The tone and register – especially of his mid-period classics like High-Rise and Crash – is never replicated. One of the ironies about the fact that “Ballardian” has become such a catch-all word in recent years is that really there is nothing like Ballard at all. And any alarm you might feel sounds all the louder thanks to the unique way in which Ballard presents his scenario. All the questioning, the worrying and the outrage have to happen outside the book. Their crimes are presented to us as natural and reasonable. Just as the narrator of the earlier novel Crash says “car crashes are good for you” and fondly advocates a death cult, so the characters in High-Rise accept and delight in the desecration of their homes and death of their neighbours.
At times, it seems as if Ballard is inviting us to enjoy it all. This moral framework demands the easy acceptance of crude violence, sexual molestation and casual murder – making High-Rise a singularly challenging read. To borrow a metaphor from later on in the book, it’s as if their cage doors have been opened and they are now free to act with no more thought for the morality of their actions than any other wild beasts. It just gives them the impetus they need.
There is a symbolic flick of the switch when Wilder kills the dog in the swimming pool, signalling that chaos can start to do its work – but this doesn’t alter the moral state of the residents. There isn’t much destruction in the first chapter of the novel, but that’s only because everything is so new, people are still arriving, the machinery hasn’t yet been turned on.
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