, who watches the community around him regress back to a... Read more
Published 9 months ago by Christopher H
4.0 out of 5 stars The Brutalist environment?
"High Rise" begins with the observations of Robert Laing, a medical man and academic living in a select apartment block, who watches the community around him regress back to a... Read more
Published 10 months ago by Christopher H
5.0 out of 5 stars high rise that works on many levels
This was my first full length JG Ballard novel after reading volume 1 of his short story collection. Read more
Published 14 months ago by spacetrader
5.0 out of 5 stars A riot!
Cripes. This book really struck a chord with me. There's something fascinating about the brevity of the prose style, the method in which a familiar setting is rendered alien, and... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Stevos
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